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Guest Curated for the Tom Thomson Art Gallery by Katharine Lochnan, Senior Curator Emeritus, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Artist Louise Moore
Following in the footsteps of artists featured from the Gallery’s Collection, including Norval Morrisseau, Tom Thomson, Fred Varley, A.Y. Jackson, Daphne Odjig and John Hartman, you are invited on a tour around Georgian Bay. Beginning on Manitoulin Island, we will travel down the Bruce Peninsula to Owen Sound, head east toward Honey Harbour then north to Killarney. We will see the many ways in which this distinctive landscape has inspired successive generations of artists producing a rich cultural mosaic. We will explore the many ways in which cosmology, geography and geology have inspired memories, dreams and visions. We will be invited to contemplate our life journey in the context of the richness of our shared lives in this beautiful part of the world.
Opening Reception:
Friday, October 4, 7-8:30pm
Auxiliary programming:
Leith Day Open House
Saturday, September 28
As part of Ontario Culture Days, join the Friends of Leith Church for an Open House at Leith Church and Tom’s boyhood home, now called Jack Pine Equestrian Centre.
Footprints in Time Exhibition Art Lecture
Monday, October 7, 10am – 12pm
Bluewater Association for Lifelong Learners (BALL) in partnership with the Gallery present lectures by Blake Debassige and John Hartman, two artists featured in the exhibition, at the Bayshore Community Centre. Tickets available at the Gallery and upcoming BALL lectures - $10.
Memory of Place: Painting Workshop with Louise Moore
Saturday, October 19, 2019
10am-4pm
In conjunction with our fall exhibition Footprints in Time: Painting around Georgian Bay, the Gallery is excited to offer a one-day acrylic painting workshop with local artist Louise Moore. This workshop will be an exploration of surroundings and landscape as it relates to one’s sense of home and sense of self. Participants will be invited to bring photographs of landscapes which are meaningful to them and which they can use a starting point for painting, drawing and mark-making.
Curators’ Talk
Saturday, December 7, 2019 1pm
Join guest Curators Katharine Lochnan and Louise Moore as they tour and discuss Footprints in Time.
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Patrick DeCoste: 13 Moons and A Canoe is an interdisciplinary art exhibition exploring the artist’s emerging Métis identity. The main components of the show are a canoe and a circular room.
The exhibition and the dialogue it fosters are offered in the spirit of advancing ongoing conversations about Canadian identity, and how together we might take responsibility for our past, present, and future. In the works that comprise 13 Moons and a Canoe, DeCoste takes up history as something living and breathing, the conceptual weight of his work lightened by its rich materiality. The installation pairs a canoe, retrofitted with a mast and sail, with a circular room made up of thirteen walls – each wall, with exception to a doorway that is left open is adorned with a canvas that is painted with a large, colourful moon – strung across poles hewn from forest trees. This room-within-a-room evokes a pastiche of environmental, cultural, and personal influences. It is, on the one hand, a monument to the Indigenous lunar calendar, an inner sanctum delineated by the full moons that mark the passing of each year, and, on the other hand, a kind of family portrait for the artist; the twelve walls represent DeCoste and each of his eleven siblings. The modified canoe, reveals the thirteenth moon on its sail, this white moon represents the baby who did not survive, the thirteenth child. The canoe sits outside the tridecagon room; it conjures up the genesis of the Métis people in seventeenth-century Nova Scotia, where DeCoste’s family has its roots. It is a potent symbol of First Contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples – a hybrid object, deceptively quaint in appearance that literalizes the impact of cultures quickening against and into one another.
Patrick DeCoste is an award-winning Toronto-based visual artist who studied fine arts at Mount Allison University and OCAD University, where he received the President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies in 2014. He has exhibited extensively across Canada and the U.S., has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, and was awarded a prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2011.
The artist would like to acknowledge his appreciation and thanks for funding support of this exhibition from the Indigenous Arts Project Grants from both the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
Opening Reception:
Friday, October 4, 7-8:30pm
Artist Panel Discussion with Bonnie Devine and Patrick DeCoste
Saturday, October 5, 1-2pm
Join guest speaker Bonnie Devine and Artist Patrick DeCoste as they tour and discuss 13 Moons and a Canoe.
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