Five arts shows to brighten up the final weeks of the winter season

The Globe and Mail

By: Kate Taylor

February 14, 2023

Original URL: Five arts shows to brighten up the final weeks of the winter season – The Globe and Mail

Artistic styles are creatures of fashion and in an era where art is intensely political and often documentary, it can be bracing to consider previous and opposing trends. For an exhibition entitled Hard Edge, the Vancouver Art Gallery is showing geometric abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s, those canvases of lines so clean they often required masking tape to paint them. From the VAG permanent collection, curator Richard Hill is assembling classics by Canadians including Jack Bush, Roy Kiyooka, Guido Molinari, Takao Tanabe and Joan Balzar as well as the American painter Frank Stella. Some of the works have never been shown since the VAG first acquired them. Opening March 4 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Invigorating and optimistic, the Wedge Foundation collection of Black photography assembled by Toronto dentist and art collector Kenneth Montague features classic images from the 20th and 21st centuries. As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (first a coffee table book; now a show opening soon at Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery) includes both photojournalism and art photography from the African diaspora in the Caribbean, North America and Britain. The images range from James Van Der Zee’s 1932 photo of a Harlem couple in raccoon coats and Vanley Burke’s 1970 photo of a British boy flying the Union Jack on his bike to more recent fine art by such prominent Americans as Rashid Johnson, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas. From Feb. 24 to May 13 at the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver.

Meryl McMaster The Grass Grows Deep 2022 Giclée Print 40” x 60”

Meryl McMaster (b. 1988), On the Edge of This Immensity, 2019, Digital Chromogenic Print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm, Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, © Meryl McMaster

To create her dramatic large-scale photographs, the Ottawa artist Meryl McMaster researches Indigenous history and family stories, builds elaborate garments, headdresses and props that draw on her mixed Cree-European heritage, and poses herself in the Saskatchewan landscapes from where her paternal relatives sprang. In this rich consideration of identity, references abound – to stories as well known as the residential schools or as personal as an ancestor who used to flatten pennies by leaving them on the railway track. In one image, McMaster is hidden behind a raven headdress and a Campbell tartan shawl as she rings a pair of school bells; in another, the artist, carrying a photograph of her Cree and Métis grandmothers, appears with a red line drawn down the middle of her face. Entitled Bloodline, the exhibition includes these recent photographs, as well as earlier work and two films, a new departure for McMaster. At the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont. to May 28.

In 2022, the artist Lydia Ourahmane made a 13-day trek by foot through Tassili n’Ajjer National Park in southeastern Algeria, accompanied by nine local guides, six artistic collaborators and technicians, and 20 donkeys to carry the gear. The result is a 47-minute wordless film that unveils the dramatic geology and mysterious rock art on a remote plateau in the Sahara desert. Much speculative material has been rewritten about the thousands of Neolithic drawings and engravings in Tassili, but this is not a documentary, rather a meditative walk through wind-carved canyons and prehistoric art galleries. Showing continuously at the Mercer Union in Toronto to April 15.

Maud Lewis (1903 – 1970) Three Black Cats oil on board 30.2 × 30.2 cm (11 7/8 × 11 7/8 in.) Collection of CFFI Ventures Inc. as collected by John Risley L2019.84.67

With its friendly cats and bright tulips, the art of Maud Lewis has a comforting solidity and deceptive simplicity. A full retrospective of the famed Nova Scotia folk artist, including numerous scenes of winter woods, farmers’ fields or boats at the wharf, examines how she developed her use of colour, form and composition. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario, the exhibition is now showing at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the provincial capital that was the furthest Lewis had ever travelled from her home near Digby. Ongoing.

Media wishing to request an interview with exhibition artists, curators, or to obtain high-resolution images of the artworks are asked to contact Sam Cheung at scheung@mcmichael.com or 905.893.1121 ext. 2210.

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ABOUT THE MCMICHAEL CANADIAN ART COLLECTION 

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is an agency of the Government of Ontario and acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries, and the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation. It is the only major museum in the country devoted exclusively to Canadian art. In addition to touring exhibitions, the McMichael houses a permanent collection of more than 6,500 works by historic and contemporary Canadian artists, including Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, Indigenous artists and artists from many diasporic communities in Canada. The Gallery is located on 100 acres of forested land and hiking trails at 10365 Islington Avenue, Kleinburg, north of Major Mackenzie Drive in the City of Vaughan. For more information, please visit mcmichael.com. 

MEDIA CONTACTS

Sam Cheung
Media Relations and Communications Coordinator
McMichael Canadian Art Collection
905.893.1121 ext. 2210
scheung@mcmichael.com

Grace Johnstone
Director, Communications, Marketing and Sales
McMichael Canadian Art Collection
905-893-1121 x2265
gjohnstone@mcmichael.com