The Art Gallery of Burlington’s (AGB) fall reception on Thursday, September 19, 2024, 6:00–8:00pm celebrates the work of David R. Harper and Magdolene Dykstra.

David R. Harper. Photo: Rich Maciejewski

Opening September 20, 2024, and running until January 5, 2025, David R. Harper’s exhibition MIDNIGHT is a profound exploration of stillness rendered in material form, including glasswork, weaving, embroidery, and a monumental installation of more than 10,000 ceramic birds.

MIDNIGHT is the culmination of Harper’s nine-year meditation on a single form. His durational and repeated use of the bird acts as a conduit to process the weight of time passing, and the tenuous relationship between accumulation and deterioration. Shaping and re-shaping the bird forms became a central act in Harper’s studio over the years. The routine, and reverence, provided a sense of comfort for the artist, as he relied on the process in times of grief or creative pause to stave off the anxieties and uncertainties inherent in the experimental nature of his practice.

As the birds piled up in his studio, a new narrative began to take shape and the work became bigger than him, bigger than the reason he began it in the first place; it started to live a life of its own. The production of ceramic birds became a way of transforming complex thoughts into tangible objects. Each form became a marker of a lingering thought, like an idea you can’t shake, or a memory that grounds you in times of anxiety. They collectively articulate the movement between feeling overwhelmed and feeling at peace and give shape to the non-linear nature of time and memory, demonstrating the intimate relationship between an artist and a process.

Harper’s elaborate installations are truly awesome in their detail, scope, and scale. His caring and attentive approach to artmaking yields elegantly unfolding narratives on grief, belonging, beauty, angst, and longing. His exhibitions are comprised of hundreds of individual components, employing both traditional and non-traditional materials, such as embroidery, ceramic, glass, and casting dehydrated milk, bone, and charcoal. For more than eighteen years, Harper has forged a path dedicated to experimentation by fostering a unique relationship with craft processes. From embroidery to taxidermy and ceramics to stained glass, his comprehension and adept understanding of material is unparalleled. MIDNIGHT highlights this distinct material language, his rigorous investigations of presence through absence, and his empathetic curiosity of the human condition with a self-reflexivity and tenderness that is refreshing. It is a monument to slow and steady production, and a continuous distillation of his practice.

MIDNIGHT is accompanied by hands-on learning in the AGB studios including David R. Harper’s two-day mould making workshop, Kate Jackson’s non-traditional embroidery workshops, and Amanda Rataj’s weaving stripes course. Get a bird’s eye view of the exhibition with ornithologist Mark Peck has he discusses the art, science, and nature found in the Royal Ontario Museum’s bird collection with a guided tour and presentation on Thursday, October 3 and with Harper as he joins curator Suzanne Carte for an online conversation on Thursday, November 7, 2024.

Magdolene Dykstra, Exchanging Presence activation, 2024, Art Gallery of Burlington. Photo: Jasmine Mander

Magdolene Dykstra uses clay as a medium for connection. The exhibition is comprised of two of her ongoing projects Gathering Presence and Exchanging Presence. Together, these works ask what it means to be seen and to what degree one wants to make themselves visible.

Exchanging Presence is a continuation of Dykstra’s attentiveness to the tension between individuality and collectivity, visibility and anonymity, impermanence, and the embedded potential for transformation. She creates openings for unity through repetitive actions. The individual marks on the wall and in the clay are small but in unison are grand. They boldly state, I am here; we are still here.

Thank you to the Gathering Presence painters Hafsa Ahmed, Nilou Ghaemi, Magnus Theodore Hara, Nina Iglesias, Akash Inbakumar, Emerald Repard-Denniston, and Ro.

MIDNIGHT has been generously sponsored by Alinea Land Corporation and Exchanging Presence by Susan & Bob Busby. The fall reception has been sponsored by Richard Burgess of Frederikse Law.

The Art Gallery of Burlington is supported by the City of Burlington, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Trillium Foundation. The AGB’s learning programming has been sponsored by The Burlington Foundation and the Incite Foundation for the Arts.

The Art Gallery of Burlington is located on the ancestral territory of many Indigenous Nations including the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Métis peoples. The territory is mutually covered by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy, the Ojibway, and other allied Nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. We acknowledge that the land upon which we gather, to create and learn, is part of the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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