Summer 2025 Exhibitions at the MacLaren Art Centre

On Thursday, July 10, 6:30 – 9:00pm, the MacLaren Art Centre unveils its Summer Season of exhibitions. All are welcome to attend. Remarks begin at 7:00 pm. Admission is free, registration encouraged.

Images (left to right): Suzanne Morrissette, Grief Plates (detail), 2025, reclaimed clay with glazes, various dimensions; Vicky Talwar, Uncharted Ascent (detail), 2025, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 30 x 84 inches; Jill Price, The House that Jack Built (detail), 2025 (1 of 5), cyanotype on reclaimed blueprint paper, 26 x 32 inches. Photos courtesy of the artists.

Jill Price
From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow

Until October 26, 2025
Gallery 3

Barrie-based artist Jill Price anchors From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow in her concept of UN/making, drawing on histories of maintenance art and walking as creative practice. Together with community members, Price scours regional shorelines, collecting, cleaning, sorting, recycling, donating, and reworking debris. These actions result in meticulous displays and wry assemblages that acknowledge the agency and potential of what has been forgotten or discarded. Inside the gallery, the exhibition builds on her ongoing project, Wht-trSH, to visualize the slow violence of plastics and other materials that colonize human bodies and more-than-human bodies of land and water.

Dr. Jill Price is an award-winning interdisciplinary creative who contributes to a growing discourse on art’s potential to enact ecological and ethical transformation. Price holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design from OCAD University and completed a research-creation PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.

Suzanne Morrissette
The Shape of Transference

July 10, 2025 – November 2, 2025
Janice Laking Gallery

In The Shape of Transference, Suzanne Morrissette presents an intimate meditation on how different forms of knowledge are passed along. Using reclaimed clay, animation, layered sound, and drawing, she brings together works that map personal, entangled ways of knowing: embodied, inherited, experienced, and studied. These artworks trace knowledge as something fluid and relational, rooted in connection rather than siloed or purely intellectual.

Arising from moments of reflexive questioning about how to carry oneself amidst profound global shifts and genocide, and shaped through kinship and the natural world, each work reflects a commitment to being in relation.

Suzanne Morrissette, PhD (she/her) is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and scholar who is currently based out of Toronto. She holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University and a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University.

Vicky Talwar
A Shift in Consciousness

Until October 26, 2025
Carnegie Room

In A Shift in Consciousness, Stouffville-based artist Vicky Talwar offers a meditation on hybridity, memory, and spiritual continuity. Rooted in her experience as a Hindu-Canadian artist, Talwar interlaces South Asian ritual and aesthetic traditions with the layered realities of diasporic life in Canada. Through vibrant colours, textured surfaces, and recurring motifs such as flower garlands, mala beads and sacred threads, her paintings become spaces of reflection and transformation. This October, the exhibition will expand to include a luminous salt crystal mandala installation, and a collaboration with Buddhist monk Lama Jam, who will present a Sound Energy Healing Mandala Performance.

Vicky Talwar is an interdisciplinary artist who draws upon her personal experience as a Hindu Canadian to produce painting, mixed media, performance, and installation artworks. Talwar holds a BFA and MFA in Art, Media, & Design from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCADU), as well as a Bachelor of Education from York University.

Where Are You?

July 10, 2025 – November 2, 2025
Molson Community Gallery
Organized in collaboration with the Barrie Native Friendship Centre

In Spring 2025, the MacLaren opened the PIE Education Centre to community members of all ages from the Barrie Native Friendship Centre. In bi-monthly artist talks led by local artist Bruno Smoky, and Indigenous artists Shelley Genereaux, Cedar-Eve Peters, and Lucia Laford, this small group of emerging artists learned from professionals and worked together to bring their creations to life.

Using a wide range of mediums, from beadwork to paintings, the artists have grown their portfolios while creating an exhibition that honors the land we live on, celebrates ceremony, and acknowledges the survivance of our Urban Indigenous Community. Embedded in the creative sessions were opportunities to build confidence in their voices as artists and to uncover shared threads of experience and expression, which quietly revealed themselves through dialogue and making.

Contributing artists include Caleigh Bailey, Nellie Bishop, Eugene Corbeil, Reid Posine, and Blake Riggs.

Special thanks to the artist mentors, Petranella Brisco, Josie Fiegehen, January Paige, Carrie Ann Restoule, and Paige Russell from the Barrie Native Friendship Centre for their program support.

About the MacLaren Art Centre:

The MacLaren Art Centre is the major public art gallery in Central Ontario serving the residents of Barrie, the County of Simcoe, and surrounding area. The Gallery has a significant permanent collection of contemporary Canadian art and presents a year-round programme of exhibitions, education activities, and special events.

The MacLaren is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabek, which include the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Pottawatomi Nations, collectively known as the Three Fires Confederacy. The local bands consist of the Chippewa Tri-Council, who are made up of Beausoleil First Nation, Georgina Island First Nation, and Rama First Nation. We would also like to acknowledge the Wendat Nation (Huron) who occupied these lands prior to the middle of the 17th century.

As a registered charity, the MacLaren relies on public and private support for its operations and programs. The MacLaren gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of its Members, Patrons, Donors, Sponsors, Partners, the City of Barrie, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Canadian Heritage.

MacLaren Art Centre
37 Mulcaster Street
Barrie, ON L4M 3M2
T: 705-721-9696
www.maclarenart.com

Gallery Hours
Mon: Closed
Tue, Wed, Fri–Sun: 10am – 4pm
Thu: 10am – 8pm
Wheelchair accessible