si com di l’eau | we are like water
Jason Baerg
May 4 - August 10, 2024
Opening Reception: June 15, 2:00 - 5:00pm
Related Programming, June 15:
- 3:00pm: Jason Baerg and Marjorie Beaucage in conversation, 3:00pm
- Fiddle Performance by Tristen Durocher
- Exhibition take-away featuring commissioned poem in response to the exhibition by Marjorie Beaucage
- New AR artwork unveiling by Jason Baerg, Montana Baerg, and Jaxson Baerg, Ni Mamoowitoonaan / We are united
Jason Baerg, si com di l'eau | we are like water, installation view, Grimsby Public Art Gallery (2024) Photo: Jordyn Stewart
A highly respected artist grounded in community and kinship, Baerg’s practice traverses intermedia and laser cut abstract painting through visual language rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, relationalities, and futurisms. Underpinned by Plains Cree medicine thinking, Baerg’s continued exploration of the Cree medicine wheel in 2024 delves into its third blue, western quadrant - fluidly conceptualizing and honoring water, sage, the setting sun, and emotional health in addition to other seminal traditional teachings. These cyclical connections flow through the circular form and symbolism of the medicine wheel, echoed through the use of tondos in the space, evoking portals to speculative futures, while stacked compositions ground past and present, both gesturing to Sky World. Reflecting on the title, si com di l’eau, graciously bestowed on this body of work by elder Marjorie Beaucage, it translates to ‘we are like water’ in the Metis language, Michif. Through colour and symbolism, we are prompted to consider water’s relationality, balance, and presence in all things and beings; its gentle nourishing characteristics; its presence in our bodies; its power; and its embodied connection to past and future ancestors. Water has the ability to exist in multiple states of matter, echoing the currents of life, and as a brimming vessel of epigenetic memories. Through seductive surfaces, Baerg’s work fluidly blurs the lines between critical theory, Indigenous iconography, and relationality through a thrilling use of abstraction and cutting-edge technology. The works on display have a propositional capacity to collaboratively implicate Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences to imagine and therefore manifest collective futures for both present and future generations. We are like water. We must adapt and flow. Carve new paths slowly over time, or with radical force. Be permeable and be able to permeate. Nourish future generations, and excise collective care.
Curated by Caitlin Sutherland
Jason Baerg is a Cree-Métis curator, educator, and visual artist. As a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting and new media installation. Often through means of visual abstraction, Baerg's projects work with various themes such as language, the Anthropocene, and Indigenous connections to land and the environment.
Dedicated to community development, Baerg founded Métis Artist Collective and has served as volunteer Chair for organizations such as the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition.
Baerg graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University. He is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Practices in Contemporary Painting and Media Art at OCAD University. Recent international solo exhibitions include the Illuminato Festival in Toronto, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, and the Digital Dome at the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His most recent curatorial project was a new media interactive engagement at Toronto's Nuit Blanche. Baerg has also adjudicated numerous art juries and won several awards through Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council.
To play a daredevil's advocate
Jordyn Stewart
January 13 - April 13, 2024
Jordyn Stewart, Honouring the Heroine of the Falls, 2022 (video still). 10 minutes, HD video. Image courtesy the artist.
Opening Reception: January 20, 2:00 - 4:00pm
Free Zine workshop with Jordyn Stewart and Sonali Menezes: January 13, 12:00 - 3:00pm (view details)
To play a daredevil’s advocate, pays tribute to Annie Edson Taylor, the first person and woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. In the early 1900’s, during the height of daredevil activity surrounding Niagara Falls, one woman surprised everyone. Confined in only a whisky barrel, padded with a few pillows, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to successfully plunge over the brink of the Horseshoe Falls and survive.
But what was her overall intention? In search of financial stability, Annie resorted to the most challenging entrepreneurial endeavor; challenging nature. In the shadow of her male counterparts - even with the Falls on her side - success was destined to be unattainable.
To play a daredevil’s advocate pays tribute to Annie and her performance, while asking the viewer to consider their individual relationships with this natural wonder. At what point has the Falls been positioned as a trophy or celebrity you need to photograph yourself next to? Or beat in a match? Where does this inherent desire to challenge the Falls come from? At some point in time this perspective stuck - do we have the need to feel superior to the Falls or recognize our inability to.
Primarily video-based, Jordyn’s exhibition highlights Annie’s feat while also questioning the daredevil’s desire to challenge the Falls through stunts. The exhibition includes paintings and prints from the collections of Grimsby Public Art Gallery, Niagara Falls Art Gallery and Riverbrink Art Museum. Sharing unique representations of the falls evoking Annie’s tumultuous feat, these artworks also highlight the feminist undercurrents of the exhibition including Stewart’s own practice and advocacy for/as a female artist, juxtaposed to the institutional narrative of museological practices historically focused on collecting male artists.
Curated by Caitlin Sutherland
Take a virtual tour of the exhibition To play a daredevil's advocate! Click the link, or the image below, and start exploring.
Jordyn Stewart (she/her) is an artist, educator and arts administrator. She received her MFA from the University of Waterloo and her BA from the University of Toronto, joint program with Sheridan College in Art & Art History. Her work has been programmed in spaces such as Art Museum, Hamilton Artists Inc., Trinity Square Video, Idea Exchange, and Gallery Stratford. In 2022, her work screened at the Small File Media Festival in Burnaby, BC and OORtreders Festival in Pelt, BE. Jordyn is currently teaching in the Department of Visual Studies at The University of Toronto Mississauga.
She is a settler artist currently residing on the traditional territories of the Hatiwendaronk, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe, including the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Six Nations of the Grand River (otherwise known as Niagara, Ontario).
Grimsby Public Art Gallery and the Artist would like to acknowledge the generous support of:
two degrees of separation
December 2 - 30, 2023
Featuring artworks from the permanent collection of Grimsby Public Art Gallery by Julie Aubin and Darlene Benner, Nicole Bauberger, Carl Beam, Alice Crawley, John Davies, Peter Legris, Rita Letendre, Denis Lukas, Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles, Ciaran Murray, Kim Ondaatje, André Pérusse, Jacques Schyrgens, Mary Sutherland Buxton, Chinkok Tan, Akira Yoshikawa, Gerald Zeldin
The exhibition two degrees of separation weaves together works that comment on 2 degrees of global warming, which would put the whole planet in crisis. As NASA states, “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generation climate change will occur.”1 While some works on display relate directly to this environmental shift, others may not overtly address it but help weave together a narrative that highlights the human implications of this post-industrial crisis as well as possible futures.
Curated by Caitlin Sutherland
1 https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3278/nasa-study-reveals-compounding-climate-risks-at-two-degrees-of-warming/#:~:text=A%202%2Ddegree%20rise%20in,generated%20climate%20change%20will%20occur.
Rewilding
Michèle Karch-Ackerman and Tanya Zaryski
August 26 – November 18, 2023
Artist Reception and Participatory Performance: Saturday, September 23, 2:00-4:00pm
Michèle Karch-Ackerman and Tanya Zaryski, Rewilding Installation view (2023). Photo: Jordyn Stewart
Rewilding is a compilation of works weaved together by Michèle Karch-Ackerman and Tanya Zaryski. The exhibition is comprised of The Library of Dresses, a year-long exploration that involved stitching a wardrobe of dresses to honour deceased female authoresses that inspired Karch-Ackerman, and the bountiful and lush paintings of Zaryski’s isolation fueled longing for connection with friends, explorations of fairy tale lore, imaginative play, and the ‘rewilding’ of her childhood and self. Both are women and mothers, committed to an art practice that tugs at the heartstrings and explores love, nature, memory and narrative. This body of work is the culmination of a year’s worth of work and playful discovery; and many long conversations about creative process, motherhood, love, loneliness, fairy tales, and the idea of rewilding. Zaryski’s Rewilding series plays with animal companions and guides, embedded with quests and magical narratives that at first glance appear attractive and charming, but upon further inspection are not entirely safe. Intertwined with Karch-Ackerman’s Library of Dresses paying homage to authors such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson, the works dovetail, transporting audiences to speculative worlds of fiction, possibility and healing.
Curated by Caitlin Sutherland
Take a virtual tour of the exhibition Rewilding! Click the image below and start exploring.
For over thirty years Michèle Karch-Ackerman’s artistic practice has involved the devotional act of sewing clothing for ghosts; the dead, the forgotten, the hurting. A nationally recognized conceptual installation artist, she has toured her ‘domestic acts of love’ in a series of solo exhibitions in public galleries across the country inspiring viewers with her thoughtful subject matter and aesthetics. From the Yukon Arts Centre and Grande Prairie Art Gallery to the McMichael Gallery, Tom Thomson Gallery and the Campbell House Museum to The Rooms Provincial Gallery in St. John’s Newfoundland (among many others), Michèle has stitched and knitted her ‘kits for lost souls’ to help heal some of Canada’s deepest tragedies.A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Michèle is the recipient of numerous awards from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, residencies across Canada, and has received national media coverage. Her work is the subject of a series of award winning publications documenting her artistic process and exhibitions.
As a painter, glassblower, and mixed media sculptor who creates functional and decorative sculptural works, Tanya Zaryski has a foot firmly planted in both the fine craft and art worlds. Fundamentally, when one sets aside the fluidity of materials and processes, Tanya is at the core, a storyteller.Tanya studied Art and Art History at the University of Toronto, and later attended Sheridan College to specialize in glassblowing. Upon graduation, she worked in the public access glass studio at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre for three years before moving north towards Georgian Bay.Much of Tanya’s work stems from early childhood experiences growing up on a farm in rural Ontario. As a child, Tanya was interested in the smallest details of the natural world, and how the lives of the creatures were dictated by the environment. For the past twenty years, Tanya has lived in the Beaver Valley area. Her current home and studio reside in Clarksburg, where Tanya lives with her son, cats, and unruly chickens.
Embodying Femininity: Power, Radiance, Care
Sharl G. Smith
May 31 to August 5, 2023
Sharl G Smith, Shelter II, (2023). Installation View. Photo: Jordyn Stewart
Inspired by her personal struggles around her own femininity and its value, Sharl G. Smith’s recent work explores the history of women’s work and domestic care under the lens of an abuse of natural feminine tenderness, care, and love. The invisible labour of women, especially in domestic work, creates nourishing environments for growth, stability, and care. Placing an emphasis on the intrinsic value of femininity, a universal principle that is present in all humans regardless of gender identity, Smith’s work aims to underscore the contributions of women, including the domestic space, as equally essential to the contributions of men.
Embodying Femininity: Power, Radiance, Care embodies these thoughts in a site-specific installation that celebrates women’s work and the long history of women artists whose craft was excluded from conversations in fine art. Constructed using bead-stitching, the life-sized sculpture celebrates weaving and textiles, mediums that have traditionally been categorized as domestic and feminine, and brings to the forefront the idea that such traditionally categorized mediums have served as particularly potent tools to engage with feminist issues in modern and contemporary art. Fortified with a special capacity to express women’s diverse perspectives and stories through their historical associations with femininity, Smith’s sculptural beadwork, Shelter II, is the perfect example of dismantling stereotypes while tapping into different and nuanced experiences of womanhood.
Take a virtual tour of Embodying Femininity! Click the image below to start exploring.
