Fall 2025 Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph

Join us Thursday, September 18 at 6:30pm for the public launch of AGG’s Fall 2025 season, spotlighting four new exhibitions that offer opportunities to think through contemporary questions of identity, representation, technology, and place. read more >

Artists and curators will be in attendance. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served; cash bar will be available.

Unsettling Conservation Collective: Reworldings

September 18, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Curated by Alexandra Nordstrom

Over the past two years, the Unsettling Conservation Collective has catalyzed a series of collaborative land-based projects that challenge dominant understandings of how Land and Water and used, valued, and protected. Grounded in specific sites with layered and contested histories, the works in Reworldings explore how art can repair relationships between peoples and place, while imagining new and lasting ones. This exhibition is part of the broader work of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership—a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators committed to supporting Indigenous-led conversation across Canada. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council—an agency of the Government of Ontario—SSHRC-CRSH, and Parks Canada.

Image details: Michelle Wilson, Warden’s Watch (detail), 2024, felted wool blanket, archival maps, embroidery thread, wool roving, glass eye. Courtesy of the artist.

Soft Internet Theory

September 18, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Curated by Tristan Sauer, 2025 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators

The dead internet theory suggests that the web—once a cornerstone of human connection, supplanting the town square, secret meeting spots, back alleys, and bars—is now void of life. Soft Internet Theory confronts the threat artificially generated content poses to cyberspace by turning attention back to the handmade and the human heartbeat that once gave the internet its revolutionary potential. Spanning net art, interactive sculpture, installation, video, and textile, the exhibition troubles narratives of artifice and anxiety by humanizing technology—seeking empathy in the digital and finding poetry in the CMD line. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Centre Wellington Community Foundation’s Middlebrook Social Innovation Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Image details: Marisa Müsing, Stuck in the Motherboard (video still), 2023, single-channel video, 7:38 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Glass, Concrete, and Stone

September 18, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Curated by Tristan Sauer, 2025 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators

When does a landscape become unnatural, and what role do humans play in that transformation? Selected from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collections, the works here subvert traditional representations of landscape as untouched, pristine, and sublime by focusing on everyday spaces infused with industrialization. Highlighting the duality of human-shaped environments—how we can find them visually compelling yet banal and monotonous—they point to how development and sprawl have not only transformed the landscapes we inhabit but also the ways we see and move through them. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Centre Wellington Community Foundation’s Middlebrook Social Innovation Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Image details: Susan Dobson, 725 Steeles Avenue (detail), 2011, C-print from digital file, 83.8 x 207.6 cm. Gift of the Artist, 2021. Art Gallery of Guelph Collection.

Earth Dreams in Colour: Soft Explosions

September 18, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Curated by Alexandra Nordstrom

Drawing from the permanent collections, Earth Dreams in Colour explores how artists use colour not only as a formal strategy, but as a way of relating to Nonhuman life, to Land and Water, to one another and oneself. Centred on saturated hues and playful forms, the artworks spark soft explosions—sensory amplifications that reveal colour as a mode of connection, perception, and feeling. Rather than a backdrop or object of observation, Land, Water, bodies, and materials are approached here as sentient, relational, and co-constitutive. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council—an agency of the Government of Ontario—SSHRC-CRSH, and Parks Canada.

Image details: Myra Kukiiyaut, Games on the Land (detail), 2000, wool duffel and felt, cotton embroidery floss, 161.9 x 146.1 cm. Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 2003. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph.

Visit the Art Gallery of Guelph

The Art Gallery of Guelph is open from 12 to 5pm, Tuesday through Sunday. All are welcome, and admission is free. Located at the edge of the University of Guelph campus, the gallery offers a dynamic space for visitors to engage with contemporary and historical artistic practices and research, explore diverse perspectives, and experience thought-provoking exhibitions. Through its commitment to fostering creative dialogue, AGG provides an accessible and inclusive environment where art connects communities and inspires new ways of seeing the world.

Art Gallery of Guelph
358 Gordon Street, Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm | Accessible
519-837-0010
artgalleryofguelph.ca
info@artgalleryofguelph.ca
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