Fuzzy Thinking

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.