Exhibitions - Art: Past

These images were submitted by the community for our one-day pop-up exhibition. These images document labour in the Forest City and are in conjunction with the current historical exhibition London Works: Labouring in the Forest City.

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Elementary and secondary school students in the Thames Valley District School Board and the London District Catholic School Board were recently invited to create artworks in response to the theme of work.

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This exhibition showcases over 30 pieces of wind-powered folk art from the collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

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Organized by curators Cassandra Getty and Toronto scholar Adam Lauder, this exhibition stages an encounter between historical and contemporary visions of environmental and social crisis. At the heart of this dialogue is 19th-century painter Joseph Légaré (1795-1855), a Quebec artist whose work challenges common-sense notions of landscape, time and adversity by re-engaging with scenes of calamity. Légaré’s striking disaster paintings, presented for the first time as a focus of a museum exhibition, set the stage for contemporary artists’ interventions within the imagery of catastrophe and activist calls-to-arms.

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A nod to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, this contemporary group exhibition examines scenarios, both real and imagined, that critique the present and foreshadow the future for our planet.

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Realignment features a variety of new sculptures by well-known London artist Bob Bozak. Each work is inspired by and underscores the importance of automobile culture in North American life. All reference the aesthetic concepts and social values surrounding cars, riffing on ideas of status, power and opulence.

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This exhibition surveys Adams’ 30-year career as an inventor of strange new worlds. An enthusiastic assembler of sculptures made from model parts, bikes, trucks, old appliances and equipment, Adams has exhibited throughout Canada and around the world. He has produced drawings and prints, small models, and huge sculptures that reenvision ideas of home, vehicles, and other machines gone humorously awry.

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Drawn from the Museum London vaults, this exhibition traces the long-held fascination Canadian artists have had with the sky and with weather. Produced by a range of historical, contemporary, and primarily regional artists, this collection of paintings, drawings and prints offers a compendium of nature in its myriad expressions. These views communicate the harshness of the Canadian climate, the wonder of the Northern Lights, and issues of time and cosmology.

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This exhibition showcases photographs by Vancouver-based painter Attila Richard Lukacs produced over the past 25 years as referents for paintings. It is the first comprehensive exhibition of his photography, offering a new look at this internationally acclaimed Canadian artist. Working with Lukacs’ inventory of over 10,000 images, fellow artist Michael Morris selected and assembled these works for exhibition.

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As the works in this exhibition Homeland reveal, over the last decade the practice of London-based artist Thelma Rosner has moved quite literally to new territory. While the play of pattern, derived from processes referencing everything from textiles to book illuminations, informed much of her past work, Rosner now focuses her practice on aspects of geographic place, culture, and notions of "home."

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This retrospective exhibition examines the career of celebrated artist, author and illustrator Arthur Heming (1870-1940). An avid northern explorer, his work helped to entrench perceptions of Canada as the "Great White North."

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In its art, drama, history, literature, and popular culture, notions of Canada have been intrinsically linked to notions of the north, but with the imminent threat of global warming and globalization, traditional realities have begun to melt away. In their place, a new 'idea of north' is beginning to emerge.

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Illustration in Canada began slowly, recording the geography and population of a fledgling country. As technologies improved, and as literacy grew, illustration flourished to meet a wide range of goals.

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Irene Avaalaaqiaq has enjoyed a distinguished thirty-year career as one of Canada’s most prominent Inuit artists and a leading member of the prolific artistic community of Baker Lake, Nunavut. A creator of distinctive drawings, prints, and sculpture, she is best known for her remarkable wall hangings, which reveal a rich tradition of shamanistic imagery. Avaalaaqiaq also brings a highly individualistic vision to her tapestries. Her world view, derived from an oral tradition, is expressed by manipulating bold shapes in bright, contrasting colours against a solid background.

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This installation by Toronto-based artist Janice Gurney features a series of 7 photographic panels arranged beneath a selection of works from the Museum's permanent collection. Gurney's panels, Credits and Credits (extended), feature the names of a network of actors that have become part of Gurney's working life as an artist in Canada for over thirty years. For this installation, Gurney included works by the artists in the collection of Museum London whose names are listed in Credits (extended). Some of these artists are closely connected with London: Greg Curnoe, Jamelie Hassan, Ron Benner, David Merritt, Patrick Mahon, Robert Fones and Arlene Stamp. Other artists in the collection are Andy Patton, Joanne Tod, Will Gorlitz, Micah Lexier, and Robert Flack. A larger network is thus formed, not only because of the connection these works have as parts of the Museum’s collection, but also as works made by artists who are connected to her.

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Danger and Aftermath is a salon-style installation of the latest photography by Larry Towell, a Bothwell-based photographer and the first Canadian member of the renowned cooperative Magnum Photos. Featured works from a number of series explore dire conflicts over issues of land, control and identity in Gaza, the West Bank, and in Lebanon. Towell's views of the 9/11 tragedy lead as well as more recent imagery of an embattled Afghanistan are also featured.

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Modern warfare came to Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of 1979. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, civil war piled disaster on top of calamity. Now the global war on terror continues in the country.

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Featuring the work of artists from London and across Canada, Front by Front explores issues the impact armed conflict has across society, and the changes or adaptations made by people in their daily lives in such an atmosphere.

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Through his monochromatic drawings, spare woodcut prints and figurative sculptures, Windsor, Ontario-based artist Victor Romao investigates issues of identity in distinctive ways. His practice includes bizarre likenesses of human and animal hybrids, chronicles of the deeds of anonymous, shadowy malefactors, and images of bucolic settings permeated with disturbing feelings of the surreal, uncanny, and ferocious. The artist’s influences are varied, ranging from the clean inventiveness of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, elements of baroque European sculptural and religious conventions, and Romao’s impressions of youth in rural Southwestern Ontario.

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In historical Baroque artworks, the mind (or soul) of the viewer was addressed through an appeal to the body, by way of intense sensory experience. A similar quality is found today in contemporary neo-baroque artworks that are characterized by powerful visual effects, and exaggerated material and aesthetic approaches that push reality.

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This exhibition presents two new series of paintings by Forest, Ontario-based artist Gary Spearin. The first, iNifiNiTi, is a sequence of abstract compositions based on the variability of the artistic imagination, captured at particular points in time. Spearin’s highly chromatic impasto creates an illusion of space that shifts or disappears. This sense of grounding jars against an otherwise heavily nonrepresentational approach to his work.

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Epics of visual speculative fiction, the drawings of London artist Kim Moodie seem to flow as streams, of dark yet humorous creativity, from an escape valve in the artist’s imagination. The artist’s particular narratives and inspirations ultimately remain with him but within the work the adventure is ours.

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This year-long exhibition explores drawing in Canadian art from its earliest uses to its role in contemporary culture. Over time the drawings on display will change, providing a wide array of selections from the collection. The Drawing Room will also progress chronologically, from historical content to contemporary works.

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Views of the Canadian farm are featured in this selection of historical works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

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This exhibition examines the concept of the garden, not only as a means of survival but as a site of contemplation, leisure, and exploration. Gardens have always had a variety of associations, symbolizing an Edenic paradise, issues of labour, gender, and folklore, even modernist ideas of progress.

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This exhibition offers a survey of works by the Guelph-based artist Janet Morton. Her intricately detailed sculptures give pause for thought, paying homage to the skill and time required to create hand-made objects, resisting and subverting the speed and insatiable demand for the mass produced and ready made. Through her consistent use of recycled materials, largely in the form of hand-knit sculptures, repurposed handicrafts, and more recently plastic consumer packaging, Morton has produced an eclectic body of work. Each familiar and recognizable offer a simple yet sophisticated commentary on home and the environment.

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Drawing upon the Italian Futurist manifesto “that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed” this exhibition is inspired by the ever quickening pace of contemporary life.

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This exhibition emphasizes the power and diversity of Canadian artists’ interpretations of the landscape. Their mediations include the almost mystical post-Impressionist vision of the wilderness associated with the Group of Seven and their contemporary David Milne. The selection encompasses both works on paper and canvases, highlighting several artworks on display for the first time in years.

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Technique profoundly influences both the form and aesthetics of an artist’s work. In this exhibition, a diverse selection of work from the Museum’s permanent collection illustrates a variety of artistic processes, representing the changing nature of art-making over time.

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Organized by curator Corinna Ghaznavi, this exhibition proposes a variety of ways that we can think about animals through representations.

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This exhibition features a selection of works that span the career of London artist Tom Benner. The works reflect on our relationship with the natural world and explore issues of threat and survival.

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Gathering works from across the province and from the collections of Museum London and the McIntosh Gallery, this exhibition celebrates the long-standing career of artist, and former University of Western Ontario professor, Duncan de Kergommeaux.

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This installation by Nelson, British Columbia-based architect turned sculptor Ian Johnston is one of several works that comprise his series Refuse Culture: Archaeology of Consumption. By employing scale, repetition and intense, enveloping colour, Johnston’s work transports viewers to a new sensorial experience.

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This exhibition features a selection of student artworks that respond to Museum London’s permanent collection, exploring the power of colour in Canadian art. Elementary and secondary students throughout the Thames Valley District and London District Catholic School Boards were asked to reflect on the theme of colour and create their own artwork.

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Museum London resumes its year-long exploration of the force of colour in art with a changing display of paintings, prints and sculptures from the vaults.

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Between 1966 and 1967, the late London artist Jack Chambers worked exclusively on paintings that were dramatically different from anything he had produced to date—graphic images made with aluminum paint. Chambers’ silver paintings were made during an intense, if troubled, burst of creative energy in 1966-1967 and are—with his films—the most visually and conceptually radical works he made.

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It's Alive! explores Canadian artist Bertram Brooker’s search for a visual language capable of animating audiences by appealing to their physical desires. Representations of Brooker as the “pioneer” of Canadian abstraction have forced an artificial separation of his career in advertising and his production as a visual artist. Pairing his work with internationally-renowned modernist artists, this exhibition marks Brooker’s accomplishments and explores links between his art, marketing and even the cinema.

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This exhibition brings together studies and finished works that focus on parts of the body: hands, torsos, faces, and heads, in media ranging from drawing to photography, prints and sculpture.

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This exhibition features 22 works by Canadian artists whose sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs convey a sense of abandonment, silence and ruin. Are the works depictions of real places and states, or do they suggest someone's uneasy memories?

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This exhibition explores the notion of the "Canadian frontier" as a site of myth production that stimulated multiple discourses, visual and textual, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Art historians have traditionally examined the mythology of the Canadian frontier in light of the paintings, sketches, and watercolours of the rugged Canadian landscape produced by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven in the early decades of the twentieth century. But rather than focusing exclusively on the "landscape trope" and/or emphasizing the reception history of the works of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Mapping Medievalism proposes that medievalism was vital to the imagining, experiencing, and representation of Canada's wilderness in the years between 1840 and 1925, reframing the notion of the Canadian frontier from an entirely novel perspective. The exhibition will draw upon primary source material and include paintings, drawings, etchings and a wide range of cultural objects from the region. Mapping Medievalism will be extended through a concurrent exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery.

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Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites and memory. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geography is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task for the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism. This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This group exhibition featuring works by 19 international artists, is organized and circulated by International Curators Incorporate, New York.

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Dykhuis's work includes satellite views of hurricane systems approaching the province. The artist's first solo exhibition in Halifax since 1997 features paintings, drawings and installations from the past decade. Radar Paintings (1999-2003) show patterns of rain and cloud (derived from the Internet) moving across the middle of Nova Scotia, in a radial grid centred on the weather station at Halifax International Airport. Dykhuis's map paintings are deeply implicated in the surveillance and mapping technologies of air travel, military defence, weather forecasting and outer space. They reflect our contemporary global anxieties, post 9-11, and local anxieties of Halifax, post-Hurricane Juan, in a world that is getting hotter both politically and environmentally. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the St. Mary's University Art Gallery.

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Graham's work blurs the boundaries between art, architecture, urban design and geography exploring concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, materiality and intangibility, fact and fiction. The London Series, uses cartography as a starting point for the development of a body of work that analyses geographical perspectives about London, Ontario. Graham uses historical maps of London to interject a new narrative into the history of the city by displacing historical meaning. The series functions as a re-presentation of historical fact that offers a new outlook for a future that never was but might have been, for a present that might not appear to be what it is and a past that is filled with new possibilities. For Graham the map is an element of its own re-creation as new landscapes—geography and the cartography used to describe it is a matter of perspective. The London Series is part of an ongoing project entitled Citymovement, a multidisciplinary project that examines and documents how we shape and are shaped by systems through the development and presentation of product design objects and prototypes that explore the boundaries between art, design, urban form and architecture.

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For more than 40 years, Bill Vazan has used sculpture and photography to explore the human understanding of geography and cosmology. Diverse investigations such as Canada in Parentheses (1969), Cross Canada Line (1969-1970, reconstructed 1999), World Line (1969-1971), and his Unfolding and Ring works (1980s) comment on our perception and representation of borders, space, time and manmade and natural landmarks. Vazan's work influenced the 1960s focus on land as subject matter, the use of photography as medium, and conceptualism as an approach.

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To open a year-long, changing display on the power of colour in Canadian art, this exhibition celebrates the achievements of the artists who formed Painters Eleven in the fall of 1953. These painters, the first to popularize abstraction in English Canada, liberated the elements of form and colour for successive generations of artists.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Botanical Model City is a site-specific work created for Museum London's Centre Gallery by Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Kate Wilson.

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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.

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This exhibition marks the first survey of Eric Atkinson's works on paper. Spanning nearly 70 years, the exhibition includes his earliest works, from the Second World War, which predate his formal training, to his most recent compositions. Each offers a view into Atkinson's use of drawing as a perceptual and pedagogical tool.

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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."

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