Arthur Shilling at the Doris McCarthy Gallery
Arthur Shilling (1941–1986) painted the land as someone who knew it intimately. A member of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, Shilling lived much of his life on the Rama Reserve, on Lake Couchiching north of Lake Simcoe, often depicting his local landscape. Working in bold colour and thick, loose brush strokes, Shilling resisted easy classification within the prevailing norms of Indigenous art of his time. As the curator William Kingfisher writes in his essay for the McMichael’s Early Days catalogue, “Shilling followed his own visions, and was looking for something that would provide him with his own sense of freedom and a way to represent what it means to be Indigenous (and human) in today’s world.”
This fall, Shilling’s Waterfall Near North Rama—Near My Place, 1973, travels from the McMichael’s collection to Scarborough as part of Cartographies of Longing, a new exhibition curated by Sandy Saad-Smith at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough, on view through December 5, 2026.
The work reflects Shilling’s deep connection to the terrain of Rama First Nation. Through colour and expressive paint handling, he conveys a sense of being within the scene rather than observing it from a distance—suggesting dampness of the rocks, the rising mist of the waterfall, and the cool breeze moving through shadowy woods. Kingfisher explains that the work exemplifies themes Shilling would return to throughout his career, in particular “using paint to create movement; dark and light; and light coming from an object, or what Shilling called ‘spiritual abstraction.’”
Cartographies of Longing brings together artists whose practices draw on family histories, oral traditions, and archival fragments to map intergenerational relationships to land. In the exhibition, Shilling’s work is exhibited alongside a painting by his son Travis Shilling, giving the opportunity for visitors to see the land not as fixed geography but as a living archive shaped by memory, storytelling, migration, and lived experience.
Cartographies of Longing is on view at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough, through December 5, 2026.
Read more from Kingfisher’s essay on Shilling in the Early Days catalogue, available through Figure 1 Publishing, Vancouver.
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