Upcoming Art Exhibitions
 

Paint by Numbers: Painters Eleven
September 11, 2010 to January 30, 2011

To open a year-long, changing display on the power of colour in Canadian art, this exhibition celebrates the achievements of the artists who formed Painters Eleven in the fall of 1953. These painters, the first to popularize abstraction in English Canada, liberated the elements of form and colour for successive generations of artists.

Sponsored by: MacTop Publishing, thielsengallery and the Cahen Archives

Bill Vazan: Arizona and L.A. Graffiti
September 25, 2010 to March 6, 2011

Internationally renowned for his Land Art creations, Bill Vazan has spent more than forty years investigating the human-cosmos relationship through his Land Art, sculpture, painting and photography. In true conceptual art fashion, Vazan eschewed the conventions of ‘good’ photography, opting instead for a more arbitrary and systematic approach. Photos were taken at regular intervals and informally (without regard for lighting, framing, etc.). Drawing attention to the act of making the photograph rather than its content, Vazan’s goal is to provide raw evidence of his transitory journeys.
 

Sara Graham: The London Series
September 25 to December 12
 
Graham’s work blurs the boundaries between art, architecture, urban design and geography exploring concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, materiality and intangibility, fact and fiction. The London Series, uses cartography as a starting point for the development of a body of work that analyses geographical perspectives about London, Ontario. Graham uses historical maps of London to interject a new narrative into the history of the city by displacing historical meaning. The series functions as a re-presentation of historical fact that offers a new outlook for a future that never was but might have been, for a present that might not appear to be what it is and a past that is filled with new possibilities. For Graham the map is an element of its own re-creation as new landscapes—geography and the cartography used to describe it is a matter of perspective. The London Series is part of an ongoing project entitled Citymovement, a multidisciplinary project that examines and documents how we shape and are shaped by systems through the development and presentation of product design objects and prototypes that explore the boundaries between art, design, urban form and architecture.

Peter Dykhuis: You are Here
October 2, 2010 to January 2, 1011
 
Dykhuis’s work includes satellite views of hurricane systems approaching the province. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Halifax since 1997 features paintings, drawings and installations from the past decade. Radar Paintings (1999-2003) show patterns of rain and cloud (derived from the Internet) moving across the middle of Nova Scotia, in a radial grid centred on the weather station at Halifax International Airport. Dykhuis’s map paintings are deeply implicated in the surveillance and mapping technologies of air travel, military defence, weather forecasting and outer space. They reflect our contemporary global anxieties, post 9-11, and local anxieties of Halifax, post-Hurricane Juan, in a world that is getting hotter both politically and environmentally. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the St. Mary’s University Art Gallery.

Experimental Geography
October 9, 2010 to January 2, 2011

Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites and memory. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geography is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task for the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism. This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This group exhibition featuring works by 19 international artists, is organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

What’s Lost and What Remains
October 16, 2010 to January 16, 2011

This exhibition features 22 works by Canadian artists whose sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs convey a sense of abandonment, silence and ruin. Are the works depictions of real places and states, or do they suggest someone’s uneasy memories?
Selected prints from Carl Zimmerman’s series Lost Hamilton Landmarks (1997) imagine near-deserted remnants of a seemingly colossal yet now fading architectural and cultural past. East Wing Mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetery, Power Plant, Mount Hamilton Hospital, and Wading Pool are photographs of the artist’s handmade dioramas that place his birth city’s built history on a level with ancient symbols of power such as Rome’s Pantheon and Colosseum. Fern Helfand’s Atomic Bomb Dome (1984) and Tony Scherman’s Ciao Gaia (2005) are unsettling in another, more obvious way, suggesting our potential destiny by depicting the utter destruction wrought by nuclear war.

Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier
October 16, 2010 to January 16, 2011

This exhibition explores the “Canadian frontier” as a site of myth production that stimulated multiple discourses, visual and textual, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on the vast territory now called Ontario, which formed Canada’s “western” frontier for much of this era.

Although the mythology of the Canadian frontier is often associated with representations of the rugged Canadian landscape by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, this exhibition takes an entirely novel perspective, interpreting Ontario’s history and visual culture through the lens of medievalism. It not only considers diverse forms of medievalism imported by European colonists, who transformed immense forests into landscapes punctuated by castles and neo-Gothic buildings, but also examines “medieval” Canada—the Native cultures that flourished in the Great Lakes region prior to 1550 CE. The exhibition explores how these wide-ranging “medievalisms” have played vital roles in shaping Canadian identity.

Mapping Medievalism draws on diverse cultural objects—medieval, Native, and colonial—as well as paintings by the Group of Seven and others. Its scope will be extended through concurrent exhibitions at the University of Western Ontario (the McIntosh Gallery and D. B. Weldon Library). For more information visit http://www.mappingmedievalism.ca

Museum London gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of the Malcove Collection, University of Toronto Art Centre; The McIntosh Gallery, University of Western Ontario; and the Museum of Ontario Archaeology.  The guest curator is Kathryn Brush, Professor of Art History at The University of Western Ontario, who has collaborated with 10 M.A. and Ph.D. students from the Faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences to prepare this exhibition. A publication containing a series of exploratory essays on Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier will be available.