Catalogue Release: Messagers’ Forum by Patrick Mahon

Installation view: Messagers’ Forum, Thames Art Gallery. Photograph provided by the Thames Art Gallery

Catalogue Release:
Messagers’ Forum by Patrick Mahon

Thames Art Gallery, September 9 – January 10, 2021

The Thames Art Gallery is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of a publication documenting the work of our current exhibition by Patrick Mahon. Featuring text by Robert Enright in conversation with the artist, this catalogue documents both Messagers’ Forum and its accompanying collaborative exhibition, “The Questions Project.”

Canadian artist Patrick Mahon’s exhibition Messagers’ Forum is a very timely engagement with culture at the intersection of art and activism. In this beautifully crafted and provocative show, Mahon continues to develop and articulate definitive themes in his practice, engaging issues of environmentalism and decolonization, while affirming the gallery space as an aesthetic site for cultural reflection, empowerment, and discourse. The artist’s acknowledgement of this country’s colonial past is both complex and visually nuanced. Yet, he ultimately poses questions of direct importance, such as, can we be “messagers” capable of reaching across the spaces between us? And if so, how?

Messagers’ Landscapes (Ovoids Horizontal), 2019. Photograph provided by Patrick Mahon

“Messagers’ Forum is an installation that poses poetic questions about culture, nature, communication, and meaning. In a space of emblematic wall sculptures, collaged landscapes, and recorded speech, I propose a setting where spoken exchanges between people in the community are suggested as being desirable and available to us, but also sometimes elusive and fleeting. It is a place where nature is presented as more than a backdrop, as if to describe a theatre for an ongoing drama.” – Patrick Mahon

A digital recording of excerpts from the interview between Patrick Mahon and Robert Enright is now available here.

The catalogue will be available January 2021. For information about obtaining copies, please contact the gallery at CKartgallery@chatham-kent.ca or ph. 226.312.2023 x4425.

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This exhibition is currently available for touring possibilities. Interested parties are invited to contact:

Phil Vanderwall
Curator/Director Thames Art Gallery
Phone: 226.312.2023 X4422
E-mail: philv@chatham-kent.ca

75 William Street North, Chatham, Ontario N7M 4L4
Open Wednesday through Saturday 11am – 4pm.

The Thames Art Gallery is an accessible facility.