Spring 2023 Exhibitions at Art Windsor-Essex
Kara Springer, Do I have to build you a fucking pyramid?, 2021, poplar wood armature, double-sided photo prints on Dibond panels. 243.8 x 208.2 x 82.8 cm. Commissioned by MOCA Toronto. Courtesy of the artist.
New Exhibitions on View
From March 14:
Exhibitions at Art Windsor-Essex this season look to the world outside, from microbiomes to majestic landscapes. BioCurious and Water Protectors show us nature at its most powerful, and the role we can play in sustaining it. Rick Leong and Jon Sasaki find new meaning in historic landscapes, placing us in old growth forests or finding new ecologies in a petri dish. Catherine Hoi’s Disruptive Bodies gets to the guts of what art can do, and how it can heal. Sara Graham builds a city with Cut-outs, Offcuts, and Cast-offs. And end your trip to AWE with a digital moment in an augmented landscape courtesy of the Moment Factory!
Biocurious features artists who explore living matter as their subject matter, and in some cases, their artistic medium. The artists – who identify as Canadian and/or Indigenous; and as women and/or non-binary or two-spirit people – create works that bridge the gap between science and art. They propose different ways we can understand living bodies and co-existence by intertwining scientific and cultural knowledge. Artists include Siku Allooloo, Alana Bartol, Christi Belcourt, Daphne Boyer, Hannah Claus, Nicole Clouston, Becky Comber, Ruth Cuthand, Lisa Hirmer, Charmaine Lurch, Laura Magnusson, Maria Simmons, Kara Springer, Laura St. Pierre, Jennifer Wanner, Amanda White, Jennifer Willet and Xiaojing Yan. Curated by Jennifer Matotek and Julie Rae Tucker.
Catherine Hois: Disruptive Body: How are our anxieties inscribed into our flesh? In what ways do our bodies reflect our lived experience? Drawing on her own relationship with her body, Catherine Hois’ sculptural and video works address these questions by reflecting on her struggles with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, and her ongoing healing process. This exhibition forms part of Below the 6, a series of exhibitions that focuses on artists based in Southwestern Ontario whose practices are socially and politically minded. Catherine Hois: Disruptive Bodies is curated by TD Curatorial Fellow Muriel N. Kahwagi and is generously supported by TD Bank Group.
Sarah Graham, In&Out&Between [Yellow Bridge], 2022-2023, acrylic paint, ink and collage on paper, 28 x 22 in. Photographed by Byron Dauncey. Courtesy of MKG127.
Sara Graham: Cut-outs, Offcuts, and Cast-offs is a material vision of the city where the excesses hold the same value as the outcomes. Examining relationships between the built environment, the landscape it occupies, and repeating forms in cityscapes, Graham proposes alternative ways of looking at the city and its parts. Cut-outs, Offcuts, and Cast-offs looks at the interplay in her works, tracing paths and connections across media. This exhibition is supported by the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority and is curated by Nadja Pelkey.
From February 17:
Rick Leong: Hard Look Soft Gaze is a reflection on pictorial representations of the landscape, and the place that they occupy in our lives and our collective imagination. Leong curated works depicting landscapes from AWE’s collection of nearly 4,000 artworks, and activated them by creating a painting of his own. Leong’s A Landscape Both Appearing and Disappearing (2021-2022) is presented alongside 30 works from AWE’s collection, evoking the ways in which we move through and inhabit the landscapes around us.
Jon Sasaki, Microbes Swabbed from a Palette used by Arthur Lismer, 2020, archival print, 91.44 x 91.44 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.
Jon Sasaki: Aura brings together two bodies of work exploring the history of Canadian landscape painting. With Aura, Sasaki collaborates with four clairvoyants to reveal the “spark of the divine” in six Lawren Harris paintings from the AWE collection. Homage, originally presented at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, presents new microbial landscapes made from dormant bacteria, yeast and fungus swabbed from Group of Seven studio objects. With both series, Sasaki’s gestures are rooted in deep admiration for the Group of Seven and their work and a desire to depict it as teeming with life and vibrating with energy. Homage is presented in collaboration with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario.
Water Protectors brings together artists whose works explore the importance of water from Indigenous perspectives. Artists in the exhibition are Christian Chapman, Ruth Cuthand, Melissa General, Tanya Harnett, Roy Kakegamic, Glenna Matoush and Roy Thomas. Through their works, these artists explore how water is a sacred, living entity in need of care and protection. They communicate individual and collective relationships to water, highlighting how water flows deep into Indigenous memory, knowledge, and identity. Through their use of storytelling and critical reflection, they honour their cultural connections to water while drawing attention to systemic inequities of unsafe drinking water within Indigenous communities. The exhibition calls attention to the need to care for the earth’s most sacred resource. This exhibition pays special tribute to those who take up that important work and honours all Water Protectors across Turtle Island. This exhibition is curated by Julie Rae Tucker and Danielle Printup.
Flowing Forces is an interactive immersive experience that takes place inside Art Windsor-Essex. The multimedia installation draws upon Moment Factory’s expertise in projection mapping, AI-generated video content, mobile-based interactivity, and sound design to transform an AWE exhibition space and its paintings into a modern take on the traditional art exhibit.
Art Windsor-Essex respectively acknowledges that we are located on Anishinaabe Territory – the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Today the Anishinaabe of the Three Fires Confederacy are represented by Bkejwanong. We want to state our respect for the ancestral and ongoing authority of Walpole Island First Nation over its Territory.
Art Windsor-Essex
401 Riverside Drive West
Windsor, Ontario N9A 7J1
519-977-0013
artwindsoressex.ca
Gallery Hours
Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00am-5:00pm
Sunday: 11:00am-5:00pm
Art Windsor-Essex is an accessible venue. For more information, contact visit@artwindsoressex.ca.
Admission is $10, or free for members.
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