Past Exhibitions

Collective Memory: 50 Years of Collecting

January 25 - April 5, 2025

For five decades, Grimsby Public Art Gallery has been a cornerstone of the region’s artistic and cultural identity. Collective Memory surveys the remarkable journey of building GPAGs permanent collection, a testament to the vision and dedication of artists, directors, curators, donors, and volunteers who have all had a hand in shaping its legacy. From foundational acquisitions to recent treasures, the exhibition reflects on the shared efforts and enduring passion of building and preserving a renowned collection for the community it serves.

Artworks often reflect the era in which they were created, yet also have an ability to transcend time, adapting and gathering different meanings with each viewer — serving as both symbols of their origins and their ever-evolving interpretation. In celebration of GPAGs 50^th anniversary, this exhibition brings together key pieces from the permanent collection and features 80 works by over 70 artists, including: Carl Beam, Otto Beyer, John Davies, Suzy Lake, Dennis Lukas, Kim Ondaatje, Jacques Schrygens, Tony Urquhart, and Andy Warhol. Together, these works embody not only artistic excellence but also the spirit of collaboration and community, forged over time. The artworks exhibited for Collective Memory were selected by GPAG staff. Coloured markers alongside a variety of the works on display indicate a staff selection. Visitors can learn more about staff selections and their thinking behind these choices through the accompanying catalogue.

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GPAG first opened its doors in 1975 in the lower level of the Carnegie building, next door to the Gallery’s current location. Founded by Director/Curator Bill Poole, GPAG quickly became an artistic hub supporting local and emerging artists, producing meaningful exhibitions, and engaging with the community through a variety of programs and special events. In 2004, the gallery moved to its current location which included a specialized vault for the permanent collection. Since 1975, GPAG has amassed over 2,500 works of both contemporary and historic Canadian pieces with special focus on printmaking, works on paper, book arts and fine craft, and art that addresses human interactions with the environment.

On Paper

Nov 23, 2024 - Jan 13, 2025

2025 marks 50 years of the Grimsby Public Art Gallery.

When the gallery opened in 1975, director William Poole created an annual tradition of hosting an end-of-term exhibition and sale for his printmaking students at O.C.A.D. The “Gallery 9” and “Gallery 19” shows saw hundreds of emerging print artists and spurred the creation of our Teaching Collection by accepting one print of each edition into our permanent collection. Throughout the years, this collection has been utilized as an incredible educational resource in our ‘Art in Schools’ program and exhibited widely in the Grimsby community.

Our inaugural On Paper show pays homage to this tradition and celebrates GPAG's continued effort to provide opportunities for both emerging and established Canadian artists. We recieved submissions from over 100 talented artists across Canada and are delighted to display their works on paper here in the gallery.

Curated by Sarah Oatley

Yield

Huy Lam

August 24 – November 16, 2024

Artist Reception and Free, Drop-in Collage Workshop: October 5, 2024

Huy Lam, Gold and Purple Pill and Turquoise Pill (2022). Photo by Jordyn Stewart

Marking Huy Lam’s first major solo exhibition in a public art gallery, Yield, explores material-based practice, wellness culture, and photographic theory.

Primarily utilizing collage and sculpture, 2d and 3d forms oscillate and intertwine, developing a narrative framework informed by the artist’s photography background, material resourcefulness, malleability, and meditation practice. Those acquainted with meditation or Buddhist theory may be familiar with the term equanimity, which can be defined as a balanced mental state that is not necessarily easily achieved and typically requires mindful practice. Though there are several definitions, it can refer to an openness and acceptance; a calmness or equilibrium; and is generally understood to embody a balanced reaction or emotional stability. This equanimical methodology can be found throughout Lam’s practice as he strives to imbue and approach works with softness and responsiveness as opposed to rigid preconceptions, letting the materials guide him. The title of the exhibition calls on Lam’s childhood memories and a phrase often repeated by his mother in Chinese to exercise restraint and humility in various contextual situations of emotional valence. The closest English translation, ‘Yield,’ embodies this sentiment, and can likewise be applied to Lam’s practice as a temporal instinct when pursuing new lines of aesthetic inquiry – satiating creative curiosity.

Mesmerizing kinetic mobile sculptures evoke a spiritual calm, while their delicate physical balance and asymmetric forms are purposefully reminiscent of traditional Chinese medicinal scales. Connotations of emotional and physical wellbeing become further engrained when paired with other works in the exhibition. The “Beacon” series with its striated steeples and lanterns, and the “Pills” series vibrant yet calming infinite loops and portals. Utilizing mass produced, brightly coloured photomontages, collages are rendered unrecognizable from their source, except for vague callouts through lines of text culled from the original such as extend your stay; a classic refresher; please enjoy responsibly.

Lam’s professional photography practice permeates each work as evidenced through his unique use of light, repetition, and balance. Moreover, the transmutation of these free mass-produced advertisements when viewed through a lens of photographic theory, begin to cultivate interpretation as a sleek counter narrative to the hegemonic stereotypes proliferated in consumerist culture, including the recent permeation of the wellness industry and its cultural appropriation.

With expert precision, Lam’s polished repetitive gestures and material resourcefulness utilize readily available source materials with apparent ease, obfuscating the time and labour behind each meticulous artwork.
Practicing acceptance, fluidity, and patience, Lam balances the end-product while relinquishing control by exercising humility and restraint. Be it through the rigidity or size of the materials at hand; Lam patiently works in unison with them, yielding to these constraints while still
bending them to his will, striking a balance that ultimately yields something beautiful.

Curated by Caitlin Sutherland

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).

Exhibition Brochure

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.

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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.

The second iteration of A Town Called Grimsby launches at the heels of centennial celebrations across the Town and offers a unique look at the creative impacts artists have had over the past 100 years—all from the perspective of the lands, both natural and built.

As we saw in A Town Called Grimsby I, curator Rhona Wenger presented works from GPAG’s permanent collection that traced the impact of artists who lived and created art in Grimsby. From historic portraits of some of the Town’s founding families to images of more recent residents who have left an impression on the community, the exhibition meaningfully connected to the pulse of Grimsby’s community.    

From the permanent collections of Grimsby Public Art Gallery and the Grimsby Museum, A Town Called Grimsby, Part II expands on the foundations of Part I and presents thoughtfully developed works that explore the Town’s distinct heritage, treasured natural setting, and architecture. The artists represented in the exhibition, including Dennis Lukas, John Davies, and Diane Ptolemy, all have distinct connections to Grimsby and reveal some of the remarkable elements that share the story of the Town. Together the works in the exhibition engage with one another, weaving new connections and perspectives around the beauty and power that the lands can show us.

Both A Town Called Grimsby, parts I and II bookmark the series of signature celebrations that have taken place highlighting Grimsby’s centennial year and underscore the remarkable contributions of artists over the last 100 years. 

Take a virtual tour of A Town Called Grimsby II

Florescence

Quintin Teszeri
September 6 - November 11

Community Collage days:
Saturday, September 7, 1:00 - 3:00 PM
Grimsby Arts Walk: Saturday, September 21, 12:00 - 3:00 pm

Florescence is a participatory collage that deconstructs the scientific tradition of botanical illustration so community members of all ages and skill sets can use the pieces to imagine their own plants. These individual collages will be joined together on an ongoing basis, growing a community garden across the wall over the course of the exhibition. In this way, the project engages florescence — a term that literally refers to the act of flowering but also figuratively describes a period of thriving.

Surroundings

Erin Greenizan, Kate Jones, Amanda Large, Gordon Leverton

September 6 - November 10

From the basic principles of line and form, to how we occupy space, to its social and cultural implications, Surroundings considers the form and function of architecture and landscape in all forms. From literal depictions of built environments, to more abstracted conceptions, the works presented explore ideas around collective consciousness and the beauty in banality.