Summer 2025 Exhibitions at McIntosh Gallery, London

Aryen Hoekstra: In storage

June 12 – July 11, 2025

In 2016, Aryen Hoekstra founded Franz Kaka in Toronto, Canada as an artist-led gallery presenting exhibitions that privilege experimentation and risk-taking. Researching from the perspective of an academic and artist, but also as a gallerist, Hoekstra examines the way that art objects are handled and traded. In storage delves into the under-examined logistics of the art business, the storage and shipping of artworks, their care and circulation. Noting the deliberate separation of art and commerce that is implied in traditional gallery floorplans, Hoekstra muddies this distinction by transplanting Franz Kaka’s crate storage into McIntosh Gallery for a period of four weeks. Here, the day-to-day operations of the gallery and their practical encumbrances are presented in place of the sacralized objects they are designed and built to protect.

Unlike Franz Kaka, McIntosh Gallery is not a commercial endeavour. Yet it too follows this architectural separation, preserving the sacred character of the exhibition space as distinct from the earthly, common and otherwise profane transactions that are necessary to support its operation. In storage makes use of this logistical opportunity to question the intractability of this separation and to examine what results as we approach its horizon. Read more

Aryen Hoekstra is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. In storage is his thesis exhibition and draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Tia Bates, It Follows You Anyway, 2024-25, beeswax, light, and found object sculpture on film images, found objects, copper, brass, concrete.

Tia Bates: Through and From the Looking Apparatus

July 28 – September 5, 2025
Closing Reception: Friday, September 5, 5 – 7pm

Through the looking apparatus, McIntosh Gallery becomes a vivarium where the substance of filmic light inhabits space—an environment where the viewer is invited to wander and discover cinematic curiosities. Emergent light grows, and changes. The works feed on electric human proximity to become a form of life. In the surrounding darkness, light is drawn in and affects with the desire to capture and stick.

From the looking apparatus, projection lux—the amount of light hitting surface—scatters through all surrounding surfaces, including the viewer. Human skin is a threshold, the barrier between self and other. The translucent surface is breeched by light, allowing an external force to enter. While human touch cannot reach into the looking apparatus, lux from the looking apparatus can reach into and touch its viewer.

The looking apparatus is an object that has lived lives of looking, but it has been transformed: taxidermied into an invention of cinematic intervention. The looking apparatus is also a framework where light is waxing—revealing and expanding upon understandings of experience. Beeswax represents human skin through its translucency and its origin as a secreted material, a way to render skin as an object and to produce mimesis.

Referencing the cinematic experience as a sensorial interaction with light, Through and From the Looking Apparatus is both an installation of light and body and a habitat that cultivates human encounters with cinematic light. Read more

Tia Bates is an MFA candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. Through and From the Looking Apparatus is her MFA Thesis Exhibition.

Graduate student exhibitions at McIntosh Gallery are presented in memory of King’s College alumnus Gregory Franklin Child through the generous support of Western University Arts and Humanities alumni Paula Case Child and Timothy Child.

Angela Grauerholz, Museé Carnavalet #26, 2018, inkjet print on Arches paper, edition of 5. Gift of the artist, 2020. Collection of McIntosh Gallery, Western University.

Holding Patterns: the short view
Recent Acquisitions from the McIntosh Gallery Collection

Angela Grauerholz, Meryl McMaster, and Soheila Esfahani
Curated by Rachel Deiterding

April 5 – July 11, 2025

Continuing through July 11, Holding Patterns: the short view uses recent acquisitions to the McIntosh Gallery collection as a tool to reflect on collecting strategies over the past five years. As McIntosh Gallery undertakes a detailed assessment of the collection, these recent acquisitions have much to teach us about inclinations to collect across contexts and frame the conversation as the gallery considers how to approach collecting moving forward. Read more

The Connecting through Collections project is generously supported by Catherine Elliot Shaw.

McIntosh Gallery
1151 Richmond Street
London, ON N6A 3K7
mcintoshgallery.ca
mcintoshgallery@uwo.ca
(519) 661-3181

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Summer Hours
Monday to Friday: 10am – 5pm or by appointment
Weekends and Holidays: Closed
McIntosh Gallery offers free admission to all exhibitions and events.

Accessibility:
We regret that McIntosh Gallery is not wheelchair accessible.