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Tom Thomson Art Gallery Exhibitions

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Home/.../Arts, Culture and Heritage/Tom Thomson Art Gallery/Exhibitions

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Tom Thomson: Field of Vision | June 24 - December 2, 2023

close up of Early Spring by Tom Thomson

Fifty years after Tom Thomson’s death, his niece Jessie Fisk discovered a small bundle of photographic negatives that were captured by the artist during the last seven years of his life. After she had them printed, what emerged was an intimate glimpse into Thomson’s experiences, including the people he was close to, the wildlife he encountered, and the environments he inhabited.

Field of Vision presents all forty photographs that have been credited to Thomson alongside his painted sketches as parallel forms of visual expression. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Thomson envisioned his photographs as works of art, they offer another layer of perspective to our overall understanding of his distinct vision. As Canadian curator and art historian Dennis Reid wrote, “if the artist’s usual form of expression is dependent upon the presentation of a moment of experience, as was Thomson’s, then the pertinence of even casual photographs is obvious.” Photography’s adeptness at capturing spontaneous, fleeting moments with accuracy parallels the painterly approach that Thomson embraced while creating his iconic plein-air sketches.  

Image Credit: Tom Thomson, Canoeing through drowned land, II, c. 1912. Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada/e002852742.


Roly Fenwick: Lifelines in Light & Shadow | September 9 - November 25, 2023

A painting of a man standing in front of a maple tree by Roly Fenwick

Born in Owen Sound in 1932, Roly Fenwick has been a steady witness to the shifting rhythms of this region having spent decades immersed in the beauty and raw energy of its landscape, transmitting it into lush psychologically charged paintings. Throughout his career, Fenwick has divided his time between his home and studio in London, Ontario, and a family cabin in Big Bay, an area north of Owen Sound along the shores of Georgian Bay. Wherever he is, Fenwick carries an intrinsic connection with the trees, swamps, and escarpment that the Bruce Peninsula encompasses, areas that he returns to both physically and inwardly to fuel his artistic practice. 

A byproduct of what Fenwick describes as his homesickness and “natural tendency to internalize,” has been a desire to paint familiar places and subjects that he feels most connected to. This extends beyond the locations of his landscapes to encompass his many self-portraits and figurative paintings of friends and family members. Although they have rarely been exhibited, his figurative works, like his landscapes, highlight an overarching desire to explore what lies beneath the surface—a spiritual search to uncover the roots and inner workings that support life. 

This exhibition presents Fenwick’s landscape and figurative paintings simultaneously, blurring the lines of distinction that separate each genre. This is conveyed through the looseness in Fenwick’s brushstrokes, the way the boundaries of his figures bleed into their environments, and how his depictions of solitary trees are handled with the same sensitivity as a portrait. One cannot help but personify Fenwick’s elms, maples, and oaks. They exude sentiments like strength, vitality, alienation, and grief; a pendulum of emotions that the artist masterfully articulates through a melancholic play of forms in light and shadow. 

Opening Reception: Saturday September 9, 2023 from 1:00pm to 3:00pm 

Image credit: Roly Fenwick, Roots: The Tree & Me, 2012, oil on canvas. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Michael Gibson Gallery.


(Re)Inventing Wilderness | September 9 - December 2, 2023

close up of work by Gary Blundell and Victoria Ward

Romantic idealizations and yearnings for areas of pristine wilderness still linger in the minds of many Canadians, as they did during Tom Thomson’s (1877 – 1917) lifetime, but these areas were as much a myth then as they are today. When Thomson was painting his plein air sketches of twisted forests, dazzling skies, and reflective lakes in Algonquin Park, he would have been surrounded by evidence of multiple industries in the form of dams, an active network of roadways and rail lines, recently abandoned logging fields, and alligator tugboats used to haul heavy lumber, among others. These elements of industries do present themselves in several of his paintings and photographs, but for the most part it is his depictions of “untouched” wilderness that he is most known for.  

Our desire to seek and uphold the concept of wilderness while surrounded by industrial activities is a focus in Gary Blundell and Victoria Ward’s artistic practices. In the early 2000s they moved from an urban area to a remote cabin near Gooderham, Ontario, not far from Algonquin Park. In their immediate environment they found themselves surrounded by traces of the same late 19th and early 20th century industry that Thomson would have been witness to, including a de-commissioned beehive sawdust burner that was used to incinerate sawdust - a vestigial of that area’s former logging industry. Both artists have returned to the burner site frequently over the years, depicting it in varying iterations, and in the process, steadily witnessing its gradual deterioration.

Blundell and Ward acknowledge that the concept of wilderness is something that many people have come to need and continue to reinvent, but their work exposes how industry and landscape are deeply interwoven. In a joint artist statement, they elaborate on this reality by stating, “Canada is haunted by industrial activity. Human residue can be felt in ghost towns, abandoned mines, and logging areas. Nature, as it regrows and takes back what was taken from these areas, creates an atmosphere of longing. At times it is hard to fix on what is being haunted or who is doing the haunting. We like to think our work exists in this tension.” 

Opening Reception: Saturday September 9, 2023 from 1:00pm to 3:00pm 

Image Credit Left: Victoria Ward, office (detail), 2020. Mixed media on wood. Courtesy of the artist.
Image Credit Right: Gary Blundell, Grip (detail), 2010. Oil, acrylic on carved wood. Courtesy of the artist.

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