Don Monet: Cottage Country

A Cube Project

D. H. Monet, Gus on the Bonnechere, 24×24 in.

Don Monet solo exhibition at Social Art Gallery

June 1 – August 6, 2023
Reception: Thursday, June 8, 2023, 5-9 pm
Social Art Gallery & Cafe
334 Dundas Street West, Toronto (across the street from AGO)
cubegallery.ca/collections/d-h-monet

Over two months this summer Toronto’s new Social Art Gallery hosts an exhibition of Ottawa Valley landscapes by artist and Cube Gallery owner Donald Harrington Monet. Don’s practice focuses on landscape, photo-collage and found object paintings on wood. This show is a meditation on the sky and land near Don’s maternal family roots – the Harringtons and Ryans – in the Killaloe area, east of Ottawa.

Reception: Don will be at the Gallery on Thursday, June 8th: from 5-9 pm

D. H. Monet, House on Carleton, 12×12 in.

About the Artist

Don Monet is an Ottawa based artist, curator and activist. He concentrates his studio efforts on landscape, photo-collage and found-object paintings. At Cube Gallery, Ottawa, now in its eighteenth year, he has curated over 100 thematic group and solo exhibitions featuring Ottawa and National visual artists. A settler of Irish/French ancestry, he has taught courses at the University of Ottawa, the Ottawa School of Art (OSA), Algonquin College, CARFAC Ontario and the Gitxsan Wet’suwet’en School of Journalism. In 1992 he co-authored and create artwork for the book Colonialism on Trial (New Society), an ethnographic visual account of the now famous Delgam Uukw vs Her Majesty the Queen sovereignty trial.

Monet builds “paintings” that reflect upon culture and iconic Canadian landscape painting. Recent work consists of multiple photographs and paint varnished onto square birch wood panels. It speaks to the viewer of our fractured ways of seeing. Meditations on the culture and landscape of middle class Canadian life. His art suggests that the most mundane moments, the smallest things also represent the largest things: playing scrabble, reading a book, a paddle in the water, starting a fire are all profoundly and culturally significant.

D. H. Monet, Hearth, 24×24 in.

A Cube Gallery Project

Social Gallery is privileged and humbled to be located on the traditional territories of many First Peoples, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat.