October 9 to January 8, 2012

Ed Pien: DREAMSCAPE

Gallery Stratford is pleased to present recent drawings, paper-cuts and site-specific work by internationally-renowned artist Ed Pien. Inspired by the world of literature, the artist explores the convergence of history, beliefs and mythology from diverse cultures. Pien’s work celebrates enchantment and imagination, and the created variations in depth of field hint at a cinematic experience.

Gallery Stratford thanks The Estate of Helen Sinclair

The artist acknowledges the support of Axenéo7, Birch Libralato, Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Galerie Maurits van de Laar, the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Council for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, Johannes Zits, Joel Thomson, Nicole Vogelzang and Gallery Stratford.

Special thanks to Applause Audio and XXVIII

Glen Crumback: LOST AND FOUND

Stratford artist Glen Crumback has been refining his drawing and printing techniques over the last decade. Influenced by his background in illustration, Crumback incorporates original and found imagery from pop culture, politics and biology into collages. The selected works in the exhibition are precisely-made yet ambiguous, as the artist invites the viewers to formulate their own interpretations of the drawings and silk-screens.

June 12 to October 2, 2011

Ambiguous Geographies: Unearthing the Work of Tony Urquhart
Curated by Kirsten Greer & Joyce Millar, Organized by the Stewart Hall Art Gallery

Discover the breadth of practice and the depth of vision of one of Canada's most important contemporary artists through his sculptures, works on paper, paintings, and photographs. The exhibition explores the symbolic power of landscapes and geography and a "sense of place" central to Tony Urquhart's work for over 40 years.

About the Artist: Tony Urquhart is one of Canada's leading contemporary artists. His paintings, drawings, and unique box sculptures have received major recognition at home and abroad. His work is featured in many important private and public collections (including New York's Museum of Modern Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England; the Hirshhorn Collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, France; and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.). He was one of the founders of CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation) that successfully established a fee structure for public museum and gallery exhibitions of contemporary artists. Urquhart was named to the Order of Canada in 1995, and received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts with Kim Ondaatje in 2009. Urquhart resided in Stratford Ontario between 1999-2009.


Perth Huron Exhibition
2011 Juror: Robert Achtemichuk

Exhibition Sponsor:

The exhibition celebrates the talents of emerging and established artists working in all media. Juried by a different curator or gallery administrator each year, the exhibition is rich in content and techniques currently explored by regional artists. The exhibition is part of the Gallery’s mandate to support the production and presentation of area artists.  Visitors are encouraged to vote for the annual People’s Choice Award.

About the Juror: Robert Achtemichuk graduated from the University of Manitoba and continued his studies both self-directed and through an apprenticeship in France, and took courses for his MFA from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City. He has exhibited his work at galleries across Canada and has led workshops at esteemed institutions including the Banff School of the Fine Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His teaching experiences in drawing and printmaking include the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Toronto (Sheridan Campus), and Open Studio. He has extensive museum and gallery experience and his advocacy roles include various committees and associations at the local, provincial and national level. He has been the Executive Director at Open Studio, Waterloo Regional Art Council and the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery. Achtemichuk is returning to his studio practice, with shows of recent paintings planned of the Homer Watson Gallery, the Glenhyst Art Gallery and Agnes Jamieson Art Gallery.

Robert Achtemichuk acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.

April 17 - June 5, 2011

ILLUSTRIOUS:
CONTEMPORARY ILLUSTRATIONS BY JACK DYLAN AND PETER RYAN

The exhibition presents recent art by two illustrators who grew up in Stratford and have since provided their talents to such publications as the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Globe and Mail. Explore the different styles and approach to illustration, and view the sketches and paintings which led to the finished product.





ART AT WORK:
COMMERCIAL ART FROM THE COLLECTION OF KEN NUTT

Examine the history of illustration through 30 drawings and paintings. This is a rare opportunity to view works from the Stratford artist’s collection, which includes sketches by Dean Cornwell and Robert Fawcett, stock certificate drawings and paintings created for books and magazines.

Read Ken Nutt's Essay.
Learn more about the works here.



SUZY LAKE: REDUCED PERFORMING: BLINKING AND BREATHING

The Gallery is pleased to present its newest acquisition to the permanent collection by one of Canada’s most important photographic and video artists. The life size portrait highlights the artist’s recent digital work involving a seven minute self scan.

January 23 – April 10, 2011

VIRGIL BURNETT: BETWEEN LINE AND FORM
Guest Curated by Cindy Hubert

LOST PLACES
Richard Gorman, Robert Sinclair, Doug Stone

Selected from the permanent collection, the works on view reveal the artists’ engagement with nature, aesthetics and mark making. The exhibition includes acrylic stain paintings, gestural ink and pencil drawings which are understated and evocative. By incorporating elements of minimalism and abstraction, the artists suggest the essence of the places captured and invite the viewers to provide their own interpretations of the landscapes.

October 3 to January 14, 2011

Ernest Daetwyler
life is but a dream

The Gallery is pleased to present interactive and site-specific works by Swiss-Canadian installation artist Ernest Daetwyler.

Employing new and established media, interactive projects, video as well as sculptural pieces, the exhibition is presented in all three exhibition spaces. The artist explores issues of time, memory, disembodiment and the current cultural state. For Daetwyler, this discourse has been expanding into an experience and interplay between tangible reality and ephemeral illusions.

The last line, "life is but a dream" in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat", a nursery rhyme and a popular children's song often sung as a round, inspired the exhibition title for the artist.

During the exhibition, a catalogue will be produced and launched, a survey covering a selection of the artist’s projects from 1998-2010 in Canada and abroad.

The multi-disciplinary projects, installations and interventions of Ernest Daetwyler are presented internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2009 Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Award for Visual Arts, Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Pro Helvetia, Switzerland and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, N.Y.
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Gallery Stratford thanks:



THE ESTATE OF HELEN SINCLAIR

Read more about Ernest Daetwyler's recent works in Sculpture Magazine.

Image: Ernest Daetwyler, Forest Cell Sph[air]es, International Forest Art Path, Darmstadt Germany, 2006. Image by the artist.

June 13 to September 26, 2010

PERTH HURON EXHIBITION
Sponsored by Insurance Central Limited
Juror: Mary Misner, Director of the Cambridge Galleries

The exhibition celebrates the talents of emerging and established artists working in all media.  Juried by a different curator or gallery administrator each year, the exhibition is rich in content and techniques currently explored by regional artists.  The PERTH HURON EXHIBITION has been part of the Gallery’s program for over 30 years, and is part of the Gallery’s mandate to support the production and presentation of area artists.

NATURAL HISTORY
Mircea Cantor, Trevor Gould, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Crystal Mowry, and Volker Seding
Guest Curator: Jennifer Rudder

NATURAL HISTORY presents works of contemporary art that revisit the history of the development of museums and zoos, and anthropological displays. Inspired by the theatrical scope of the dioramas and monumental animal displays, each artwork evokes a moment in the complex history of the captivity, collection and display. Trevor Gould's artworks take up the history of colonial pillage of animals through the work and practice of a past generation of artists and curators. Through layers of photographic manipulation, artist Joshua Jensen-Nagle succeeds in finding the life in a taxidermy polar bear, capturing one of the world's largest beasts at a time when the species is threatened by extinction. Crystal Mowry's critical examination of one life implicated in the racism at the base of the anthropological display is crucial to our understanding of that past. Volker Seding's rigorous photographic documentation haunts the exhibition with the abjection that was until recently, the zoo. Mircea Cantor's video confronts us with the separation over time of human from mammal and presents us with the possibility of imagining a renewed coexistence. The exhibition is produced by the University of Toronto.

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

WATER MARK
Guest Curated by Carla Garnet



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.

DROWNING OPHELIA
Guest Curated by Carla Garnet



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?

Read Guest Curator Carla Garnet's Essay here.

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.


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.

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.

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
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.

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
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.