Greg Staats at the Art Gallery of Hamilton

By Stephanie Vegh

The impulse to read the span of Greg Staats’ Runners Continuum from left to right feels like a trap. Or, perhaps more playfully, a dare to accept this streamlined sequence of fourteen neatly framed photographs as a logical extension of the vast white cube that contains them. A spray of twisted jute ropes on a low plinth foregrounds this frieze of images with its own quieter suggestion: six thick coils of fibres, lively as braided hair, meander their own imprecise lines as a reminder that the path we may choose to walk, here or elsewhere, does not necessarily run straight or smooth.

Greg Staats, Runners Continuum, 2025, installation view (photo: Joseph Hartman)

The suite of photographs that form the heart of this major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton unfurl a vast landscape and history through flickering fragments. A glimpse of tree roots here, and a canopy of bare branches there, coalesce into a full forest of distance and time. Each pause along this path is digitally crisp and saturated with light. If green could burn, these pine boughs certainly do.

Greg Staats, Runners Continuum (3), 2024, archival digital pigment print

Complicating this succession of vivid photographs are monochromatic enlargements of newspaper clippings documenting acts of resistance in Six Nations of the Grand River, a territory lovingly depicted in many of the neighbouring images. In the blur of Ben-Day dots rendered in shades of blue and violet, accompanied by the editorializing captions of Canadian news media, the viewer can decode the story of a week-long occupation of the Ohsweken council house by hereditary chiefs attempting to reinstate their traditional government and sovereignty in March 1959. The stoic protest of placard-bearing children in one image stands in firm contrast to the chaotic scene of RCMP violently expelling protestors from their council house days later.

Greg Staats, Runners Continuum, 2025, installation view (photo: Joseph Hartman)

Staats excels here with a mode of storytelling that is both generously giving and subtly coded with gestures that explicitly honour the Haudenosaunee runner, a person tasked with carrying messages between communities and nations. This is the traveler’s gaze that directs Staats’ lens through that photographic landscape, and their responsibility to sustain understanding through traditions and truths is embedded throughout works in other media. Strings of white whelk and purple quahog wampum beads carry the intelligence of the runner bearing hand-crafted messages across space and time, while an intimate arrangement of translated Onondaga text fragments from the Great Law of Peace gesture at the effort of reclaiming knowledge repressed through colonialism.

This effort is keenly felt in sweeping the dust, a video in which the artist performs the contrary act of sweeping a rural road and driveway in a span scarcely wide enough to welcome his own footsteps. The raspy-throated caress of straw over gravel speaks its own secret language of care entangled with futility, of perseverance sharpened by wry irony. The task concludes with the artist’s laboured breath sounding from offscreen – a pause beneath the weight of hard work, before the video loops and the story begins anew.

Greg Staats: Runners Continuum continues until May 18.
Art Gallery of Hamilton: https://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/
The gallery is accessible.

Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based artist, writer, and arts worker focused on communications and advocacy. Her drawings, installations, and book-based works investigate cyclical histories and human impacts on the natural world. She can be followed on Instagram @stephanievegh