
Fuzzy Thinking
Shauna McCabe
This exhibition brings together historical and contemporary textile works, foregrounding how softness, tactility, and material complexity create space for nuanced and layered ways of seeing and understanding. Featuring textile pieces by prominent Canadian artists including Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, William Kurelek, Jack Shadbolt, and Gordon Smith, the exhibition foregrounds the ways in which these figures, known primarily for their work in other media, adapted fibre as a means to explore new dimensions of process and form. Their works are placed in dialogue with contemporary artists such as Jagdeep Raina, Grant Heaps, Roda Medhat, Holly Chang, and Anna Torma, each of whom embrace textile not just as medium but as method, embracing its capacity for experimentation, hybridity, and the slow accumulation of meaning.
Drawing as well on the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collections, the exhibition includes Inuit wall hangings, Navajo weaving, and intricately beaded works — each reflecting the cultural and aesthetic significance of these practices. Deeply connected to the everyday, these objects blur the lines between the functional and the symbolic, carrying meaning through use as well as through form. Assembling varied approaches to textiles across time and place, Fuzzy Thinking invites viewers to consider how softness can challenge rigid boundaries between categories of art and craft, narrative and abstraction, the individual and collective. In doing so, the exhibition proposes a more fluid, tactile logic—one rooted in the intimate and investigative language of the material and handmade.



Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
View More Exhibitions

exhibition
May 22.2025 / August 29.2025
Curated through an open call, artists from across Guelph were invited to share their work in a collective reflection of the city’s creative landscape.

exhibition
May 3.2025 / May 8.2025

exhibition
April 24.2025 / April 29.2025
Through photography, Bahar Enshaeian unravels the intricate layers of memory, identity, and belonging. Rooted in personal experience, her work speaks to the complexities of migration, displacement, and the search for home.

exhibition
April 10.2025 / April 15.2025
What utility can we find in vestiges of the past? This question shapes Hal Fortin’s interdisciplinary practice and its distinct sculptural language, punctuated by humour, dream logic, and the rhythms of domestic labour.

exhibition
April 2.2025 / April 6.2025
At the heart of Stephanie Fortin’s practice is an ethical inquiry: is it necessary—or responsible—to aestheticize waste in the context of global exploitation and climate change?

exhibition
Contemporary Indigenous Artists at AGG
January 16.2025 / May 4.2025

exhibition
September 12.2024 / January 5.2025
Eternal Transcendent highlights a selection of photographic works by Robert Flack that convey his reverence for the more-than-corporeal and a yearning for healing in light of the AIDS epidemic.

exhibition
September 12.2024 / May 4.2025
Juxtaposing Susan Mogul’s 1997 video with a collection of quillboxes, this exhibition unifies both forms of expression through themes of women’s identity, family, relationships, and the quest for home.