Shauna McCabe
Studying the forces that shape and transform human relationships with the environment, Lisa Hirmer’s work spans visual art, social practice, and writing. In We Are Weather, she explores how we recognize and represent environmental change at a moment when the Holocene, a geological era of climate stability, gives way to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans act as a planet-scale force. While we are aware of changing conditions – from mass extinctions to climate change – the unprecedented scale of these changes and their cascading impacts can be difficult to make sense of in the context of daily life. Juxtaposing the outcomes of Hirmer’s creative research with works she has selected from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, this exhibition examines how we move from simply observing to registering these losses and understanding their accumulating effects.
Image detail: Lisa Hirmer, Watching, Dull Edges (the northern hemisphere of a 23°27′ tilt), 2017, photograph, 16 x 24″
Presented with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
About the artist
Lisa Hirmer
Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans visual media, social practice, performance, research and occasionally writing. Her work is primarily concerned with collective relationships – that which exists between things rather than simply in them – in communities, publics and other assemblies of people, as well as in our relationships with the more-than-human world. Hirmer has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Third Space (Saint John), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto), Art Gallery of Mississauga, Cambridge Galleries, Tasdance (Australia), Peninsula Arts (U.K.), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), CAFKA (Kitchener-Waterloo), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Flux Factory (USA) and Queens Museum (USA). She is currently based in Guelph.
View More Exhibitions
exhibition
September 18.2025 / January 4.2026
Challenging colonial conceptions of how Land and Water are used, valued, and protected, Reworldings speaks to living relationships with place and peoples, to the interdependence of species and systems, and to the urgent need to restore not only ecosystems, but justice.
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September 18.2025 / January 4.2026
Through practices that span net art, interactive sculpture, installation, video, and textile, Soft Internet Theory invites audiences to consider a gentler, more human digital future.
exhibition
May 22.2025 / August 29.2025
Fuzzy Thinking explores how textiles’ softness and tactility challenge boundaries between art and craft, weaving together historical and contemporary works rooted in material and cultural complexity.
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?
