Virtual Canada Gallery

What the Ocean Remembers

What the Ocean Remembers presents newly commissioned and recent works by a group of artists engaged with the creative and critical milieu of the Atlantic Region of Canada: Jordan Bennett, Kym Greeley, Thaddeus Holownia, Meagan Musseau with Jenelle Duvall, Jerry Ropson, and Camille Turner.

In their artistic practice, these artists are looking at and thinking about material memory, memory of the land and sea, both as the residual effects of human action and the reciprocity we need for a sustainable co-existence with the natural world. Their works open a broader critical discussion around decolonization and historical erasure.

This virtual exhibition opens on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21, 2021 with a commissioned land-based performance by L’nu artist Meagan Musseau. Additional programming and content will continue to emerge through December 21, 2021, including artist talks, panel discussions and performances.

What the Ocean Remembers is co-curated by Matthew Hills, Director/Curator, Grenfell Art Gallery, and David Diviney Senior Curator, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and is co-organised by Grenfell Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in partnership with the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom.

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Shimmering Horizons

Shimmering Horizons brings together works by five Canadian artists that offer visions of future life-ways on Earth. Unbound by the inhibiting narratives of apocalypse and dystopia, and wary of the false promise of technological salvation, these artists instead draw on the rich traditions of creative science fiction explored in the fields of Indigenous Futurisms and settler-feminist posthumanism. Together they ask: “Can sci-fi do more for us than simply confirm our worst fears, or offer escapist fantasies? Can new stories address the violence of the past, recognize the urgency of the present, and still offer compelling images of the future?”

Tania Willard, Gut Instincts, 2018, Digital mural. Courtesy of the Artist.

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Position As Desired: Exploring Black Canadian and Black British identity | Photographs from the Wedge Collection

In celebration of Black History Month in the UK (October 2020) and ahead of Black History Month in Canada (February 2021), the High Commission of Canada is proud to partner with the Wedge Collection (Toronto) to bring you a virtual preview of ‘Position As Desired: Exploring Black Canadian and Black British identity | Photographs from the Wedge Collection’, set to launch physically at Canada Gallery next summer. In anticipation of the physical presentation, this newly curated online arrangement will provide a discourse between Black Canadian and Black British lens-based artists works, exploring parallels in artistic practices and lived experience, shared histories and important differences.

Liz Johnson Artur, Untitled, 2016.
Image courtesy Wedge Collection. ⓒ 2020 Liz Johnson Artur.

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Meryl McMaster: As Immense as the Sky

Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist, living and working in Ottawa. She describes her work as sculptural photography — incorporating props, constructed garments and performance to examine her sense of identity and selfhood. McMaster has dual heritage and is Nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and a member of the Siksika First Nation on her father’s side and has British, Dutch and Scottish ancestry on her mother’s side.

For her latest series, As Immense as the Sky (2019), McMaster set out to gather the wisdom and folklore of relatives on both sides of her heritage. She traveled to sites of ancestral significance across Canada following waterways and ancient pitching trails where social, cultural and environmental histories have collided. Her self-portraits reanimate mythology and family anecdotes through her own personally transformative journey through the landscape.

The series draws upon themes of memory, migration, genealogy and time as McMaster retraces the footsteps of her ancestors. Her images explore the intersections of both her Indigenous and European heritage whilst revealing Canada’s conflicted colonial legacies. McMaster is represented in London by The Baldwin Gallery, in Toronto by the Stephen Bulger Gallery and in Montréal by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain.

Cartography of the Unseen – 2019, Digital C-Print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm

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