Confluence
ROSEMARY GALLERY September - November 2024
gallery website
Co-Directed Co-Curated with Suzanne Morrissette
ROSEMARY GALLERY temporarily situated on 226 Main Street in Winnipeg for the Confluence exhibition.
The merging of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers has long been a site of gathering. Whereas historically it has served as a meeting place and trade centre, the rivers today stand in for the symbolic act of gathering with guests from all directions and hosts from Treaty 1 territory. They are also sites of profound ongoing disapora and poverty, racial violence and environmental degradation. These are matters which our communities have organized around for many years.
Confluence is an exhibition which brings together artists who are active in the city of Winnipeg in 2024, in synergy with the city’s 150th anniversary, ushering a time to reflect on histories of the city, projection of future and understand the present’s needs, priorities, and values of artists and communities within the city and their relationships to one another and their communities.
Artists: KC Adams, Ian August, Claire Johnston, Casey Koyczan, Pat Lazo, Kent Monkman, Bret Parenteau, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Rhayne Vermette
Symbiosis
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, April-October, 2023
Curated with Mel Granley, Guest Curator
Fascinations with the mushroom form and functions have shaped creative imaginations and scientific ideas for generations. Symbiosis gathers interdisciplinary contemporary artists located in British Columbia, across Canada and internationally who have produced work that explore forest ecologies and musings about mushrooms. The symbiotic relationships between fungi and boreal realms have co-dependent networks that are essential to the health and vitality of ecosystems. These interconnected relationships have inspired artists and researchers to delve into these micro and macro worlds to consider teachings from the land, medicines, and survival. Scientific and artistic curiosities of the natural world offer inquiries and explorations in Symbiosis.
Artists: Nanotopia; Tosca Terán and Andrei Gravelle, Rick Leong, Ernst and Alma Lorenzen, Mason Mashon, Diane Borsato, Xiaojing Yan, Bradley Necyk, Kaja Kiuru, Colton Hash, Helen Chen, Kathryn Wadel, Rande Cook, Deb Silver, Sara Hurley, Sarah Jim and Connie Paul.
Symbiosis Programming:
Mushroom and Plant-Based Foray with Diane Borsato and SVIMS
October 26, 2023
Join us as we host a mushroom and plant-based foray, with artist Diane Borsato, and the Southern Vancouver Island Mycological Society’s (SVIMS) Kem Luther and Andy MacKinnon!
In relation to the exhibition SYMBIOSIS, we’ll gather on the land, under the forest’s canopy and gather wild mushrooms and plants. During the foray, we will learn from the mycologists and Diane about the linguistic, cultural, edible, medicinal and ecological meanings of the collected mushroom and flora specimens. Rain or shine we’ll be out learning on the land with our mycological and artistic experts and we hope to see you there dressed for whatever weather we find that day. There will be an opportunity to hear from the curators of Symbiosis and Indigenous perspectives on interconnectivity of culture, land, flora and fauna.
Cooking Online with the London Chef – The Fragrant Mushroom
OCT 13 Please join us for this fun, free live-online culinary class, Cooking Online with the LONDON CHEF – The Fragrant Mushroom, an exciting collaboration with the London Chef and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s SYMBIOSIS exhibition, where we will be exploring delectable mushroom cuisine.
Woven In
#wip Podcast, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Symbiosis Exhibition Curatorial 2023
Adorned
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, June 2022 - January 2023
A show of visual bravura and cultural abundance, this group exhibition presents ways and wills to be adorned and embellished with ancestral traditions and a forecast of futurisms. Mavericks of design and radical thinking, these artists convey knowledge of material to weave, rethink, reshape, remix, collect, collage, splice and mend to produce original works of art in fashion. The fast fashion garment industry’s impact is significant – clothing waste and pollution are a reality, considering sustainably sourced and produced fashion is environmentally, socially and politically relevant. The works exhibited in Adorned will present style and identity beyond aesthetics and beauty, exploring cultural expressions, histories, futurisms and materiality.
Artists: Dana Claxton, Karin Jones, Adeyemi Adegbesan, Sho Sho Esquiro, Atelier COĪN by Cameron Ray Lizotte, Meghann O’Brien, FarLee Mowat, Simranpreet Anand, Ay Lelum: The Good House of Design, and Simranpreet Anand. In addition, historical items from the AGGV collection are included as well as films programmed throughout the exhibition.
Naadohbii: To Draw Water
Winnipeg Art Gallery, July 2021 - 2022
International Tour:
Museums Victoria, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum, September 23, 2022 - March 26, 2023
Pataka Museum, Aotearoa/New Zealand, July 01- October, 2023
Naadohbii (pronounced NAH-DOH-BEY) is from Anishinaabemowin language and translates as “to draw/seek water.” The name was gifted by Elder Dr. Mary Courchene. Featuring over 20 artists, including some newly commissioned pieces, Naadohbii: To Draw Water is tri-national, sharing interdisciplinary artwork from Turtle Island, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). This exhibition illustrates an axis of solidarity between Indigenous nations across the globe around environmental, political, and cultural traditions and interconnected relationships to water. The exhibition enacts what curator Natasha Ginwala terms an "axis of solidarity" between Indigenous nations across the globe around environmental, political, and cultural connections and relationships to water. This meeting of First Peoples artists from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island brought together multiple Indigenous approaches to stories of freshwater and saltwater, to the movement of people and animal kin that rely on this resource. Naadohbii: To Draw Water considers the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, recognizing the power of art in enacting change. This exhibition contributed dialogue towards water and our changing environment from an Indigenous perspective and with an international scope. Our world is profoundly linked to water in all forms for human and ecological survival. Water is sacred. Water is life.
Co-Curated with international curatorial team: Reuben Friend, Director, and Ioana Gordon-Smith, Curator, Pātaka Art + Museum, Wellington, New Zealand; and Kimberley Moulton, Senior Curator, South Eastern Aboriginal Collections, First Peoples Department, Melbourne Museum, Museums Victoria, Australia. A visual response with the WAG-Qaumajuq's collection of Inuit sculptures with Jocelyn Piirainen, Assistant Curator of Inuit Art; Design by Indigo Arrows
Artists: Maria Hupfield, Jaime Black (with Seven Oaks School Division Youth), Kevin Brownlee, Rebecca Belmore, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Christi Belcourt, Israel Birch, Marianne Nicolson, Lindsay Dawn Dobbin Nici Cumpston, Imaq-ALs, Ishmael Marika, Onaman Collective, Dr. Vicki Couzens, Jeremy Leatinuu, Nikau Hindin, Elisa Jane Carmichael, James Tylor, Nova Paul, Rachael Rakena & Keri Whaitiri, William Noah, Jessie Onark, Artists from Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection: Eshuguriak, Mina Inuktalik, Annie Oqaituq, Nelson Takkiruq
Boarder X
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2016
National Tour:
Mackenzie Art Gallery 2018, Art Gallery of Alberta 2019, The Rooms 2019, Nanaimo Art Gallery 2020, Squamish Liliwoot Cultural Center 2021, Museum of Vancouver, 2022
In May 2021, the Canadian Museum Association awarded the 2016 exhibition, Boarder X, with an outstanding achievement award.
Boarder X presents contemporary work by artists from Indigenous nations across Canada who surf, skate, and snowboard. The exhibition reveals how these practices are vehicles to challenge conformity and status quo, and demonstrate knowledge and relationships with the land and water. Whether reading the urban terrain, making a cement jungle a playground, riding the natural contours of white immovable mountains, or shredding the ever-changing waves, it’s not about controlling land and water, but being humbled by their power.
Through painting, mixed media, carving, weaving, photography, performance, and video, the artists reflect cultural, political, environmental, and social perspectives, as well as critiques about the territories we occupy. The paintings present narratives and observations of traditions, movement, balance, and entanglements of space, place, and belonging. Mobilizing traditional histories, the artwork conceptually bridges the past and present with reinventions in carving, weaving, and performance. Video and photography capture the energy of boarding with unbridled motivation and physicality. The exhibition is an affirmation of cultural resilience and an acknowledgement of ongoing respect and reverence for the land.
Artists: Jordan Bennett, Colonialism Boards (Michael Langan and Kent Monkman collaboration), Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Roger Crait, Steven Thomas Davies, Mark Igloliorte, Mason Mashon, Meagan Musseau, Meghann O’Brien, Les Ramsay, Amanda Strong
Born In Power
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2019
presents Indigenous and Black representation in photography, film, and text from a self-determined lens. Presenting expressions from womxn and non-binary/enby identities that embody representations of the self and community as acts of reclamation and image sovereignty. Black and Indigenous womxn/non-binary identities share a collective history of resistance, endurance of intersectional oppression, discrimination, diaspora, sexual violence and racial objectification/subjugation. Armored with that acknowledgement, the artists presented here, from the position of intersectional Indigenous and Black identities, use photography and film to defy/challenge/address stereotypes and Eurocentric standards to define identity for themselves without the influence of society's or institutional expectations and impositions. Representations of intergenerational Indigenous and Afro/Black bodies are recast, re-scripted, and countered by self-determining acts, familial power and bold vulnerability.
Within a dominantly white institutional space, this exhibition poses a critical question of self-determination and positionality, whose prerogative is it to bring marginalized experiences and voices to a wider public. Born In Power brings into context the idea of power and privilege behind the lens. What is meant by being born in/ born into power? What are the challenges of being Black, and Indigenous womxn/non-binary identified people in this world? How has 'blackness' and 'indigeneity' been represented by 'whiteness, 'historically and now? Born in Power reflects on the power of photography and film to capture and create constructs of identity and consider the history of photography and media as a colonial tool, an imperial weapon of racial violence, and objectification.
Artists: Anique Jordan, Meryl McMaster, Ella Cooper, Kali Spitzer, Hagere Selam Shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Raven Davis, online programming included additional artists
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Winnipeg Art Gallery, November 2018
Consisting of interdisciplinary work by artists with Winnipeg ties, Behind Closed Doors reveals the inner workings of the artist's studio, offering a peek into the museum vault and disclosing narratives that normally unfold behind closed doors. The works produced and displayed demonstrate variance in process and design, merging disciplines and broadening themes, bridging the past and present. This exhibition explores the influences that motivate creative production and exposes the rich process of investigation that goes into creating art-charting the trajectory of works in progress.
The gallery space functions as a laboratory of ideas, showing how a creative intention evolves and transforms through material experimentations: from ornamental collage to sculpture, from artifact to sculpture to painting, photography to collage, watercolors to sculpture, embroidery to three-dimensional form, and unconventional placement, on and off the walls. For Behind Closed Doors, the Winnipeg Art Gallery also opened its vault to artists with a desire to mine the museum as inspiration for them to select and research pieces from the WAG collection that informed new work and new ways of seeing art work and artifacts.
From personal to public collections, this exhibition defies the more traditional, homogenous, and conventional strategies of display. Behind Closed Doors is gestural and playful, yet poses underlying questions and explores many different subjects, including experiences of displacement. the transmission of social and environmental values, interaction between memory, experience and the imagination and expressions of interpretation.
Artists:
Ian August, Irene Bindi, Mia Feur, Takashi Iwasaki, Shaun Morin & Melanie Rocan, Kristin Nelson, Matea Radic, Dominique Rey, Robert Taite
Woven Together
Kelowna Art Gallery, July 14 to October 7, 2018
Woven Together, a group exhibition of work that relates to the woven basket as a contemporary methodology to explore epistemologies, interwoven narratives and histories. The exhibition considers weaving as a reflexive practice as the maker’s hands create interlaced actions through a learned, contemplative, and repetitive process binding together layers of knowledge and material. Representing nations from Coast Salish Territory in British Columbia to Ktaqmkuk Territory in Newfoundland, Woven Together entangles practices from the West and the East to unravel intergenerational and intertribal memories of matriarchal kinships, knowledge, and practices.
Artists: Ursula Johnson, Meagan Musseau, Meghann O’Brien, and Tania Willard