Laura Moore, TL074CN, 2021. Hydrocal gysum cement, gouache and scenic foliage, 3 x 3 x 2.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: LF Documentation.

Ctrl + Alt + Delete

June 28 – October 4, 2025
Panel Discussion: June 28, 1 – 2 pm
Opening Reception: June 28, 2 – 4 pm

Digital systems and ecological networks increasingly mirror one another in their complexity and precarity. Data is harvested, systems crash, and both natural and digital worlds share a language of crisis, entropy, and transformation.

Ctrl + Alt + Delete explores these parallels through the work of Laura Moore and Geoffrey Pugen. Working across sculpture, video, textile, and collage, each artist navigates the porous terrain between the organic and the synthetic, revealing how digital environments, like ecosystems, are inhabited, interconnected, and deeply susceptible to collapse. Embedded in their work is a critical reflection on consumer culture—its cycles of innovation, accumulation, and obsolescence—that drives instability in both spheres.

The exhibition also reflects on the human desire to master and control both realms, an impulse increasingly bound to their unraveling. Whether evoking nostalgic technologies or probing predictive systems, Moore and Pugen invite viewers to consider how we archive the present, interpret the past, and envision possible futures amid accelerating digital and environmental shifts.

Courtesy of the artist, Elly MacKay.

Only Human

June 28 – October 4, 2025
Opening Reception: June 28, 2 – 4 pm

Only Human is a solo exhibition by Owen Sound-based paper artist Elly MacKay that examines the ethical challenges artists are facing amid the rise of artificial intelligence. As generative technologies advance, creative work is being absorbed into vast training datasets without the artist’s consent, attribution, or compensation, resulting in their personal style being imitated by machines. These shifts raise urgent questions about ownership, authenticity, and what remains uniquely human in the act of creation. They also prompt a deeper uncertainty about how to move forward when we can no longer tell what is real.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are asked to lock away their cellphones in secure lockers before engaging with an intricate diorama inspired by MacKay’s personal dreams. This act serves as both a symbolic and practical gesture, momentarily shielding the artist’s work from digital intrusion while prompting visitors to consider how their devices mediate, distort, or even replace direct experience of the world around them.

Protective, although perhaps ultimately futile, Only Human invites a deeper reflection on the delicate balance between human creativity and the ever-expanding digital landscape.

Arthur Lismer, War and Peace, n.d. Ink and gouache on card, 27.3 x 18.5 cm. Tom Thomson Art Gallery Collection, Owen Sound. Gift from an anonymous donor through the Ontario Heritage Trust, an agency of the Government of Ontario, 1988.

All the Calm and Calamity

June 21, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Opening Reception: June 28, 2 – 4 pm

In the fall of 1914, as the First World War unfolded across Europe, Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley posed together for a photograph during a painting trip in Algonquin Park. The moment, seemingly ordinary, would come to mark a quiet divergence. While Jackson, Lismer, and Varley would go on to support the war effort as artists, Thomson remained rooted in the northern wilderness, choosing to paint the stillness of lakes and the steady rhythm of changing seasons.

All the Calm and Calamity explores the paradox at the heart of this moment—that war and peace, though seemingly opposed, often exist simultaneously. The luminous sketches Thomson created between 1914 and his untimely death in 1917 offer no direct commentary on war, yet they emerged from a world steeped in uncertainty and loss. Serene and introspective, these works overcome outward chaos to affirm the possibility of peace within a fractured world.

Presented alongside Thomson’s landscapes are powerful wartime works by Jackson, Varley, and Lismer—on loan from the Canadian War Museum and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection—that confront the stark realities of war. Together, these contrasting perspectives trace the fragile boundary between calmness and calamity, revealing how all four artists, each in their own way, bore witness to a world transformed by conflict.

For more information about our current exhibitions, please visit our website.

About Tom Thomson Art Gallery

The Tom Thomson Art Gallery develops exhibitions and programs that enrich the region and contribute to national visual arts discourse. We promote and support emerging and professional artists, advocate for the creative sector, and actively research, preserve, develop, and exhibit the collection to promote scholarship and to generate and explore new ideas. We are committed to welcoming and inspiring people of all representations, ages, backgrounds, and abilities.

Gallery Hours:
Monday to Saturday: 10:00am – 5:00pm
Sunday: 12:00pm – 4:00pm

Tom Thomson Art Gallery
840 1st Avenue West
Owen Sound, ON N4K 4K4
www.tomthomson.org
ttag@tomthomson.org
519-376-1932

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The Tom Thomson Art Gallery operates with generous support from the City of Owen Sound, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.

Accessibility:
Tom Thomson Art Gallery is fully accessible. For more information, please visit our website.