Past Exhibitions

Drawing from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores the use of abstraction by artists in their depictions of the natural world.

This group exhibition that explores various rituals related to the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean.

Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea presents landscapes by Canadian artist Takao Tanabe from AGG’s permanent collection.

This exhibition of works by Manitoulin Island-based artist Carl Beam probes the interstices of history, politics, science, materiality, and Indigeneity.

The Third Scenario examines the act of art making through hyphenated conditions and what it means to create while being Asian and living in Canada.

This exhibition highlights Grande’s distinct visual lexicon culled from her experiences as well as cultural sources – symbolic references that coalesce in surreal, painterly compositions.

Incorporating elements of local lore as well as the evolving built landscape, Norlen’s large-scale drawings explore the effects of time and the play of memory and imagination that results.

The constructions of José Luis Torres evoke the prolonged ambiguity and estrangement inherent in experiences of immigration and exile.

Chelsea Ryan combines diaristic practices with digital technologies to record the still, transient, and enduring moments she notices of everyday life.

This work chronicles the artist’s experience of pregnancy amid reports of high maternal mortality rates experienced by Black women in the U.S.

Taking root during pandemic lockdowns, this installation acknowledges loss while offering a space for grief and mourning.

Connecting aspects of Indigenous cosmology to wider cultural meanings, this exhibition speaks to the idea of seeing through space.

This exhibition speaks to the connections between art and social activism and to the visual aesthetics that emerge from protest.

The first exhibition to explore pioneering feminist artist Mary Kelly’s long engagement with activist movements.

Curated by Middlebrook Prize recipient Erin Szikora, Homecoming engages land, language, and community, offering strategies to rethink our relationships to home.

This exhibition of Haudenosaunee souvenir beadworks responds to the history of ethnographic collecting by celebrating personal, economic, and cultural value.

Examining intersections between botanical explorations and colonization, Anahita Norouzi focuses on the plant colloquially referred to as giant hogweed.

Rihab Essayh’s immersive environments allow for “radical softness”, where showing vulnerability is a political gesture in a society that prioritizes indifference.

In this exhibition, curator Taqralik Partridge offers a vivid picture of the lived patterns and habits that inform expressions of Inuit experience.

Scouring photographs for errors, artist Meg Ross enlarges the details, producing images that represent light leaks and scratched emulsion stained to degrees of unfixed-ness.

This exhibition brings the prints and textiles of Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona into dialogue with those created by her grandmother and great-grandmother.

Collective Offerings responds to the fragmentation produced by colonialism and deepened by political, ecological, and health crises.

Inuusira, meaning “my life”, features new work by Tarralik Duffy in dialogue with Pitseolak Ashoona’s prints and drawings from the gallery’s collection.

Prospetto a Mare (Prospectus to sea) examines the complicated colonial and postcolonial histories connecting East Africa and Europe.

Deeply embedded in Hungarian textile traditions, Permanent Danger‘s narrative embroideries evoke ideas of human vulnerability, risk, and the highs and lows of life.

Infused with transnational poetics, the work of Nigerian-born artist Emmanuel Osahor centres on issues of place and displacement.

Initiated by Métis artists Nathalie Bertin and Lisa Shepherd, Breathe. features handcrafted masks that reflect on COVID-19 conditions.

In response to the pandemic, this exhibition highlights colonial histories and the importance of documenting the present to reinterpret the past and transform the future.

In The Disappearing Sky, the ground underfoot takes on allegorical dimensions, pointing to movement in space and to landscapes that extend the body in every direction.

When We Breathe We Breathe Together is an action-oriented cultural initiative facilitated by Decolonize This Place as a platform for building relationships of decolonial solidarity.

New Age Warriors celebrates the strength of artist Catherine Blackburn’s ancestors and the women in her life today, featuring regalia fashioned from Perler beads.

This exhibition brings together work by BIPOC artists to confront how commemorative monuments eclipse individual stories and other ways of knowing.

Marking a century since the First World War, artist Charles Pachter created a series of paintings about the “war to end all wars” and its legacy for Canadians.

Sin Cielo / Skyless is a video wall that depicts the aftereffects of mining on the Cauca River within the town of Marmato, Caldas in Colombia’s northwest.

Grounding presents nuanced practices of art-making that respond to extractive industries in the Americas, and more specifically within Canada, Peru, and Argentina.

This exhibition details how the classification of the environment as “other” has allowed for harmful alterations to the natural landscape.

Drawing on the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, Pattern and Form highlights wall hangings that blur the boundaries between the real and imagined.

Uprising brings together over 30 paintings by Michif (Métis) artist Christi Belcourt, complemented by the work of knowledge holder and artist Isaac Murdoch.

Caroline Mousseau’s paintings are thoroughly about time, exploring the effects of slowness and repetitive effort to draw attention to the gendered history of painting.

New Art Now: Recent Acquisitions is the physical iteration of two online exhibitions featuring works that the AGG has acquired over the past five years.

A glimpse into Nathalie Bujold’s distinctive universe through artworks that demonstrate the potential of video to create new ways to express time, form, and space.

During her residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sandra Brewster employed the gallery’s cataloguing methods to document personal items of friends in Toronto’s Carribean diaspora.

Drawn from images circulated on social networks, Qautamaat brings together the photography of Inuit community members, documenting phenomena of daily life as a visual map.

Inspired by the rise in discourse related to capitalism and vampirism, Carmela Laganse constructed a collection of furniture that highlights how consumption and predation permeate daily life.

Rupture connects performance art and object-making with both Indigenous and feminist narratives, speaking to a tradition of DIY and anti-aesthetic methods.

Sparked by the artist’s own loss and grief, bagiskaagewin (letting go) uses symbolic offerings to create a river of grief and gratitude, shifting Western sensibilities about death.

Tina Guyani | Deer Road addresses dispossession from an Indigenous perspective, as one manifestation of the devastating effects of colonial practices across Turtle Island.

Featuring the work of graphic novelist and artist Seth, A Life, All Play focuses on the creative exploration that is integral to his storytelling.

This exhibition features the work of Inuit artists that speaks to the primacy of the land in Inuit culture and its evolving representation in visual art.

The Drive situates the work of Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, and their peers in relation to diverse Indigenous and Canadian artists.

Featuring the work of Jagdeep Raina, Chase is a poetic exploration of the interplay of memory and migration, and of how both are mapped onto everyday landscapes.

Curated by University of Guelph students, this project offers a public recognition of Indigenous place, mapping the ties between creative practice and the land.

We Are Weather explores how we see environmental change at a moment when the Holocene gives way to the Anthropocene, in which humans act as a planet-scale force.

The Curse of Geography reflects on the effects of geographic isolation from and proximity to centres of power, on social justice, human rights and public policy.

Evolving her distinct approach to portraiture for over two decades, Janet Werner imagines nuanced women’s worlds where other identities and other stories play out.

Critical Mass features the work of established and emerging Black artists, addressing the historic erasure of the experience of Black history in Canada.

A short film installation that recounts the story of two Nigerian-born sisters who were enslaved in the Caribbean and brought to Scotland during the Jacobite rising of 1745.

This exhibition engages with the symbolism of the moon as a historically feminine and feminist symbol, opening it up to new meanings in the 21st century.

Fieldwork features the work of Arizona-based artist, farmer, and food activist Matthew Moore.

This exhibition is grounded in intergenerational art and activism that speaks to the central role of the seal and seal hunting within Inuit culture and society.

Drawing on his experience as a welder and labourer, Buszchak focuses on materials and their joining methods – often taken for granted as a means to an end.

These three digital installations leverage the effects of luminosity, exploring the potential of spectacle as a tool of engagement.

On Saturday, March 24, 2018 the Art Gallery of Guelph threw the art party of the year, welcoming over 150 art lovers and collectors.

This is a selection of the foundational pieces from the AGG’s Indigenous collections and new art practices from across Canada that were included in 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact.

This exhibition provides a vital opportunity to re-narrate landscape through art practices that actively engage our collective histories and possible futures.

The Common Collective presents an installation that combines new media and analog technologies to explore social and environmental changes in rural Ontario over the past half-century.

This installation features Shelley Niro’s video Niagara with items associated with Niagara Falls from the William Reid collection of Haudenosaunee beadwork.

150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact provides a platform for diverse Indigenous narratives that imagine new social futures.

My curiosities are not your curios examines the idea of collections and their institutional and colonial histories.

This exhibition features photographs by scientist and environmental interpreter Dr. Roberta Bondar, exploring the biodiversity of Canadian landscapes.

Bringing together various works from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collection, Landmade explores the ways land has mediated the relationship of art and place.

mount pile examines one of our nation’s iconic geographies and landscape of extraction—the Canadian Rockies—depicted as both sublime and fractured.

Featuring the recent work of artist Hiba Abdallah, Th’an explores the Arabic language through the lens of art as social practice.

When We Were features the work of four Guelph-based artists who transpose historical landscape tradition and plein-air technique in contemporary practice.

The visually rich spaces in Ottawa artist Melanie Authier’s paintings remind us that we are still negotiating a myriad of questions when we consider art after Modernism.

A Sense of Wonder focuses on supporting d/Deaf and disability arts and artists through the convergence of art and social practice.

Presence features three new bodies of work by artist Colin Carney, incorporating large-scale photographs, audio, and video in an exploration of the poetics of space.

Dear Life traces the ways in which women have shaped the course of art across the 20th and 21st centuries, transforming their experience into visual language.

This exhibition raises urgent questions about the human body’s relationship to work and the subjective dimensions of productive and unproductive labour.

Hours features multiple new series by Guelph artist Greg Denton that reveal the quotients of time, process, and performance in portrait painting.

This exhibition traces the visual evolution of Native beadwork in Canada, made possible through a major gift to the gallery from William Reid.

Emerging from personal experiences and lived environments Mondes bricolés documents the reimagination of everyday life in the form of diverse new worlds.

This exhibition by artist Christina Kingsbury and poet Anna Bowen shows the culmination of a three-year installation on the former Eastview Landfill site in Guelph, Ontario.

Paul MacIntyre investigates the ideological implications of labour in art making by re-contextualizing reproductions of Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse.

For his exhibition Grapple, John Haney presents multiple works that respond to a mysterious object he found on a Newfoundland beach.

Largely curated from the AGG’s permanent collections, this exhibition highlights works by contemporary Inuit artists from across Canada.

The survey exhibition Distant Grounds reveals Oxley’s innovations in colour and form in both printmaking and large-scale painting.

In this solo exhibition, artist Cole Swanson examines complex trans-species relations, specifically the intersections between human, bee, and bovine biologies.

Berlin 2013 / 1983 is an ambitious new work by Daniel Young and Christian Giroux that represents the artists’ preoccupation with the built environment.

Inconsolable features a new body of figurative work by painter Eileen MacArthur, representing anonymous women in the midst of a poignant and emotional moment.

On Saturday, November 14, AGG threw the Art Party of the Year with over 200 people and our guest of honour Seth, Guelph’s own cartoonist extraordinaire, and his lovely partner Tania in attendance!

Of Time and Buildings considers space, place, and time as expressed in 45 photographs of buildings, both existent and imaginary.

Titled Untitled features twenty-five works that all share a common title but vary dramatically in intent, style, and materiality.

The Queer Feeling of Tomorrow suggests the playful uncertainty of our personal and political futures in a supposedly “post AIDS” historical moment.