Tom Thomson Art Gallery Exhibitions

Rae Johnson | excuse me while I touch the sky |May 7 - July 16, 2022

Although Rae Johnson’s artistic career was dominantly influenced by her residence in Toronto, in the late 1980s Johnson and several of her peers became disenfranchised with living there and decided to move to the Flesherton area, establishing a unique community of like-minded artists. The move precipitated a profound shift in her practice demarcated by a departure from the urban scenes on which she had built her reputation towards a focus on landscape. Johnson’s desire to evoke an embodied experience of the environments she inhabited is palpable in the resultant works from that time period, through her dream-like paintings of interior spaces and spiritually motivated depictions of land, water, and sky. Throughout her 40-year career, Johnson was driven to visually articulate the inner, rather than physical, world—the unconscious, spiritual, and psychological forces that influence how something is felt rather than simply observed. This remarkable exhibition draws on work from the Gallery’s collection along with paintings borrowed from the artist’s estate and St. Jerome’s University which have never been shown publicly. It will include a few examples of work from early in her career but will focus primarily on the landscapes she created while living in Flesherton.

Sorouja Moll|365 Days: you will never know |May 14 - July 23, 2022

365 Days: you will never know is a documentation of Moll’s year-long durational meditation on the way solitary experiences collided within the communal, liminal space she shared with strangers on her daily walks. It is presented through a multidisciplinary installation combining audio and video sequences of the shoreline, photographs of solitary figures standing by the water, and stones gathered from the beach to demarcate the passage of time—one for each day of the first year of the pandemic. The installation is intended to be an immersive experience, in which silhouettes of visitors stand in solidarity with the solitary figures in the projection and look towards the horizon together.  

 The Thomson Room 

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) is considered one of the most important and influential Canadian artists. Together with members of the Group of Seven, he created a distinct approach to portraying rugged Canadian landscapes. Thomson grew up and is buried in Leith near Owen Sound, ON. The Tom Thomson Art Gallery is named for the iconic Canadian landscape artist and houses a nationally significant collection of his work. This intimate exhibition of Thomson's oil sketches, graphics, memorabilia, and archival materials offer unique insight into one of Canada's most influential artists of the 20th century.