Current Exhibitions
Natalka Husar: Burden of Innocence
July 24 to September 26
With Burden of Innocence, Natalka Husar takes her lifelong obsession with
painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, into new territory and presents
three interwoven narratives in the form of a history play in three acts.
In Act 1, Husar paints her own image, masked and costumed, to address the
dependency between painter and subject, and the anachronistic limbo in which
painting currently lies. Act 2 deals with fictitious characters that include old
Soviet-style and new capitalist wheeler-dealer thugs who are put on trial not as
an accusation but as a record of the cultural and psychological damage that
Ukraine has sustained. Act 3 represents a banquet, in which the protagonists
from the first and second acts reunite in the canvas Looking at Art. Husar, cast
as her dual personae, plays the waiter in her examination of the artist’s role
and art’s responsibility vis à vis the social narrative.
The exhibition is the result of a curatorial collaboration between the Macdonald
Stewart Art Centre, the McMaster Museum of Art, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery and
the McKenzie Art Gallery. It is organized for circulation by the Macdonald
Stewart Art Centre. The London exhibition is sponsored by Ukrainian Community
Centre.
Krimiseries: Evidence, Narrative & the Forensic Imagination
June 26 to September 26
While the intensification of forensic detail in contemporary media has
dramatized a resurgence of conviction in the infallibility of science, popular
consciousness has simultaneously sustained a deepening skepticism of claims to
objective truth. Within this climate of the ambiguity of empirical evidence and
elusiveness of knowability, "crime-solving" has become a dominant cultural
trope. The attentiveness to the documentation of experience and the potential
for latent meaning has also been reflected in contemporary art. Krimiseries
introduces a series of installations by international artists that offer
ways of thinking about the nature of evidence, teasing open the space between
signifier and signified. The projects of RAQS Media Collective (Delhi, India),
Deimantas Narkevicius (Vilnius, Lithuania), Stih and Schnock (Berlin, Germany),
Mac Adams (New York, USA), and Susan Schuppli (London, Ontario) take as their
impetus a shared way of knowing, seeking to reconstruct contingent events using
fragmentary evidence. Each work suggests lingering questions, subtly transposing
the forensic imagination as methodology within creative practice.
Raqs Media Collective, 5 Pieces of Evidence, 2003,
video installation, Installation view: Venice Biennale.
Courtesy of the Artists
Patisserie Duchamp: puis-je fumer
June 26 to October 10
This installation on the topic of smoking, channelled through French-American
artist Marcel Duchamp, combines artifacts, drawing, photography and sculpture by
Vancouver-based artist Christos Dikeakos and in collaboration with others. The
objective is neither to celebrate nor demonize smoking, but to examine its
erotic and neurotic dimensions, and the broad social implications of a “habit”
that has become a topic of foreboding and the forbidden.
Christos Dikeakos, Puis-je fumer, 2008, graphite on
paper. Courtesy of the Artist
Brenda Joy Lem: Homage to the Heart
June 19 to September 19 Forum Gallery
Homage to the Heart begins with an oral history from the artist’s father and
aunt recounting childhood memories of growing up in a Chinese hand laundry
during the Depression. The exhibition consists of silkscreen prints, a small
installation with sound and three video projections.
The exhibition uses photographs selected from the artist’s family
collections as well as from archival sources to consider themes including
memory, trauma, spirituality and what Lem describes as “the enduring heart.”
Indeed, works in this exhibition point to the experience of life in a
rapidly changing Canada, featuring works entitled A Car in the New World,
The Globe Restaurant, My Father..., and How Can You Let Those Chinese Boys
Do Better Than You? Catalogue essayist and poet M. NourbeSe Adamu Philip
describes Lem’s use of both printmaking and photography as producing “a
fruitful tension.”
Brenda Joy Lem began her practice making collages from the packaging and
labels found on everyday Chinese-Canadian paraphernalia, a decision that
motivated her to confront and publicly comment on emotional connections to
the past, including the effects of racism, and inspire her for the future.
This exhibition is organized and circulated by the Robert McLaughlin
Gallery, Oshawa, in collaboration with the Varley Art Gallery of Markham.
Sponsored by the Chinese Canadian National Council, London
Chapter.
Kate Wilson: Botanical Model City
April 24 to September 19 Centre Gallery
Botanical Model City is a site-specific work created for Museum London’s Centre
Gallery by Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Kate Wilson.
Wilson’s works,
which often combine drawing and painting, are meticulously detailed yet
enigmatic in their use of cursive, architectural and botanical references. They
are expansive, sprawling entities. Critic Gary Michael Dault has described
her practice as embodying “urban recklessness, pop-chaos, hedonistic breakup and apocalyptic
meltdown.”
Botanical Model City is of an original composition developed through the use of
preliminary drawings and computer imaging and then executed by hand. Each of her
site-specific installations have their own evolution which are, as Wilson notes,
“drawn, scanned, projected, traced, scanned again, and printed and animated in
myriad ways.”
Wilson has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of awards from the
Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Recent exhibitions of her work were organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
(Buffalo), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris) and the Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria (Victoria).
Kate Wilson wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council,
the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
Kate Wilson, Study for Botanical Model City, (detail), 2010, acrylic and
ink on paper, 27 x 35cm, Courtesy of the Artist
Chisel and Gouge: The Graphic Work of Mackie Cryderman
April 17 to October 31, 2010
From the 1930s through the 1960s, London artist Mackie Cryderman participated
in exhibitions alongside such notable artists as A.J. Casson, Charles Comfort,
Paraskeva Clark, Adrien Hébert, Edwin Holgate, Yvonne McKague Housser and Kazuo
Nakamura. Juries selected her work for display with the Ontario Society of
Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy of Artists.
Cryderman’s enthusiasm for a number of art processes—printmaking, painting,
carving, metalwork, pottery and set design—profited more than just her own
creativity. Her work as head of the art department at the London Technical and
Commercial High School (now H.B. Beal Secondary School) benefitted generations
of London students, including the renowned artists Greg Curnoe, John Boyle and
Murray Favro. From 1927 to 1962, Cryderman developed and taught an arts
curriculum that gained prominence across the province and country.
Organized from Museum London’s collection, this exhibition surveys
Cryderman’s graphic works, for her greatest artistic achievements occurred as a
printmaker. Her bold use of line, sculpturesque form and expert composition
reveals the stylistic influences of David Milne, the Group of Seven and fellow
London artist Eva Bradshaw. Cryderman's subject matter included landscapes,
nautical views, “jaunts into the abstract,” and street scenes, including views
of London.
Mackie Cryderman, Untitled, (detail), undated, linoblock print on
paper Collection of Museum London, Gift of the Estate of Clifford Cryderman,
London, Ontario, 1995
A(l)lure of the Local
Until September 5, Lawson Gallery
This exhibition is drawn from the historical, modern and contemporary art
collection of Museum London and loans from contemporary artists. They are
integrated with objects from the material culture collection to weave
together a story of London, Ontario and its environs. The title is borrowed
from Lucy Lippard’s 1998 book Lure of the Local, which examined the impact
and importance of local knowledge. In the book, the American author and
curator argued that a true sense of place leads to the creation of a
community, “…which grounds the individual in a web of social, political and
historical relations [and] art appears as a tool for rediscovering the
wholeness within a multi-centred society.” But as artist and critic Douglas
Davis wrote in 1976, “Art is not life [but] it is an activity encircled by
life, upon which it depends.”
Featured in the exhibition are 19th century works by James Hamilton and
William Lees Judson; modern period, 20th century works by Edward Glen, Mary
Healey and Albert Templar; contemporary work by Ron Benner, Jack Chambers,
Clark McDougall and Gerard Pas; and loan works by Scott Conarroe and Sky
Glabush. In addition, Richard Storms has developed a site installation and
exhibition introduction for the Lawson Gallery stairwell, which highlights
the four “Londons” in the world against a “constellation array” of LED
lights.
Mary Healey, Forks of the Thames, c. 1920, watercolour on
paper, Collection of Museum London,
Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Evelyn Kelly Albright, London, Ontario, 1979
Arresting Images: Mug Shots from the OPP Museum
June 5 to September 12
The infamous mug-shot—that look into the face of the accused—has long been a
source of intrigue and curiosity.
This exhibition will explore criminality in the late 19th-century Ontario and
will feature historical portraits from the OPP Museum as well as an assortment
of artifacts from the
Museum London collection.
