Fall 2023 Exhibitions at Art Gallery of Guelph

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 5:30 pm

Join us for the launch of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s upcoming fall exhibition season with an opening reception on Thursday, September 21, at 5:30 pm. The gallery is pleased to introduce four new fall exhibitions: Kept Alive Within Us and Carl Beam: Pieces of the Puzzle, curated by Sally Frater, AGG Curator of Contemporary Art, as well as The Third Scenario and Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea, curated by Holly Chang, recipient of the 2023 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. Come celebrate the new season, meet the artists, and stay for brief introductions to the current exhibitions by the curators.

Kept Alive Within Us
Samantha Box, Sandra Brewster, Andrea Chung, Giana De Dier, Deborah Jack, Las Nietas de Nonó, Sharon Norwood, Ésery Mondésir, Farihah Aliyah Shah, Nyugen Smith, Kara Springer
September 21 – December 30, 2023

Kept Alive Within Us explores relationships with the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean. Collectively the works underscore the ways in which West African cultural knowledge and customs are embedded within the practice of daily life throughout this southern geography and the diaspora. Highlighting how ancestral ontological ways of knowing emerge throughout daily domestic actions and encounters with the natural world, Kept Alive Within Us attests to forms of cultural resilience and survival that disrupt and resituate how the Caribbean is encountered and perceived within the West. At a moment when the Caribbean is under threat as a result of climate change and global warming, the installation illustrates how encounters with domestic, gastronomical, ecological, and spatial realms constitute ongoing acts of remembrance and resistance.

Curated by Sally Frater and organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Guelph Community Foundation Musagetes Fund, and the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Enhancement Fund, Office of Diversity and Human Rights at the University of Guelph.

The Third Scenario
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Joy Wong, Lan “Florence” Yee, Justin Ming Yong
September 14 – December 17, 2023

The Third Scenario examines the act of art making through hyphenated conditions – states and environments in flux that challenge the idea of art and identity as fixed entities. This group exhibition highlights critical approaches to making and investigations of personal narratives, while moving into larger discourses on what it means to create while living in Canada. Disrupting the expectations of both art making and representation, the artists push beyond medium specificity, investigating materialist impulses through painting, text-based and mixed media works, as well as installation.

Collectively, the works evoke a strong sense of artistic production as an investigation of experience, contextualizing this within broader discourses of community and culture. As each artist expands their medium, ideas of place or placelessness are also destabilized. Their work points to the complexity of creation and subjectivity in the contemporary Canadian arts landscape, exploring conditions of liminality, inversion, and transference.

Curated by Holly Chang, recipient of the 2023 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, and organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Centre Wellington Community Foundation Middlebrook Social Innovation Fund, and the Guelph Community Foundation Musagetes Fund.

Carl Beam: Pieces of a Puzzle
September 14 – December 17, 2023

Moving across genres including sculpture, painting, ceramics, printmaking, installation, and assemblage, Manitoulin Island-based multimedia artist Carl Beam created an extremely potent and influential body of work. Formally and conceptually proficient, he produced works that probed the interstices of world history, politics, science, and materiality, as well as Indigeneity. This exhibition, which draws on holdings from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, focuses on prints and paintings by Beam that illustrate not only his skill in both, but how his capacity for composition was able to challenge our ability to make meaning.

Curated by Sally Frater and organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea
September 14 – December 17, 2023

Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea presents landscapes by Canadian artist Takao Tanabe from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection. The installation chronicles over 20 years of Tanabe’s practice in printmaking, including lithography, photogravure, woodblock printing, and etching. Evoking a strong sense of place with a simplicity that borders on abstraction, the works are almost topographical. Surveying and illuminating moments layered with mysticism, landscape becomes a living, rhythmic thing. Tanabe’s spaces are not confined to the pictorial frame – there is a dimensionality that places us within a larger encounter. The compelling compositions suggest a solitary point of view – that of a single viewer standing on the edge of the sublime – and that, across these images, there is only land, sea, and you.

Curated by Holly Chang and organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Image credits: Las Nietas de Nonó, Foodtopia: Después de todo Territorio (video still), 2020 – 2021, digital video. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, MOMA; Courtesy of the artists; Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Firefighter’s Jacket, 2022, sumi ink, linocut, gyotaku and natural dyes on sewn washi. Photo credit: Wilson Duong. Courtesy Patel Brown Gallery; Carl Beam, How to Ride a Horse Properly, a demonstration by Frank Cushing, anthropologist, 1990, photo-etching, 115.6 x 75.6 cm. Gift of Marion Oxley, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph.

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