Fall 2026 Exhibitions at Art Windsor-Essex
This fall, Art Windsor-Essex presents three new exhibitions exploring themes of fast fashion, transportation, and gender.
Alexa Hawksworth, Performance Red Integra, 2023, Oil on canvas, 120″ x 60″ (L x H), Courtesy of the artist, Private collection.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (and Boats and Bikes)
November 5, 2026 – May 23, 2027
Opening Reception: November 5, 2026, 5–9pm
In the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an ordinary trip home becomes an unexpected series of delays, missed connections, and detours. As the journey unravels, airports, highways, and hotels become settings for strong emotions: frustration, loneliness, grief and humour, leading to an unexpected friendship. The film suggests that we rarely remember travel as a sequence of routes and schedules. We remember what happened and how it felt.
Transportation is a practical system for moving people and things from one place to another, with infrastructure shaped by political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Yet travel is also an affective experience. Anticipation, wonder, desire, uncertainty, disappointment, nostalgia, and hope become attached to the vehicles we travel in, the routes we follow, and the destinations we imagine. The warmth of sunlight through a car window. The scent of a shoreline. The vibration of a train. Clouds drifting beneath an airplane. These sensory encounters become part of how we experience movement through the world.
The group exhibition Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Bikes and Boats) brings together contemporary artworks that explore the affective dimensions of transportation and travel. The selected contemporary artists examine transportation as emotional, sensory, and imaginative experiences, revealing how journeys shape our perceptions, memories, and relationships to place. Together, the works reveal travel does not end with arrival. The experience of moving through the world lingers in the body and imagination, shaped by memory, culture, and place.
Erica Rutherford, The Reunion, Human Comey Series, 1997, oil on canvas, 144 x 154cm, Collection of the Rutherford Family, Prince Edward Island. ©Estate of Erica Rutherford.
Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works
November 19, 2026 – February 21, 2027
Opening Reception: November 19, 2026, 5–9pm
This exhibition presents an overview of the remarkable career of artist Erica Rutherford (1923-2008), who—in the last few decades of her life—made her home in rural Prince Edward Island. Following World War II, the artist became involved in theatre, design, visual art, and film. Constantly on the move, from London to South Africa–where she produced the country’s first film with a Black cast and spent several years farming—to Ibiza and other locales, Rutherford eventually settled on painting as a focus, although her work was conditioned by deep uncertainties about her identity. Adopting a crude, even regressive materiality in semi-abstract collages and paintings, Rutherford’s early work explored elemental subjective states. By the late 1960s, she was teaching in American art schools and had already shifted towards a hard-edged Pop style that became her trademark in the 1970s and 1980s.
Her life was transformed by her transition to living as a woman in the mid-1970s, and by her permanent move to Prince Edward Island, which she described as a homecoming, despite having first visited the Island in her forties. From the haunting and ambiguous imagery of her career up to this point, Rutherford settled into a cheerful domesticity reflected in brightly hued imagery of flowers, cats, landscapes, and a career in children’s illustration, only to return to nightmarish, elemental fantasies late in life, with the ambitious large-scale painting series The Human Comedy. Rutherford described her life as a “struggle to realize and to express my nature,” and in her autobiographical writing, she repeatedly noted the close relationship between her work as an artist and her self-realization—as a woman, as an explorer, and as a shaper of place and identity.
– Pan Wendt, curator
Sav Riley, Deconstructed Jean Tapestry (detail), 2026
Sav Riley: Factory Reset
October 15 – February 21, 2027
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 15, 5–9pm
Curated by T. Bujold-Abu, 2025–2026 TD Curatorial Fellow
Factory Reset is a hard reboot, an opportunity to reimagine the Fast Fashion industry from the perspective of the consumer, as we interrupt the means of production. Artist Sav Riley works with donated denim; the sturdy cotton twill fabric representative of labor, activism, and rebellion. However, alongside the history of this proletariat fabric – the environmental repercussions of denims over consumption are creating a lasting impact. Sav Riley (communally known as Designs by Sav) foregrounds a new perspective: to salvage and transform the future of denim, such as a pair of jeans, through the same labor it embodies. Factory Reset is a collection of streetwear fashion and textile explorations that reinvent the lifecycle of denim through sustainability.
About Art Windsor-Essex
Established in 1943, AWE is the largest public art gallery in Southwestern Ontario and has grown with incredible support from the Windsor-Essex community. For over 75 years, AWE has experienced great change—in leadership, our collection, and our address. With every adaptation, we keep getting better at what we do: inspiring growth through the power of art. At AWE, we share historical Canadian, Indigenous, and contemporary art with the Windsor-Essex community in inventive and creative ways. Through our activities, we spark creativity and conversations, and educate and engage. With 15,000 square feet of exhibition space, new takes on our permanent collection of nearly 4,000 artworks, and through unexpected partnerships, AWE is the creative heart of Windsor-Essex. At Art-Windsor Essex, change happens here.
Art Windsor-Essex
401 Riverside Drive West
Windsor, Ontario N9A 7J1
artwindsoressex.ca
visit@artwindsoressex.ca
519-977-0013
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Accessibility: Art Windsor-Essex is a fully accessible venue. For more information, visit here.
Image Descriptions:
1. A painting of a scene of a red car with layered figures and abstract shapes, blending warm orange, yellow, and blue tones.
2. A colourful painting depicting characters both human-like and animal-like, some wearing black masks, and interacting.
3. A tapestry made of layered denim pieces.
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