From Water to Water: A Land Acknowledgment

For thousands of years, the Toronto Carrying Place Trail connected the Great Lakes with Georgian Bay and beyond — a network of waterways and portage routes that shaped movement, trade, culture and settlement across the land we now call home. From Water to Water: A Land Acknowledgment traces that history through new drawings, watercolours, photographs, collaborative works and a new mural by Anishinaabe artist and scholar Bonnie Devine and Canadian photographer Robert Burley.

Through years of shared research, mapping, storytelling and artistic practice, Devine and Burley follow the Trail across the landscape, asking what these ancient routes can tell us about the places we live in today — and what has been obscured over time. Their works invite audiences to look again at familiar ground, foregrounding Indigenous histories, ecological interconnectedness and the enduring significance of water as both a physical and a cultural force.

The exhibition is presented at Evergreen Brick Works — a former industrial site reclaimed by nature and community, situated along the Trail’s own path, and connected by that same Trail to the McMichael’s home in Kleinburg. It is also presented as a Parallel Project of the Toronto Biennial of Art. The project deepens a longstanding relationship between the McMichael and Devine, which began with her research into the Trail and the creation of the site-specific mural From Water to Water: A Way Through the Trees, installed at the McMichael in 2021.

A companion publication, to be released in November 2026, features an essay and new artworks by Devine alongside Burley’s photographs of the Trail as it can be experienced today.

From Water to Water: A Land Acknowledgment is presented by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in partnership with Evergreen Brick Works.