Tom Thomson Art Gallery Exhibitions

A small exhibition showcasing highlights of the Gallery's Collection of Tom Thomson works.

Investigating the human connection between nature and the environment, Richard Watts’ Earth Etchings is a survey of key works produced over the past decade through interdisciplinary practices -large-scale sculpture, printmaking, collage, painting and performance.

Using non-traditional materials - latex and gauze - Watts covers rock faces, tree trunks, abandoned architecture, old wooden boats and canoes, forming a skin-like mold over the earth’s surfaces. He peels back a relief sculpture similar to a tapestry, full of natural remnant textures like soil, splinters and fibres that radiate when backlit. Through shaping, lighting and suspending these earth etchings at life-scale, the sculptures transcend the space, raising a divine impression of the Canadian landscape. Watts’ most recent “insect writing series” and “forest shells” installation speak to global climate change issues, concerns of deforestation, species migration and seasonal shifts.

Included are works that honour the Canadian canoe, and its integral history of transporting people through the land. These sculptures explore the relationship between permanence and decay, depicting relics that become conduits for the passage of time.

Earth Etchings is a visual journey unpacking our natural world, exposing connections between our urban and wilderness experiences, and more specifically, between us and nature.

For more infomation on work, please visit Richard Watts website.

Watts is represented by Liss Gallery, Toronto, ON.

Vehicles are all around us every day, getting us from one place to another and for the most part go unnoticed. In this exhibition curated from the Gallery’s Collection, the artist focuses on these mundane modes of transportation, as a source of inspiration. Whether viewer sees these images as nostalgia, or means of adventure or hastening an environmental catastrophe, the interpretation is up to us.