April 11 to June 6, 2010

BEING IN TIME
Celebrating the 138th Anniversary of the Ontario Society of Artists    

BEING IN TIME celebrates the 138th anniversary of the Ontario Society of Artists by taking up as its very theme the existence in Canada of the OSA, a uniquely durable artists society, which remains contemporary over time.
 
Literally brimming with images of figure and ground in a variety of media this 138th Annual OSA Members Exhibition celebrates the OSA’s constant work to provide opportunities for its membership, to work, exhibit, document, educate and reflect on the natural and man-made beauty found in this province and beyond by featuring contemporary abstracts and representations of nature and culture by 61 member artists, which are complimented by the inclusion of exemplary oil and pencil studies by past society members such as: A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Doris McCarthy.

Artists: Ona Alisauskas, Robert Amirault, Valerie Ashton, Nadia Bechirian-Tiseo, Peter Barelkowski, Andrea Bird, Lillian Michiko Blakey, Kelly Borgers, George Boyer, Carmel Brennan, Bruno Capolongo, Ray Cattell, Rita Choy-Ng, Susan Clark, Lynda Cunningham, Pat Dumas-Hudecki, Nancy De Boni, Elizabeth Elliott, Carole Edwards, Jean Eng, Pat Fairhead, Mary Ellen Farrow, Judith Finch, Maya Foltyn, Heather Grindley, Cathy Groulx, Diana Harding-Tucker, Janet Hendershot, Robin Hesse, Kate Hyde, Tara Imerson, Shahla Jamal, Laurin Jeffrey, Linda Kemp, Lila Lewis Irving, Mary Anne Ludlam, Sheila Roberts MacDonald, James MacDougall, Janice Mason Steeves, Vallery Mokrytzki, Robert Montgomery, Ryan Moon Song, Mary Ng, Audra Noble, Mary Pavey, Germinio Politi, Helena Pravda, George Raab, Alejandro Rabazo, Janet Read, Doreen Renner, Asher Sadeh, John Schweitzer, Christina Sealy, Gerald Sevier, Dragan Sekaric Shex, Johanna Skelly, Alice Teichert,  Gerd Untermann, Wynn Walters, and Yetvart Garbis Yaghdjian

Les Levine, J.C. Heywood, Otis Tamasauskas, and Harold Klunder

Viewed as an installation this selection of fifteen prints playfully reveals the double potential of images to operate both as abstract signs and as representational pictures encoded with history by showcasing Levine, Heywood, Tamasauskas and Klunder’s engagement with early 20th century collage strategies, colour, technique and the possibilities of pressing ink on paper. 

January 17 to April 4, 2010
Public Preview: Sunday, January 17, 2-4 pm

WATER MARK



Water is to the world what blood is to our bodies.
Leonardo Da Vinci c. 1513, found in "vetturale di natura" ("the vehicle of nature")

In WATER MARK, on view from January 17th to April 4th, 2010 at Gallery Stratford, Gerard Brender à Brandis, Brian Holden and Lucinda Jones explore the Grand River and the surrounding landscape using several different printmaking techniques, including wood block engraving, mono-print and serigraphy.

The three-person exhibition is formally organized around the appearance of ‘water’ in the natural world and its contemporary representation in print. WATER MARK showcases the framed fine art prints of Brender à Brandis, Holden and Jones, as well as each print maker’s source material.

WATER MARK demonstrates diverse approaches to creating and exhibiting prints in a museum context: Water: the Great Giver and the Great Taker-Away, a series of forty-five small black and white wood engravings by Brender à Brandis is installed in a salon style; Water in the Wilderness: Northwestern Ontario, a series comprised of twenty-four various print media editions by Holden, is showcased in grid-formation; while Jones’ 2009 suite of seventeen colourful mono-prints, entitled Experiencing Water, hangs linearly.

Together, Brender à Brandis, Holden and Jones’ source material includes a selection of quotations, sketchbooks, photographs, and digital clips as well as a variety of printing tools, printing screens, engraved wood blocks and metal plate surfaces. These documents and tools are presented in two display tables and on a small TV monitor stationed near by. The juxtaposition of source images with print equipment and finished edition prints illustrates the varying nature of fine art print processes, as well as illuminates the interrelationships and differentiation between the artists’ array of print making styles and conceptual content.

Locating water in the landscape as a source of imagery and conceptual inspiration can be traced to artists like Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 –1519), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and Japan's best-known artist, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). For instance, Leonardo’s fascination with water results in numerous illustrations of waves, currents and water falls as well as diagrams of machines for moving water and excavating earth to create canals to allow for its flow. Dürer's celebrated watercolor, Dream of a Deluge, shows the duality of water: its ability to give life and to take it away; while Hokusai is principally recognized for his woodblock print, The Breaking Wave Off Kanagawa, which depicts the impending threat of giant breaking waves above helpless boaters, while Mt. Fuji sits unmoved in the distance.

Like their antecedents, Brender à Brandis, Holden and Jones image water both as presence and representation using a range of historic and contemporary print making techniques.

Stratford based artist Brender à Brandis is currently finishing an edition of books on the Grand River. The master printmaker, wood engraver, typesetter, bookbinder and poet, was born in the Netherlands. The artist came to Canada with his family in 1947. After living in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, the Brandises settled in Ontario, where Gerard attended McMaster University and achieved a degree in Fine Arts and Art History. The writer, Marianne Brandis links her brother’s practice of book making and engraving to traditions dating back to mediaeval scribes and the Gutenberg Press. She explains that it is Brender à Brandis’ graphic reference to nature that connects the lyricism found his work to that found in the work of his Art Nouveau precursors, William Morris, Charles Ricketts, and Charles Shannon.

Brender à Brandis’ work Water: the Great Giver and the Great Taker-Away, presented here derives from a series of images of the Grand River. While working on this suite of woodblock engravings Brender à Brandis realized how often he had depicted the transparent substance in prints over the years, and that water signified something sacred and precious to him.

His handmade books and engravings are represented in several important public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, the Hamilton Art Gallery, the Confederation Art Centre just to name a few. He has illustrated a number of his sister's historical novels, created books on Cape Cod, the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, as well as the musical instruments mentioned by Shakespeare and much more.

Brender à Brandis himself explains that his fellow Thunder Bay based artist Holden creates strong images of water in which the animal or insect plays an essential role, for instance, in one print, “the image of a water strider says so much about water -- its refection is the core of the piece, and the notion of "walking on water" has powerful mythical qualities.”

Holden’s connection to water results from the artist having lived the majority of his life along the shores of Lake Superior, the largest body of fresh water in the world. Holden offers up his experience of these remote wilderness waters by extending his vision to include the practice of documenting his trips into the bush using both still and video cameras, and follows by translating these images through to the application of ink on paper. Holden’s series Water in the Wilderness: Northwestern Ontario comes from his fascination not only with landscape, which is a prominent component in many of his images, but also from the structures and forms found in the many varieties of organic life. In this series Holden illustrates the important interconnectedness that exists between the landscape, living things, and the element of water.

Active as a visual artist for over thirty years within the Thunder Bay Arts Community, Holden also gives instruction in the visual arts through Community Arts and Heritage programming and through the Ontario Arts Council Artist in Education program. His work has been regularly presented in exhibitions at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the Definitively Superior Gallery, the Lakehead Visual Arts, the Ottawa School of Art, and the St. Joseph’s Heritage Centre.

Jones is an accomplished printmaker with expertise in various printmaking media techniques including: Etching, Collagraph, Woodcut and Linocut. She holds a Fine Arts Degree from the University of Western Ontario. Consequent to her degree she continued to study art at Concordia University where she took printmaking for 2 years with a focus on Etching, Relief Processes and Lithography, while also working in the Photographs Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Her art practice is rooted in depicting the natural world. She seeks to capture nature, first with her digital camera, and second through the abstract use of elements found in her photographic images, such as line form and colour. However, rather than reproducing the photographic, Jones’ suite of mono-prints visually work to create a sense of what lies beneath the surface of moving water by relying on repeated abstract and arabesque applications of fanciful plant like patterns and undulating forms. In Experiencing Water, the artist’s approach to evoking underwater scenes viewed during aquatic passage recalls abstract art, where repeated patterns and forms constitute an infinite pattern that extends beyond the visible material world.

Inspired by the work of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the first artists to create a purely abstract painting in 1910, and Helen Frankenthaler, whose paintings show spontaneous and direct nonfigurative gestures and forms, Jones takes up the abstract expressionist approach to portraying the emotional and spiritual aspects of nature as pure form in her print based works. Jones explains that, “What interests me as a printmaker and non-representational artist is not an image of water's surface image but its internal aspects, its weight, its energy and its movement within itself. My main focus is to manifest the energy of life, which is constantly moving and changing. My intent with this body of work is to draw the viewer into a world within the beauty and movement of water.”

The veteran printmaker opened 'Lucinda Jones Printmaking' in 1991 at the Riverworks Building in St. Jacobs, Ontario where from 1991 to 1996 she demonstrated printmaking techniques to the public and sold artwork to visitors from all over the world. During this period, Jones has also offered printmaking courses to adults as well as workshops for kids in schools through the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Working in Stratford since 1997, the artist took up residency in town in 2005 and now maintains a studio in her home.

Carla Garnet, Guest Curator

DROWNING OPHELIA



Poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment, Without the which we are pictures,
or mere beasts
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Act IV Scene V, Line 48

DROWNING OPHELIA, on view from January 17 - April 4, 2010 at Gallery Stratford, delves into the timely and timeless allegory of Ophelia’s loss of judgment and her subsequent watery demise in an exhibition of new media, video, photography, painting, and sculptural works by Janet Bellotto, John Dickson, Janieta Eyre, Sue Lloyd, Paulette Phillips, Mélanie Rocan, and Sharon Switzer.

The group show poses several questions such as: How do artists tell stories in their work? How does contemporary art reflect and reveal narrative traditions? How does the art of today record and describe the world around us? And must ‘the real’ be fictionalized in order to be thought?

Concern for the state of the environment is often considered a modern phenomenon; however, even a cursory look through literature reveals both fear and fascination with water. Poets love water, particularly its transitory nature. They recall Heraclitus, the Presocratic philosopher’s proverb: “You can never bathe in the same river twice,” or the legend of Atlantis, first mythologized in Plato's dialogues. Of course, there is also Noah’s Ark and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Ophelia senses her prince abandoning her to a watery grave...

Images of water, sanitized and spectacularized, play a prominent and recurrent role in art as in business and politics. This is not surprising, given the essential place of water in life itself. Water is understood as mutable, sublime, sustaining, and destructive. Throughout time water has served as a representation of birth, death, placidity and violence. Water also transports the hero to his great adventures and carries him home. Water holds the promise of freedom, its surfaces inviting, and its depths mysterious.

DROWNING OPHELIA probes our watery relationship with nature by alluding to literature as a sea of dreams and fears, desire for meaning, justice, and pursuit of beauty and reveals contemporary art practice as a fictional stream to be investigated for cogent environmental reflection upon notions of sustainability.

Janet Bellotto’s 2004 five-minute video loop Torrential Drift features moving imagery taken from a gondola-ride during the early morning hours in Venice. In this work, the artist captures the reflections of the surrounding architecture while passing through the canal. It is interesting to see this fluid city as a reflection, the image acting as a premonition of Venice’s potential drowning due to global-warming. In other words, we see the city already drowned.

In another series entitled Diluvian Lure the artist optically merges imagery from Pre-Raphaelite paintings, sea anemone and Italian landscapes. The central Lenticular photograph restages John Everett Millais’ well-known 1852 Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia, which pictures Shakespeare’s drowning personae floating down river, her hair loosen in the stream; a necklace of violets still around her neck and an unfastened bouquet of many different flowers drifting away from her open hands.

From Charlotte Bronte to Leonard Cohen, writers engage water for its ability to both recoup and drown and as a fluid symbolic presence animating our imagination and connecting to our ever changing, and often-conflicting, emotions.

The stuff of nightmares, myths, and fairytales are performed in Janieta Eyre’s 1995 photograph Rehearsal #23, in which the artist stages herself as Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, “Lying, robed in snowy white/That loosely flew to left and right-/The leaves upon her falling light-/Thro the noises of the night/She floated down to Camelot.” Alluding both to classical literature and the Greek custom of burying deceased unmarried women as brides of Christ, Eyre depicts a woman suspended between life and death. Dreaming or still unborn, there is a sense in this image both of peace and anxiety that lies floating on the water.

Sue Lloyd’s 2001 works Float, Night Storm, Twilight and Tangled show a world impossibly split in two. The women in the top portions of her large digitally produced, photographs image women out on floating boats, searching with lanterns, and staring down into the depths. The bottom part of these new media prints depicts women swimming deep under water, literally separated from the top half of the work: metaphorically separated the others above, by time, space, and the physical constraints of the image. Deliberately constructed, each image is a compression of time and place, spanning years and continents. They are Canadian landscapes, but also places everywhere and nowhere.

‘Fictionality’ is fore-grounded in Lloyd’s backlit 2002 digitals titled Flood, Swamp, and Swimmers… The Aristotelian dividing line between reality and fiction is highlighted by the artist’s refusal to have her new media water-soaked photo-based works line up or match. In-as-much Lloyd evokes both the pastoral tradition of picturing the land as a generous and fertile Mother Earth (providing us with rest, diversion and solace) while activating the other equally primal understanding of the earth as chaos and death. For Lloyd, both views of Nature and Mother Earth are in play at once.

Temporality, memory, and loss weave through Paulette Phillip’s 2002 Floating House video projection with 5.1 surround sound, shot on 16mm film and transferred to DVD, as does the very contemporary fear of being drowned just as Atlantis was. The conceptual artist’s work broadcasts a spectral vision of a maritime house adrift out on the Atlantic Ocean as the force of the sea pulls it under. Paulette explains that her work questions the implied stability of structures like “human nature,” knowledge, and architecture and how over time these structures are contested, disappear or get reclaimed by nature. She writes, “My interest in the psycho/socio nature of phenomena − how and why things appear − is guided by research into histories where the romantic oscillates with the scientific.”

Connecting the aesthetic to the political John Dickson’s works Franklin Expedition, Oil Spill, Leviathan, Sinking Ship and Cyclone are all made using found components such as wine-bottles, water, cork, and magnets and in the case of Cyclone a small motor. These five sculptures are excerpted from Dickson’s larger 1996/97 series, TEN SMALL NAUTICAL DISASTERS. The DISASTERS are based on the idea of the 'ship in the bottle', which is often associated with a tradition in folk art that expresses a naive nostalgia towards a life at sea. Describing the context of his work, John writes,

"In my bottles I use real water, sand and rocks, and carve small vessels out of cork that really float (or sink). Much of my effort has been directed towards the stabilization of very dynamic situations. The floating ships are held in a fixed position by magnets inset into the shelves that cradle the 1.5 litre wine bottles. Algae, mould growth, and condensation inside the bottles create little isolated eco-systems complete with weather conditions. In some cases I've chosen to inhibit this `natural' behavior while in others I have accepted it as thematically appropriate - Nature is the cause of most tragedies at sea. In my bottles humanity is not always the victim. One of the `DISASTERS' shows a listing tanker, the waters surface covered by a slick of black oil. Some of the scenes depicted are based on historical events – the Titanic and the Franklin Expedition – while others are not specific in their references - a ship sinking among icebergs. Others [sculptures] are pure fiction and fantasy – a sea monster, Hollywood under water. They all depict tragic situations that subvert the naive and cheerful character of the traditional 'ship in the bottle' by alluding to a darker and more complex relationship between humanity and nature.”

Blurring the borders between the logic of facts and the logic of fictions, Mélanie Rocan’s small 2009 oil paintings Crashing Waves #1, Crashing Waves #2, and Swimming #1, along with her large scale 2007 oil, Caught in Hula Hoops, are informed by what the artist describes as a “female consciousness,” and speak of the fragility of human beings and the reality of the subconscious state. In these paintings Mélanie captures a distressed beauty, which suggests an inner emotional condition of highs, lows, and psychological unease. These works linger between darkness and playfulness, depicting figures that are either part of their environment, pierced by their surroundings or forced to transform into the natural environment. Rocan’s imagery is haunted. It shows humanity intertwined with nature, suggesting that if one goes under - so does the other, because the artist paints them co-mingled as one and the same.

Comedy and the sublime share appearances in Sharon Switzer‘s digital video suite Falling From Grace presented on multiple plasma screens. This duo of new-media works present scrolling text and footage taken during a night drive in a car, a static shot of a lake at night lit by a searchlight and animated by a continual cascade of raindrops, bracketed by a third white-on-white screen that reveals reveries like, "I once won a free trip to heaven but I needed the cash so I sold it on eBay." Both the whimsical and sad aspects of the sublime are summoned in Switzer’s three-part work by way of compelling cloud and water imagery, jumbling up themes of memory, stillness, language, and storytelling, while obliquely dealing with subjects of loss, yearning and hope.
Perhaps the increasing frequency of wild fires, hurricanes, and floods along with their accompanying costs to the world’s forests, urban centers and shorelines, leads artists and their audiences to focus on ‘what happened’ and ‘what could happen’ more often.

Clearly, the string of major disasters throughout the world in the past decade is causing a new awareness of the significance of water.

If the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought, then Janet Bellotto, John Dickson, Janieta Eyre, Sue Lloyd, Paulette Phillips, Mélanie Rocan, and Sharon Switzer’s works on show in DROWNING OPHELIA bring this about by provoking us to think about our own stories, set in motion by water in our time by referring to the possibilities and potentialities found in art and literature.

Carla Garnet, Guest Curator

Gallery Stratford wishes to thank the following for their support of the exhibitions:
City of Stratford
Ontario Arts Coucil
CJCS 1240/107.7 Mix FM
Applause Audio
Erie Street B & B

October 4 to December 13, 2009
Mary Anne Barkhouse: Boreal Baroque

The Gallery is pleased to present artist Mary Anne Barkhouse in an exhibition entitled Boreal Baroque on view October 4th through December 13th.

Boreal Baroque is an examination of environmental concerns and indigenous culture through the juxtaposition of animal imagery against a range of historical and contemporary situations. The setting is inspired by Versailles, with the wild occupying the wildly opulent.

Mary Anne Barkhouse is a descendant of a long line of artists from the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl Nation of Alert Bay. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, Toronto and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Toronto. She works in various media such as sculpture, photography and jewellery. Her work can be found in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.

This exhibition is curated by Linda Jansma, and circulated by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

Also on View:
SPEAK FOR THE TREES: Prints from the Permanent Collection
Featuring works by acclaimed First Nations artists Carl Beam, Norval Morrisseau, Shirley Bear and Brian Marion, the exhibitions explores the relationship between humans, animals and the environment.

Carl Beam, Turle Diaries, 1992, photo-emulsion & acrylic
Carl Beam was born in West Bay (M’Chigeeng) on Manitoulin Island. His Ojibway heritage exerts a strong influence on his art work, though he largely eschews traditional style and imagery. His work is multi-dimensional; the juxtaposition of cultural, symbolic, and personal photo-documentation encourages an active involvement with the viewer in their interpretation. In Turtle Diary, Beam dissolves the distance between the preconceived distinguishable conceptions of the past and the present in order to facilitate the understanding that culture is a flexible system of eco-dependent interrelations. Executed in the photo-emulsion on canvas method popularized by Robert Rauschenberg, Turtle Diary combines textual and visual images that appear incongruous on their own, but which together depict a correlation to the Ojibway creation myth.

Norval Morrisseau, Shaman, serigraph, 27/ 180
Born on Sandy Lake Reserve in Fort William, Ontario, Morrisseau is a renowned Canadian Contemporary artist whose work was instrumental in the progression of Aboriginal art. Drawing on his Anishnaabe heritage, his art is a visual translation of ancient myths and legends of the eastern woodlands previously passed down by the oral tradition. Morrisseau is the celebrated originator of the Woodland School of Art aesthetic, the pictographic style a revitalization of Ojibawy Midewiwin birch bark scroll painting. His striking and innovative characteristic style depicts images delineated in thick outlines and vivid colours, which provide a sense of organic movement and impart a powerful energy.

The artwork of Morrisseau depicts the legends of his people, the cultural and political tensions between native Canadian and European traditions, his existential struggles, and his deep spirituality and mysticism. The ideology of universal interconnectedness is a reoccurring theme in the artwork of Morrisseau—the depiction of the interrelations between humans, animals, and nature in both the spiritual and physical planes, in the context of the past, present or future, communicate his belief in a sense of interdependent oneness. The manner in which he denotes the images reinforces this principle: the close proximity of his subjects, often overlapping or placed directly on top of one another; the solid blocks of colour that fit together like puzzle pieces; or the use of a continuous line to connect one subject with the next, effectively fuses the individual elements of the composition into a single whole. Regarding the process of his work, Morrisseau states:

I transmit astral plane harmonies through my brushes into the physical plane. These otherworld colours are reflected in the alphabet of nature, a grammar in which the symbols are plants, animals, birds, fishes, earth and sky. I am merely a channel for the spirit to utilize, and it is needed by a spirit starved society.

His paintings challenge viewers to look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings into the realm of the spiritual world, and the power generated by traditional belief and wisdom.

Shirley Bear, Grandmothers/Grandfathers, 1991, ink on paper
Born on the First Nation Community of Tobique (Negootiook), Bear is a multimedia artist, writer, and Elder, whose work has played a decisive role in Aboriginal and women’s socio-cultural struggles. Symbolic, archetypal, and representative images of women are prominent in her work and challenge the silent status ascribed to women by patriarchal history. Paintings, prints, photographs and multimedia works reveal her continual investigation into the recovery of the essential feminine role in society. Bear studied art in New Brunswick, New Hampshire, Boston and Vancouver, and has served as Cultural Advisor to the British Columbia Institute of Technology, First Nations Education Advisor at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and Resident Elder for First Nations House of Learning at UBC.

Brian Marion, Untitled, acrylic on paper
Of Ojibway heritage, Marion was born in Kamsack, Saskatchewan. At the age of 15, Marion began a nine-year apprenticeship with celebrated Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau. Through his art work Marion perpetuates the artistic legacy of Morrisseau and his ideology of universal interconnectedness, and the bold aesthetic of the Woodland School. According to Morrisseau, throughout his apprenticeship Marion “has been able to get inspiration from his native spirituality and with the blessing of the Creator, add his own emotional and intuitive interpretations to produce beautiful art.” Acquiring knowledge and seeking inspiration from the spiritualism of the Ojibway culture as a basis for his compositions, and applying colour to forms derived, in part, from ancient pictographs, his art work is a vibrant interpretation and narrative of Canadian Aboriginal history.

Edward Burtynsky: Selections from the Collection
On View: June 7 - september 27, 2009

Gallery Stratford is pleased to present for the first time a selection of works from the collection by renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The selection is made from 39 works recently donated to the Gallery by the artist.

This significant donation brings the number of works in Gallery’s collection to more than 900. The Gallery Stratford Burtynsky collection includes a wide variety of large-scale work, spanning from 1985 to 2005 and covers his subjects of railway cuts, quarries, oil fields and refineries, highway overpasses and his most recent work of China. The photographs also cover a variety of other site locations, including Canada, the United States, and India.

Burtynsky is known as one of Canada's most respected photographers. His remarkable depictions of global industrial landscapes are in the collections of major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary film on Burtynsky in China, Manufactured Landscapes, has reached an even larger international audience.

Gallery Stratford was one of the first public galleries to present a solo exhibition of Mr. Burtynsky’s work over two decades ago. In the summer of 2009, the Gallery is pleased to be able to share with the Stratford and visiting audience a stunning collection of recent works by the artist.

Exhibition Sponsors:
Musagetes Fund at the Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation
Cleeve Horne Award given by the Ontario Society of Artists
Additional support provided by David & Jennifer Leaney

Perth Huron Exhibition
Featuring Works by Artists from the Two Counties
Click here to read the 2009 Juror Statement

For over 25 years, Gallery Stratford has presented the Perth Huron Exhibition to acknowledge the work of local artists. Open to artists from both counties, the work is juried by a local artist or art administrator each year. The result is an eclectic mix of works in all media representing a wealth of concepts and subjects.

In 2009, the Gallery was pleased to receive 95 submissions.

About the Juror: Rhona Wenger is a respected director, curator and writer from the Hamilton area. She is currently the Director and Curator of the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. She was previously the Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of Northumberland in Cobourg. She has worked at The Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound as Assistant Curator/Registrar in addition to the Art Gallery of Peterborough. Ms. Wenger studied Art History and Classical Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, receiving her B.A. Honours and her M.A. in Art History.

Exhibition Sponsor:
Insurance Central Limited

Artist Jenal Dolson uses organic formations and intimate structures in her paintings to create utopian environments. Her work examines the human form and its relationship to its immediate surroundings. Referencing medical text books, early animation and shapes found in nature and geology, the fragments of recollection and observation all combine in deeply ornamental but self-contained paintings. The paintings in this exhibition come from the heart of the Northern Green Mountains, a result of Dolson’s recent residency in 2008 in Vermont.

Gareth Lichty is a builder, a maker of things, but above all he is a sculptor. Lichty’s emergent practice has quickly risen to prominence through his astounding and mature use of banal and ubiquitous materials to render large-scale and elegant sculptural objects. These objects require physical strength and thousands of hours of sustained and careful labour. In the works included in It has a lot to do with a thought, Lichty’s reconfigurations make reference to the traditions of monumental sculpture while providing a wry critique of excess and the consumer world.

Sarah Kernohan thinks about geological processes, glaciation in particular, in the construction of her work. Using collage in the process allows her to build drawings that have multiple layers. In drawing, she explores the surface of small organic objects – pieces of bones, shells, fungi, plants, rocks, and branches. The detail found on these objects' surfaces bring to mind the surface of the earth through an airplane window. The large scale of the work has the power to invoke associations and powerful experiences.

Sarah Kernohan, 2009.

Gareth Lichty, 2009.

Jenal Dolson, Purple Mountain Hush, 2008.

Jenal Dolson recently completed a residency in Vermont and she has exhibited her work in Toronto, Guelph and Cambridge. She received her Honours BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, in 2007. She is currently working at Brock St. Studios, Toronto Ontario.

Sarah Kernohan has exhibited her work in Canada, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, she won the Best Drawing Award and Best Student Drawing Award (2007, 2008) at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. She currently lives and works in Kitchener, Ontario.

Gareth Lichty has exhibited in Europe, New Zealand and Canada. He studied Fine Arts at York University, Toronto and sculpture at Leeds University, England. Since 2005, Lichty works as the Director and Chair of Programming for CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener and Area). He lives and works in Kitchener, Ontario and is represented by Peak Gallery in Toronto, Ontario.

Monstrance – Glenn Elliott
The Mirror of Nature: Drawings and Paintings - Michael Karn

Gallery Stratford is pleased to present resident Stratford artists Glenn Elliott and Michael Karn in a pair of contemporary exhibitions that differ thematically, but share a historicized aesthetic. Elliott's dangerous, silver sculptures work well with Karn’s dark and highly polished still life paintings, emitting a saturated decadence reminiscent of academic baroque works.

Sculptor Glenn Elliott’s recent foray into the representation of vintage tattoo designs in three dimensions has produced remarkable results. Working with 1940s WWII American tattoo designs, Elliott utilizes found silverware and cutlery to turn images of the dagger, the rose, the heart, the snake and the skull into sculptural works with a religious cross-over. A self-described preacher's kid, Elliott has made a number of works formally based on the monstrance. This is the name of the vessel used in the Roman Catholic Church in which the host is housed for demonstration. Two of Elliott’s clockworks will also be shown. Originally from Texas, Glenn Elliott has made Stratford his home since the 1970s where he worked in the Properties Department of the Stratford Festival until his recent retirement. This will be Glenn’s first exhibition at Gallery Stratford in twenty years. For more information on the artist click here.

In his first exhibition at Gallery Stratford, artist Michael Karn will exhibit an exquisite collection of paintings and drawings depicting flowers, fruit, elaborate table settings and classic studies of plaster busts. The conventions of still life provide a framework for the artist for the exploration of the formal elements and interplay of foreground and background and light and shadow.  Many of the works are a result of his intensive program of study at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto.           

Fun & Games - Permanent Collection

This amusing exhibition comes from our permanent collection. A selection of whimsical sculptures, drawings and prints are included from a wide variety of artists like regionalist, London painter Greg Cunroe, sculptor John Ivor Smith and Stratford's own Ken Nutt and Glenn Elliott.

Crystal Mowry, The Falls & Jen Hutton, Palindromes
October 10 - December 14


Incorporating the numerous snapshots of Niagara Falls found on the free image-sharing site Flickr and inspired by mass-amusements such as Panoramas that were popularized in the 19th century, Mowry hopes to confuse or re-articulate relations between discovery and the individual traveler. While there is nothing particularly remarkable about Niagara Falls photos found on Flickr, Mowry is interested in how the scale of the falls defies the convention of using human figures as an indicator of scale in photographs. The cataract (waterfall) acts as a screen, or a backdrop that is a stand-in for an actual site. The falls, like the hypothetical crowd they depict, are incapable of being the same landscape twice. With her drawings of posed groups of people on polystyrene, Mowry hopes to create a space in which we might imagine ourselves shrunken, able to wander its landscape, and uncover its artifice.

Crystal Mowry has shown across Canada at the Anna Leonowens Art Gallery in Halifax, Stride in Calgary, at Art Metropole, the Doris McCarthy Gallery and Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Open Space in Victoria and in the UK.

.In Palindromes, Jen Hutton explores the subjective perceptions of mirrored images and forms while visually straddling chaos and stasis, monumentality and ephemerality, and the atomic and the gigantic.

In April 2006, the artist observed and documented a strange ice formation in her hometown of St. Marys, Ontario.  Using these snapshots as a point of departure, the exhibition presents two new large-scale installations: a sprawling topography made of paper, and a wall-based pushpin installation.  Alongside found objects, drawings and photographs, Palindromes creates uncanny formal and conceptual relationships between this incongruous land form and the works and writings of the late American post-Minimalist artist Robert Smithson. 

Jen Hutton has shown at Mercer Union, Sleepwalker Projects, Art Metropole and David Mirvish Books on Art in Toronto, at The Other Gallery in Banff and at eyelevel gallery in Halifax.

Shakespeare in the Collection
March 30th - September 28th

An exceptional exhibition of works drawn from its permanent collection, providing an overview of book illustrations of scenes and characters from Shakespeare's plays. Included were theatre design sketches that emphasized the changing interpretations of the plays over the last 50 years, as well as the relationships between illustrations and dramatic text. The works have been chosen to represent the repertoire of the 2008 season of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Drawings and sketches by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Desmond Heeley, Robert Prévost, Sue Le Page and Brian Jackson were created for earlier productions at the Stratford Festival of Canada. The works were donated by Floyd S. Chalmers to Rothman’s Gallery (now Gallery Stratford) in the 1960s and 70s.  As such they formed part of the Floyd S. Chalmers Collection.

Perhaps the most intriguing work was the small oval portrait of William Shakespeare himself. This work was purchased in London by Floyd S. Chalmers and donated to the Rothman’s Gallery. The painting on board is a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, and is likely from the early 19th century. This is the first time the portrait has been shown at Gallery Stratford.

Exhibition sponsored by M. Joan Chalmers, O. Ont; C.C.

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
Paintings by Gary Evans and David Blatherwick
March 30th - September 28th

This exhibition featured recent paintings by Gary Evans of Alliston, Ontario and David Blatherwick who lives and works in both Montréal and Windsor, Ontario.

David Blatherwick has pursued non-representational painting for more than a decade. The often cartoon-like nature of his organic imagery is intentional, as is his choice of eye catching colours. Using the human body as a reference, Blatherwick intends the paintings to serve as a point of departure for thought, to remind us of our fragile nature and eventual mortality.

As with Blatherwick, Gary Evans resists the urge to abstract his imagery beyond the point of recognition. Evans’ landscapes are those of a suburban developed commercialism. Brightly coloured, often playful, the building shapes spin and dazzle, appealing to our sense of instant gratification as consumers. Evans has been creating paintings composed of organic and architectural shapes for several years. Lately he has focused on gathering the shapes into a compressed group to become a generator of energy, his spinning objects and psychedelic colours creating a gravitational pull that splits your initial gaze into component parts, and when absorbed, reconstructs the elements into a whole

March 30th to May 18, 2008

Small is Good

This exhibition of small works by artists will declare the undeniably large talent of this group. For the past two years, Gallery Stratford has dedicated itself to the presentation of work by Stratford's many artists. In Small is Good, the work of ten accomplished painters, printmakers and graphic artists will be showcased. The work of Gerard Brender à Brandis, Dorothy Byrne-Jones, Jeremiah Courtney, Pauline Hall, Janet Hill, Judith Horner, Teddy Payne, Cynthia Venables and Leslie Watts of Stratford plus drawings by Sarah Hunter of Toronto will be featured.

Heather Goodchild:
The Path of Anna Ward Brouse

In her latest installation at Gallery Stratford, Toronto artist Heather Goodchild provides a visual narrative that follows the inspiration of the founder of a fictional secret society. Anna Ward Brouse is a paragon of truth, beauty and suffragette revelation and her vision channels the rituals and symbolism of Freemasonry, Girl Guides, and childhood games. Goodchild's textile stations and portraits evoke feelings of reverence, apprehension, and the strange comfort that accompany all ceremonies of passage. Goodchild's skilled craft and facility with all things textile, creates folk images of fictional heroines for those whose histories have been forgotten.

January 13 ~ March 23, 2008

Alan Johnson: Uncommon Views

Alan Johnson has been painting out of doors in Stratford since 1987. He chooses his location based on the combination of available shade and good light on the vista, often in out of the way places that are off the beaten track.
 
While Johnson’s bucolic views of the Avon River and the bridges of Stratford are delightful, many of his strongest paintings are those of the Cooper Site – the former CNR steam locomotive repair yards (cover image). The appeal of a painting with sunlight falling upon a rusted metal door in an abandoned building, or the mist rising off the water at dawn, are equally strong for Johnson. These watercolours function as a kind of visual diary, recording weather conditions, light and hidden views of Stratford.  

Margaret Pryde: Impressions

Gallery Stratford presents a solo exhibition of recent works by Stratford artist, Margaret Pryde. Her sculptural installations invite the viewer to interact with her objects on both visual and physical levels and to appreciate them for their simplicity, adaptability and their role in our history.

The installation Etiquette, 2006 (left), explores gender roles including social etiquette in relation to dining. The work, incorporating objects such as chairs, tables and dishes won the People’s Choice Award in the Perth Huron juried exhibition in 2006.

Pryde’s great facility with wood is evident in her many works, often breathing new life into reclaimed building materials and changing their purpose from industrial to conceptual.  In a series of wall mounted sculptures, hundreds of wooden pegs reflect the shape of various body parts, reading like landscapes created by the displacement of mass by the body’s weight against the mobile pegs.

Also on View: Cameras Alive @ 45

2008 is the 45th anniversary year of the Stratford Camera Club. To celebrate, the Club is pleased to present a juried print exhibition at Gallery Stratford with works by 20 Ontario photographers.  Sixty-three works were selected in the categories of Anything Goes, Photo Journalism (black and white only), and Close Up.  Awards from the Jurors will be presented at the opening on January 13th.  For more information, please visit www.stratfordcameraclub.ca.

Jane Buyers: Images for Words/Memory of Things

On view October 14 to December 10, 2007

Referencing the physical, intellectual and metaphorical associations of the book, Buyers's extraordinary works encourage viewers to become readers of images instead of text. The exhibition includes prints, drawings, and porcelain and stoneware sculptures. The artist's delicate ceramic botanical "illustrations" and prints leap off the page from the open books, and pull us into their tangled vegetation with colourful flowers and curling leaves. The resulting experience is more akin to a walk in the woods than reading.

Drawing to Learn: Works from the Collection of Ken Nutt

On view October 14 to December 16, 2007
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 14, 2-4 pm

Drawing to Learn: Works from the Collection of Ken Nutt. Untitled Portrait of a Girl, 1897. Charcoal and chalk on paper. Signed H.P. Stevens. Collection: Ken Nutt

Stratford artist and illustrator Ken Nutt exhibits 68 life drawings from his impressive collection. Nutt started his collection by accident while browsing through a bin at an antique show. Numerous drawings in the collection have been bought at antique stores and more recently online. Many of the works are by little-known or unknown artists, some as assignments in American art schools at the turn of the last century. These drawings come up for sale as they are found in attics or dispersed by relatives. All of the works in the exhibition were done when the medium of drawing was an investigative tool, exploring more simple phenomena, like how a cloth folds. Image: Untitled portrait of a girl, 1897, charcoal and white chalk on toned paper, 24" x 19". Signed H.P. Stevens, the Cleveland School of Art. Photo by Terry Manzo.

2007 LAWSON KILLER PERTH-HURON JURIED EXHIBITION

On view October 14 to December 10, 2007
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 14, 2-4 pm

Each year Gallery Stratford and Lawson Killer Insurance Inc. presents the Juried Exhibition to support the work of artists from Perth and Huron counties. The work is selected by a panel or artist each year. The result is an eclectic mix of works in all media representing a wealth of concepts and subjects. The Gallery is pleased to have artist Art Green as its juror for the 2007 exhibition.

May 27 - September 2, 2007

Shadows and Windy Places
Catherine Widgery with Sanjeev Shankar

Gallery Stratford presents a solo exhibition featuring three new multi-media installations by renowned artist Catherine Widgery. Widgery's slowed-down plays of light, held for a second on film, focus our attention on the experience of light, reflection and illumination. The installations include: Shadow of Time, Liquid Light, and Wind Prayers.

Shadow of Time reveals the passage of time through shadows and reflections.

Shot over a 24 hour period at the edge of a pond in New Delhi, wind and light play over the surface and into the depths of the water. Human sounds mingle with bird calls, rustling leaves, insects and croaking frogs. The world continues busily along, oblivious to the mutable and eternal beauty so close by.

The 10 minute film captures the magic of unseen forces in the shifting patterns of light and sound throughout the day. It sees and breathes what we do not, creating an experience that transcends space, time and place.

Moments from half way around the world in India are brought into the gallery in Stratford. The viewer is inspired to slow down and meditate on the precious passing of each moment. Shadow of Time reveals the miracle of the present.

Image: Installation by Catherine Widgery and Sanjeev Shankar. Photographed by Sanjeev Shankar.

Liquid Light draws our attention to the magic of water revealed through light.

The copper kalash used here is a powerful element in Hindu temples, where it releases a drop of water at slow intervals onto a stone form called the shiv lingam, a symbol of procreation.

Here the drops fall into a transparent pool of water. The ripples from the drop spread out and return from the circular edge retracing its path, time sent backwards. As one walks below the floating liquid light, the energy of each drop ripples over ones body and is projected onto the floor.

The point where the drop touches the surface of the water and generates the ripple is mesmerizing as it reveals the gentle pulse of timeless forces.

Wind Prayers
In Guatemala people make kites from newspaper, colored wrapping paper, or bits of plastic bag and write the names of those they have lost onto the kites. When the kites soar in the sky, they let them go. It is a giving up to the spirit, to the wind.

In Wind Prayers, 100 kites fill the upper reaches of the Gallery, installed in a pattern to evoke the path of movement. Painted on the chiffon surface of each of the kites, are sky and clouds, through which one can see the kite's frame and the many kites installed above it. From the viewer's perspective, the line of kites follows a curving, dipping path, gradually decreasing in size. The installation provides windows to an imagined space, and the light of sky.

About Catherine Widgery
Catherine Widgery was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1953. She received a BA from Yale University in 1975, graduating cum laude with a special distinction in fine arts and winning the Walker Prize. She lived and worked in London, New York and Rome before moving to Montreal in 1979 and to Truro Massachusetts, in 1999. She has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe. Her exhibit Lost Sense at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1998 received international recognition. Her work appears in the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Musée du Québec and many other public and private collections. She has been awarded numerous grants for her work from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and has completed 28 major public sculpture commissions in the U.S. and Canada. A major installation in Denver was featured on the cover of Landscape Architecture magazine, and her Trail of Dreams, Trail of Ghosts in Santa Fe, New Mexico was selected as an outstanding public art work in 2003 by ”The Americans for the Arts.”

About the Collaborator
Sanjeev Shankar was born in Wellington, India in 1981; and currently resides in Bombay, India. Mr. Shankar is an architect, with a Masters in Design from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India. He was the Chief Conceptual Designer for "bauma 2007", an exhibition for the building and construction industry attended by 500,000 visitors. He is part of an ongoing project with the Technical University of Munich, and British artist Tony Reason to create an interactive social platform for Europe. Mr. Shankar has won numerous awards, being chosen as a finalist in the Jindal Stainless Steel Design Competition, and recipient of scholarships from the Technical University of Munich and Indian Air Force.

The video projections and installations to be shown at Gallery Stratford, build on Widgery’s large body of work in a wide range of media, from sculptural objects to public sculpture, to performance, video and film.

Michael Rae: Stratford @ Night: available light

February 18 - May 13, 2007

Michael Rae's backlit photographs of Stratford, Ontario show a side of this highly groomed town that tourists rarely see. In the nocturnal wanderings of this Stratford-born artist, underpasses, playgrounds and wooded areas take on a hallucinatory, Blair Witch aura by night. The imagery in Stratford@Night: available light provides a counterpoint to the idyllic views of Stratford used in tourism marketing campaigns. That is not to say these photographs are unsentimental; the artist has great fondness for the locales that only night owls and local teenagers know. They document a gothic side of Stratford that visitors rarely experience.

Michael Rae, Rocket and Full Moon, 2006, digital lamda print on duratrans

Rae's exhibition is linked with the large-scale photography, by two emerging Canadian artists Jesse Boles and Scott Conarroe; their works examine our relationship to the industrial, suburban and urban landscape:

Jesse Boles: Crude Landscapes

February 18 - May 13, 2007

Jesse Boles, Crude Landscape #123, 2005. C print

Jesse Boles’ series of nocturnal photographs Crude Landscapes documents the contemporary industrial landscape. Boles uses the language of the romantic landscape painters, while focusing on landscapes which are constructed entirely by humans. Photographs of the portlands of Toronto and Hamilton depict areas built from the ground up with massive landfill projects in Lake Ontario. The works are not intended as a response to the relationship between the untouched natural landscape and the influence of human civilization but rather examine the landscape as an exclusively human endeavor and the implications of that project.

Scott Conarroe: Londons...

February 18 - May 13, 2007

Scott Conarroe, Parked Bus #1, 2005. Colour photograph

Scott Conarroe's photographic series Londons... portrays the London in Ontario as a point where the notions of authenticity and replication come together. It consists of two parallel series, the latter copying the layout of the first. By making reproductions of a city that is itself a type of reproduction, then repeating and repeating the process again within a single frame, Conarroe attempts to unravel what little tension remains between modes of originality and the inauthentic. His large format colour photos explore the landscapes of Canadian living, with intensive place portraits of communities as disparate as Vancouver and Halifax and Red Lake, Ontario.

Curated by Jennifer Rudder

Robert E. Ihrig: a Retrospective

January 7 to February 11, 2007

Robert E. Ihrig, Battling Knights, oil on canvas, 1958. Collection of Jason McCann.

2007 marks the anniversary of when Gallery Stratford first opened on June 16, 1967 and Gallery Stratford is celebrating 40 years of presenting high calibre exhibitions of Canadian art. It is fitting then that the 40th year opened with a retrospective of works by the late Robert E. Ihrig (1931-2005). A great talent and huge influence on the cultural scene of Stratford, Ihrig served as the first Director of the Rothman's Gallery (now Gallery Stratford); as well as Director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

Ihrig was a prolific artists who always maintained a studio in Stratford. His work included painting, drawing, sculpting and photography. He taught art classes in Stratford and initiated the Open Studio life drawing sessions that continue to this day at Gallery Stratford. His works are in the permanent collection of Michigan State University and the Stratford Festival Theatre, as well as many private collections.

Organized by Karen McCabe

The Retrospective is sponsored by the Friends of Robert E. Ihrig.
An accompanying catalogue is available.

James MacDougall: Person to Person

November 5 to December 10, 2006

Gallery Stratford continues with its dedicated presentation of talented local artists in November with James MacDougall's exhibition of portraiture. The 51 accomplished works are a testament to the stature and ability of Stratford artists. Gallery Stratford is pleased to the first venue in Stratford to present MacDougall with a solo exhibition.

The solo show is an important event in the life of an artist. Artists get to experience their life's work hung all together and feel a renewed sense of accomplishment and pride in their work. James MacDougall is one of Stratford's many talented artists. His accomplished portraits reveal his strong relationship with the human face, revealing strength and tenderness, beauty and personality.

The exhibition includes works from 1973 to 2006 in a variety of media from oil, acrylic, watercolour, ink, to pencil. An eclectic mix of style over the decades shows the artist's explorations of classical and modern portraiture and figurative work.

James MacDougall, Maria, oil on canvas, 2005.	Tristan Eekhoff, Margaret Pryde, and Susan Benson

2006 Lawson Killer Perth Huron Juried Exhibition

This kind of Juried Exhibition is a mirror of a community, a particular place and a specific time in history. While contemporary art may be relevant in a global perspective, the practices seem to always remain tied to a region and a particular moment in time.

A regional exhibition can take many forms in order to present a comprehensive look at art production. A possibility is to develop a theme with a specific Call for Artists or show a large variety of works following a process of research and studio visits to artists. The Perth Huron Juried Exhibition is maintaining the tradition to curate the exhibition from the works submitted by applying artists. This practice allows the juror to see the actual work in the room it will be presented. The presence of the space and placing the artworks to see how they relate to each other influences the decision making process and facilitates developing a cohesive exhibition.

Who would have thought that an installation of Stratford's strongest emerging artist would relate to a new work of the most celebrated stage designer and painter in this city?

These large centerpieces and their visual interaction define to a large extent the character of this exhibition; Margie Pryde's installation With the Grace of Emily Post relating to Susan Benson's painting Ferry Ride, the triptych Three Roots and further Michelle Salter's Paradox of Motion #1.

Choosing from the submitted work only, this exhibition intends to present recent visual art in contemporary as well as traditional media created in the two counties. Rather than a manifestation of the newest or most innovative art trends, it is a presentation of a variety of styles, media and techniques and a glimpse of exciting visual art happening right here.

This exhibition lives from artists who literally bring in work from their studios and allow critical discourse and dialogue. Congratulations to the efforts and accomplishments of ALL artists in the community who continue to give meaning to our lives and invite us to see the world from a different point of view.

Ernest Daetwyler

Person to Person is generously supported by The K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation.

Micro/Macro: Robert Wiens & Melissa Doherty

September 10 to October 29

Fall at Gallery Stratford starts with exceptional exhibitions by two painters concerned with our disappearing forests.

The watercolour works by Robert Wiens are eloquent studies of true-to-scale tree trunks. His paintings of white pine and sugar maple reveal the beauty of a miniature landscape. Wiens's project began with a trip to the old growth forests of Temagami in 1996, and continues with series of arboreal works using deciduous trees found locally in the Picton area where he lives.

Melissa Doherty's paintings present a birds-eye view of Southwestern Ontario's forests and woodlots that have been carved and erased to make room for roadways and overpasses. For Doherty, contemporary landscape is no longer a vast frontier, but a limited material manipulated by humans. To her, each painting is like a still-life; a construction, or model.

The close-up and aerial views by Wiens and Doherty are different, but their works embrace the same interest in trees and urban sprawl.

A selection of works on paper from the Gallery's permanent collection that prominently feature trees is on view in Gallery 3.

Bright Particular Stars: The Theatre Portraits of Grant Macdonald (1909-1987)

May 28 to September 3, 2006

“…will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time…” (Hamlet II, ii)

Although largely unknown today, Canadian artist and illustrator Grant Macdonald shaped an international career during the mid-20th century as a theatre portraitist in New York, London, and later Stratford. The works exhibited here are selected from over five hundred housed at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, that form a vast panorama of theatrical greats who dominated the American, British and Canadian stages, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Born in Montreal in 1909 and raised in Galt, Ontario, Macdonald studied at the Ontario College of Art and the Art Students’ League, New York. By all accounts extremely personable, he quickly gravitated to the Broadway scene, befriending its actors and sketching portraits for newspapers, magazines, playbills and posters. A visit to England drew him into London’ theatre orbit, and over the next decade he alternated between both capitals, capturing their stage stars in many of their signature roles. His peripatetic life slowed after 1947 when he moved to Kingston to care for his father; the opening of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1953 brought him new commissions during the next decade.

Macdonald’s portraits – acutely observed, candid and often affectionately humorous – deftly evoke the personalities of both his sitters and the characters they played. Often quickly drawn – sometimes between acts – their appeal lies in their spontaneity, born of both the artist’s skill and his ties to many of his subjects. Through them, he affords us a glimpse of the sophistication, wit and style of a Golden Age of English-language theatre on two continents.

This exhibition is organized and circulated by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the McLean Foundation.

The Archives Project: The Photographs of Fred Ubelacker (1869-1943)

May 28 - September 3, 2006

Fred Ubelacker’s photographs document the everyday life of his family in Stratford at the turn of the nineteenth century. An overall sense of the leisurely life lived at that time is conveyed in his images of boating on the Avon River, babies in elaborate perambulators, exotic pets and reading on the Victorian veranda. His photographs of theatrical pageants and staged tableaus in the parlour, predate the evolution of this theatre town. The photographs here have been reprinted from more than 300 original glass plates that form part of the collection of the Stratford-Perth Archives.

A butcher by profession, Fred Ubelacker managed his father’s shop at 53 Market Place in downtown Stratford for forty-three years. The painted sign on the side of the building can still be seen from George St. and St. Patrick: “H. Ubelacker & Son, Fresh Meat, Established 1855.” One of a group of dedicated amateur photographers active in Stratford, he was a founder of the Stratford Camera Club in 1900, and was the club’s first president. The club continues to meet in 2006.

Fred and his wife Mary lived on Nelson Street with their four sons and one daughter, next door to his father and mother. The photographs serve as a record of the intersection of rural and urban life, when a home in downtown Stratford still kept chickens in the yard and small children were comfortable approaching a rooster the same size. Through details of clothing, children’s playthings, interiors, plumbing or the fact that the family read the Buffalo News, we gain a sense of life at that time. The strong, pastoral images of the Avon River suggest an idyllic coexistence with nature.

The photographs suggest that Fred Ubelacker saw the potential of photography as a means of artistic expression. His work encompasses a wide range of styles from straight documentary, to classic portraiture, to a more artistic or “pictorial” style. He was adventurous enough to try experimental photography. Utilizing the long exposure time required by the cameras of the time, Ubelacker was able to join himself in the frame.

Leisure activities took place out of doors and in Stratford, children played in the fields and in the river. They played checkers with their grandfather and read books. The Ubelacker children seem very well dressed, and whether that was required on photo shoot days, we can only guess. The photographs on display include the more spontaneous moments, such as climbing a toboggan hill or the boys playing their horns in the snow. The Romantic image of the little boy asleep on the log in the woods, recreates a fairy tale illustration. The still pose allowing a proper exposure, it is a remarkable image. Our initial concerns for the child’s well-being and safety reveal how much has changed in 100 years.

Produced in co-operation with the Stratford-Perth Archives.
Sponsored by Orr Insurance.
Photographs printed by Terry Manzo.

Thanks to Lutzen Riedstra and the staff of the Stratford-Perth Archives, Marian Doucette, Terry Manzo, Glenn Elliott, the Stratford-Perth Museum and to Ken Nutt for showing me the photos in the first place.

Reading Without Books: Chapter Four

November 19 – December 19, 2005

Designed to coincide with the Fifth Annual Stratford Book Festival, this exhibit showcased a collection of painting and mixed media works by three Canadian artists. Reid Diamond’s cereal box art, Alistair Magee’s prose-based paintings and Sylvia Ptak’s delicate fabric texts show that storytelling and narrative is central to the reading of works of art.

Reid Diamond (1958 – 2001) was an artist, musician and writer. Writing was central to Reid’s artistic output. He was a storyteller, a talent he incorporated into his visual art; creating installations that became the story, both physically and metaphorically. Gallery Stratford was pleased to show Reid Diamond’s thought provoking installation, Altered Flakes. This piece shows how words and the act of reading infiltrates our everyday lives – during the morning when, slouched over the kitchen table, holding a half-dipped spoon, chewing a mouth full of something crunch, we idly read the panels of a cereal box.

Alistair Magee is a Glaswegian painter, born in Scotland, who lives and works in Toronto. Magee’s work begins with fragments of found language written in longhand – private correspondence, grocery lists, legal and historical documents – these notes are then projected on canvases, meticulously traced and then washed over with rhythmic bleeding layers of thick acrylic paint. Magee’s works included in this exhibition are deeply rooted in history, inspired by deeds, wills, and early Canadian land treaties. While his paintings are painted in English, the words are buried – blurred by layers of paint or fragmented in their form. The handwriting in each piece tends to slant from the lower left to the upper right giving his body of work sameness; however, just as each of us writes differently, each painting differs in its message and the viewers’ ability to decipher letters or fragments of words.

Sylvia Ptak is a Toronto-based artist and educator whose artwork is inspired from old texts and documents; appearing as cloth pages hung as dreams of words previously read. Ptak writes with a pin, not a pen, picking away at the cloth to create a remarkable facsimile of manuscript pages.

Vimy and After: an exhibition of Drawings by Walter Seymour Allward

September 13 – November 13, 2005

Walter Seymour Allward (1875-1955) was the sculptor and architect of the renowned Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge in France. He completed only two other World War I memorial sculptures – The Stratford Memorial (1922) and The Peterborough Memorial (1929).

This exhibition, curated by Tony Urquhart, featured one hundred and twenty-two drawings from the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Queen’s University Archives and the collections of Allward’s grandson and great grandson.

Initiated by Gallery Stratford, this exhibition toured Ontario with stops at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston (May 1 – June 26, 2006);
Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (November 28, 2005 – January 29, 2006); Art Gallery of Peterborough, Peterborough (April 7 – May 14, 2006).

An accompanying catalogue is available.

Articles of War: Barbara Hunt + Allan Harding MacKay

September 13 – November 13, 2005

This exhibition featured striking artworks by two contemporary artists whose work revolves solely around issues of war and Canada’s role as peacekeepers in the world.

During a time when cameras can quickly capture thousands of images more readily than paintings, Allan Harding MacKay’s works remind us of why it remains important to send artists to record not only our nation’s victories and triumphs, but the emotions connected to warfare.

Allan Harding MacKay, of Kitchener, is an official Canadian war artist of the wars in Afghanistan and Somalia and has just been awarded the commission of the Veterans’ Memorial at Queen’s Park, Toronto. MacKay traveled to Somalia in 1993 to capture images of the Canadian Forces’ experiences in traditional sketches, paintings and with his video camera. MacKay’s nine works selected for this exhibition are dark, sombre mixed media works portraying Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan and Somalia. His gritty surfaces depict shadowy figures in wax, oil pastel and sand, evoking uncertainty in seeing or understanding the war-torn areas he visited.

Barbara Hunt is a Newfoundland fabric artist whose artwork gives voice to a woman’s mourning for the lost or damaged bodies of innocent young men, women and children suffered in wars.

Three of Hunt’s textile works were displayed in relation to MacKay’s works. Fifty of Hunt’s pink, hand-knitted landmines from Antipersonnel were displayed surrounded by her installation, Fodder, composed of hundreds of deconstructed army fatigues hanging lifelessly on the gallery walls like empty, savaged vessels. On a lone white wall, Incarnate, a single camouflage suit, outlined in bright pink chain stitch embroidery hung suspended.

These contemporary works, depicting war and Canada’s peacekeeping role, when viewed with Allward’s heroic drawings from World War I served as a jarring reminder of the continuation of extreme violence and war in the 21st century.

Lawren Harris: From Landscape into Abstraction

May 8 – September 4, 2005

Lawren Harris is a household name in Canada and his stark and cool paintings of mountains and lakes have achieved an iconic status in our national cultural imagery. In the summer of 2005, Gallery Stratford was pleased to participate in the province-wide celebration of the 85th anniversary of the Group of Seven’s first exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Eight paintings by Lawren Harris were on loan from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, including the stupendous Lake and Mountains, the centerpiece of this exhibition. Harris was convinced that art must express spiritual values as well as representing the visible world.

He traveled to the north shore of Lake Superior in 1921 and returned there for the next seven years, seeking to convey the spirit of the northern Canadian landscape. In his later work he moved away from landscape and representation into abstraction. In the selection of paintings included in Lawren Harris: From Landscape into Abstraction, the natural progression from the four monumental landscape paintings of Lake Superior, the Rocky Mountains and Baffin Island towards the four, stunning abstract paintings is made visible.

Encapsulated within Gallery Stratford’s exhibition was the dramatic revelation of an art historical shift in Canadian painting.