Couzyn van Heuvelen: CAMP | 50/50 Garden of Resilience

Community Garden Installation and New Exhibition in Celebration of Summer

The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery presents a dual exhibition launch featuring the innovative 50/50 Garden of Resilience—a living installation merging art with sustainable agriculture—alongside Couzyn van Heuvelen’s CAMP.

Installation view of Couzyn van Heuvelen: CAMP at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2023.

Couzyn van Heuvelen: CAMP

May 24 – August 24, 2025
Reception: Saturday, May 24, 2:00pm with guests Couzyn van Heuvelen and Curator Leila Timmins. Tour begins at 2:30pm.
Curated by Erin Szikora and Leila Timmins

CAMP is shaped by the artist’s own formative experiences with his family and his desire to connect with the love and labour of his homelands. He demonstrates how the camp is a site for shared learning, community-building, and joy. Situating viewers in this conceptual and cultural space, CAMP addresses the critical role of land-based practices in Inuit self-determination, food sovereignty in the North, and the pleasures of celebrating in community around food.

Born in Iqaluit, Nunavut, but living predominantly in Southern Ontario, Couzyn van Heuvelen’s artistic practice explores Inuit cultural sovereignty and the tools and technologies of living on the land. Known for his large-scale sculptural works, van Heuvelen’s playful approach seamlessly blends traditional practices with contemporary materials and fabrication processes, asserting the resiliency and adaptability of Inuit culture.

Ron Benner, Trans/mission: 101, 2016. Photographic /garden installation. Installation view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. ©Ron Benner. Photo: © 2016 Scott Lee.

50/50 Garden of Resilience

May 24 – October 2025
Organized by KWAG Curatorial + Public Programs Departments

The 50/50 Garden of Resilience is the newest addition to the KWAG Sculpture Garden. This hybrid model explores the model of the community garden as a platform for radical sustainability and mutual aid on a community level. In a place where 10% of our neighbor’s face food insecurity on an annual basis, the 50/50 Garden of Resilience will be a refuge of direct action, grounding the possibilities of small-scale, urban food production and community strength through intergenerational exchange and learning.

KWAG understands the garden as site, model and gallery. As a site, it is a functioning community garden that will grow organic fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers. As a model, it is a decolonial gesture that inverts capitalist expectations of land value and outdated conceptions of aesthetic value and landscaping. As a gallery, the garden will be regularly programmed, activated and cared for, just like our internal gallery spaces. KWAG seeks to learn from the garden and understand how we can best position ourselves to care for our immediate neighbors and local ecologies.

Related Programs:

Official Garden Launch Celebration
Saturday, May 24, 12:00pm
Celebrate the first full day of gardening and activation of the Garden of Resilience during our launch weekend!

50/50 Garden of Resilience Weekend Activities
Saturday, May 24, 1:00 – 4:00pm
All ages | Free

50/50 Garden of Resilience Food Drive
Saturday, May 24, 1:00 – 4:00pm

Cyanotype Tote Bag Workshop
Saturday, May 24, 1:30 – 2:30pm
All ages | $20 plus HST

Summer Style Swap!
Sunday, May 25, 1:00 – 4:00pm

50/50 Garden of Resilience Weekend Activities
Sunday, May 25, 1:00 – 4:00pm
All ages | Free

Flower Pounding Tote Bag Workshop
Sunday, May 25, 1:30 – 2:30pm
All ages | $20 plus HST

For inquiries and additional details, please contact garden@kwag.on.ca.

Also on View:

Miles Rufelds, Salvage Archives, 2025. Installation, digital video with sound, 43:00 mins. Installation view from Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, February 8 – May 25, 2025. Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Miles Rufelds: Salvage Archives

Closing on Sunday, May 25, 2025

Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems.

Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste

Land Acknowledgment

The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery respectfully acknowledges that we are located in Block 2 on the Haldimand Tract: land promised to Six Nations, which includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River. This is the traditional home of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples, whose resilience we honor by offering this Gallery as a space to reflect and learn from one another. We are committed to reconciliation and ensuring that our Gallery’s programs and Permanent Collection demonstrate more diverse, culturally relevant Canadian art and artists.

About Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

As Waterloo Region’s leading public art gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) connects people and ideas through art. Its nationally acclaimed exhibitions and programs welcome all to be inspired and challenged through a deepened understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our communities. It offers dynamic public programs that inspire creativity and an appreciation of the visual arts in the Region and beyond. Established in 1956 and incorporated in 1968, KWAG is a non-profit organization open to the public and administered in the public trust. Admission is free.

Accessibility: KWAG is fully accessible.

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
101 Queen Street North
Kitchener, ON N2H 6P7
www.kwag.ca

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CAMP is Organized and circulated by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Presented with support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.

Curatorial tours are sponsored by Wells Resolutions and supported by The Gamble Family.

The 50/50 Garden of Resilience is funded by the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation and WRCF’s Community Grants program.