Summer 2023 Exhibitions at Art Gallery of Guelph

Summer Season Launch

May 25, 2023 | 6:30 pm
Art Gallery of Guelph

Join us on Thursday, May 25, at 6:30 pm, for the launch of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s summer season featuring four exhibitions that highlight the role of art in relation to everyday environments and experiences. All welcome; refreshments will be served.

Featuring immersive, large-scale installations, both Alison Norlen: Armatures and Imaginaries and José Luis Torres: Temporary Territories transform gallery spaces, exploring the interplay of architecture and archive, space and time, to offer new insights into the ways in which local and global forces shape the physical and social landscape. Presented in conjunction with the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, Chelsea Ryan: be(hold)-ing and Samuelle Grande: Out of the blue represent the culmination of two years of focused work in the Master of Fine Arts program.

Alison Norlen: Armatures and Imaginaries
May 25 – September 10, 2023

From faded amusement parks and roadside attractions to abandoned pavilions and industrial structures, Alison Norlen explores familiar and forgotten architectural sites that once represented spectacle and unsurpassed promise. The visual world that emerges in this exhibition is one closer to home – immersive images stemming from archival records of Guelph and its historical transformation. Melding local lore with documentary detail, her large-scale drawings examine earlier stages of city-building to capture moments of monumental Guelph – from obsolete feats of engineering once deployed in 19th century quarries and bridge construction to iconic cultural artifacts and civic symbols that have become part of the urban terrain. Ultimately, her meticulous renderings speak to how utopia and invention inform everyday landscapes, ensuring they are both, and at once, real and imagined, mundane and spectacular, functional and fantastic. read more >

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

José Luis Torres: Temporary Territories
May 19 – September 3, 2023

Evoking the profound ambiguity and estrangement at the heart of experiences of migration and exile, Quebec-based Argentinian artist José Luis Torres transforms spaces with large-scale installations that offer possibilities to see and engage the familiar in new ways. Recontextualizing and reinterpreting objects of daily life, the very simple gesture of “making do” that informs his DIY architectures speaks to a profound precariousness of relationships to home, to identity, and to belonging associated with informal settlements, where sedentary spaces of stability give way to nomadic spaces of risk and vulnerability. For Torres, this geography of temporary territories offers insight into the deep transformation of everyday cultural experiences associated with cross-border movement at local and global scales. read more >

Curated by Shauna McCabe and organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Partnership support from Circle Home Furniture Bank, an initiative of Danby Appliances, and ReStore, an initiative of Habitat for Humanity.

Chelsea Ryan: be(hold)-ing
May 19 – July 9, 2023

Using video to record the transient, still, and enduring moments in and around her home, Ryan focuses on the background noise of her everyday life. be(hold)-ing explores the relationship between attention and distraction and how these cognitive activities can be captured and represented through single-shot video, projection, diary entries, and radio static. Through multi-screen installations and surround sound, the artist creates a space that asks viewers to think about their own experiences of time and distraction in a society where their attention is a valuable currency. read more >

Presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the University of Guelph School of Fine Art and Music.

Samuelle Grande: Out of the blue
July 14 – September 3, 2023

The work of Montreal-born artist Samuelle Grande weaves experiences drawn from her daily life together with collected images sourced from anonymous scrapbooks, cinema, and Western art history, incorporating them into free-wheeling, rhizomatic visual compositions. Her exhibition Out of the blue features paintings that hybridize the public visual culture Grande encounters with her own personal lexicon of imagery. Each piece emerges through a visceral process of addition and erasure so that dream sequences and memories overlap in surreal, painterly scenarios. read more >

Presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the University of Guelph School of Fine Art and Music.

Image credits: Alison Norlen, Covered Bridge, 2023, acrylic, ink, charcoal, chalk, 182.9 × 396.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist; José Luis Torres, Theatrum mundi, installation (detail), found objects. Voir à l’Est / Art contemporain, Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, 2013 © José Luis Torres; Chelsea Ryan, the sun blinds me as I sit here (detail of still), 2023, looped digital video, 2:09 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Samuelle Grande, Shelter, 2023, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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