While Black: a forum for speculation on what the gallery can’t hold
Documenting their relationship to the art gallery and its systems of representation, Black artists working in Canada consider ‘what the gallery can’t hold’. Through multimodal and multimedia responses, these artists offer questions, imperatives, proposals, and insight into their own experiences within contemporary art institutions and the cultural life beyond them.
This is the third event in a series of planned forums and public presentations organised by curators based across this country, in conversation with artists, to consider both the limits and possibilities of the relationship between contemporary art spaces and Black art, arts workers, and audiences.
Surabhi Ghosh: What’s mine is yours
This exhibition surveys the last decade of Montreal-based Surabhi Ghosh’s sculptural work, including several collaborations and a new piece, Within / Without. The artist’s practice frequently employs patterning, modularity, and repetition, as well as the material and formal qualities of textiles to create installations that are flexible and responsive to different architectural contexts
Dreaming Machines
In dreams, we imaginatively break the rules of time and space. Events pile upon one another, sequences are scrambled, impossible encounters occur between things and beings. Dream narratives overwhelm linear time with a flood of images only nominally under our control. This sense of dreaming as the free and reality-bending arrangement of images pertains also to the world-forming possibilities of art works. This exhibition explores examples from the collection of artists drawing upon the metaphor of dreaming in their work, as an autonomous generator of possible events and imaginary collisions.
RE: visiting
Re:Visiting looks at the careers of eight notable Canadian artists represented in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery collection through juxtaposition. Older works are placed in dialogue with newer ones produced by the same artist – in some cases, accompanied by various forms of commentary by each maker on how the earlier work is transformed by the comparison. Each example is quite different. Sometimes, the thread that runs between the works is so strong that the way the later work affects our experience of the earlier work is quite subtle.
Give Me Shelter
Thirteen emerging artists based in St. John’s, NL, reflect on the richness of a cultural community that is both steeped in tradition and looking towards a rapidly-changing future.
Emerging Artists Series sponsored by RBC.
Emily Pittman, Unsettled, installation view, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 2020
Gerard Clarkes: A Haunted Land
Introducing the work of Winnipeg-born, P.E.I.-based artist Gerard Clarkes, this exhibition features a large selection of the enigmatic, theatrical landscapes he produced in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s.
Image: Mr. and Mrs. Hartley S.P.Q. Rolf Witherspoon and Family, 1964, oil on board, 91 x 122 cm
Creative Obsessions: A Look at Contemporary Craft in Prince Edward Island
Fine craft is equal parts tradition and innovation, passion and obsession, filtered through the skills and the sensibilities of artisans. Making craft is a form of thinking, a communication across generations. In Creative Obsessions: A Look at Contemporary Craft in Prince Edward Island, artisans working on PEI respond to the theme of “creative obsessions” with innovative works drawing on craft traditions to mark Craft Year 2020. The exhibition is organized by Confederation Centre Art Gallery in collaboration with the PEI Crafts Council.
Guest curated by Ray Cronin and Sarah Maloney.
Isako Suzuki, Landscape, stoneware, ceramic stain, 2020
Creative Obsessions: A Look at Contemporary Craft in Prince Edward Island
Fine craft is equal parts tradition and innovation, passion and obsession, filtered through the skills and the sensibilities of artisans. Making craft is a form of thinking, a communication across generations. In Creative Obsessions: A Look at Contemporary Craft in Prince Edward Island, artisans working on PEI respond to the theme of “creative obsessions” with innovative works drawing on craft traditions to mark Craft Year 2020. The exhibition is organized by Confederation Centre Art Gallery in collaboration with the PEI Crafts Council.
Aggregate No. 2, 2018, archival ink on rag paper, edition of 5, 60.9 x 60.9 cm
Tyler Los Jones: Look slowly and all that moves
This exhibition presents new work by the Banff-based artist, developed from a residency in PEI in 2017. The show consists of images and objects that braid together three strands of inquiry: an investigation into organisms on PEI that stabilize dynamic, shifting environments; the relationship between present-day marine life on the east coast and the ancient seas that comprise the Rockies in Alberta; and the material history of photography and expanded photographic processes. Curated by Pan Wendt.
Supported by Alberta Foundation of the Arts, and the RBC Foundation.
