Current Exhibitions 
|
GALLERY LEVEL ONE
Ticketed Admission applies to Level One exhibitions.
AGH Members receive Free Admission to all exhibitions.
|
Europe’s Exoticized East
On view May 22 to September 6, 2010
Curated by Dr. Patrick Shaw Cable
Europe’s Exoticized East presents a diverse array of lush visions created by 19th-century European "Orientalists" — the name given during the period to artists who specialized in Near Eastern and North African subjects. The exhibition utilizes as a base the rich selection of Orientalist paintings and sculptures in the AGH Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Collection of European Art, which includes the painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Bargue and the sculptors Charles Cordier and Antoine-Louis Barye. Supplementing these works are several significant loans from institutions in Canada and abroad — for instance, important watercolours from the Romantic master Eugène Delacroix’s 1832 trip to Morocco, on loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the magnificent silvered bronze and Algerian jasper sculpture The Algerian by Charles Cordier, borrowed from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Beautiful, richly coloured and representing varying degrees of fantastic, realist and naturalist approaches to the subject, these works of art are also telling visual documents of 19th-century Western cultural and political attitudes toward the Near East.
|
BACK TO TOP |
Dance of Life: The Tanenbaum African Collection
On view May 22 to September 6, 2010
Curated by Dr. Patrick Shaw Cable
Spanning a wide variety of cultures, themes, media and formats (from intimate figurines to over-life-size figural statues and decorative arts), the African Collection assembled by prominent Canadian collectors and philanthropists Joey and Toby Tanenbaum represents one of the couple’s more recent forays into the realm of extensive art collecting. At the core of the Gallery’s celebration of Vital Africa throughout 2010, this exhibition will showcase a large selection from the impressive Tanenbaum African Collection, which consists of more than 100 works of art, primarily from east, central and west Africa, yet also including some examples of Oceanic art. Dating chiefly from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the works include such striking pieces as masks of Mali and high-relief sculpted door panels of Nigeria, to open-network columnar palace supports of Cameroon and two-metre-tall funerary figures of the Congo.
|
BACK TO TOP |
Brendan Fernandes: until we fearless
On view June 10 to October 3, 2010
Curated by Melissa Bennett
|
The exhibition until we fearless pushes viewers to reconsider perceptions and inhibitions about the cultural identities associated with Africa and the African Diaspora.
until we fearless debuts Voo Doo You Doo Speak, a life-sized make-shift shelter that viewers can enter. Within this structure is a multi-channel video and sound environment that exudes tribal rhythms through two electronic sound pieces by Hamilton’s Jeremy Greenspan (of the music group Junior Boys), created specifically for this exhibition. Animated African masks flash on monitors, and are accompanied by Dadaist and Voodoo-inspired sound poems which are played on headphones.
A new suite of animations entitled Love Kill is shown throughout the exhibition space on monitors, combining drawing, animation and music, and evoking dark humour in their display of animals at prey. African mask imagery, spear motifs, and a sculptural installation featuring life-sized deer decoys wearing fabricated African masks invite us to think about the use of synthetic materials in such an expression of traditionally "natural" things.
Throughout the exhibition space, the juxtapositions of images, natural and man-made materials, and tribal and nonsensical sounds lead the viewer to consider the many ways in which the arts and artifacts of Africa have been presented within popular culture. In this exhibition, nature and culture come together as complicated forms, offering a new perspective on identity.
This exhibition is Fernandes’ first solo exhibition at the museum level, and is the culmination of several years of his most poignant artistic investigations.
Born in Kenya of South Asian heritage, Brendan Fernandes immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from the University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University. He has exhibited internationally, has participated in numerous residency programs and is the current recipient of the New Commissions Project through Art in General, New York. He is based between Toronto and New York. His work is represented by Diaz Contemporary, Toronto.
Brendan Fernandes has been short-listed for the 2010 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent prize for contemporary Canadian art. He is the Ontario finalist.
An exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal will feature selected work by the shortlisted artists from October 8, 2010 to January 3, 2011. The winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award will be announced at a Gala event at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal on November 18, 2010.
For more information about this award, visit: www.artgalleryofnovascotia.ca/en/sobeyartaward.
A forthcoming exhibition catalogue will include an essay by Melissa Bennett and an interview with the artist by Eric C. Shiner, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Exhibition Partner: The Hutton Family
|
BACK TO TOP |
Cake: Fiona Kinsella
On view June 5 to October 3, 2010
Curated by Melissa Bennett
The familiar is made strange in this exhibition of ornately decorated cakes and thick abstract oil paintings. Kinsella’s cakes, iced with baker’s fondant, are situated precariously between beauty and the grotesque. Appearing at first as standard cakes that are often used to mark rites of passage like birthdays, weddings, or funerals, the cakes are here adorned with small objects such as bones, religious relics, teeth, and are sometimes encircled with human hair.
The cakes impart a Victorian sensibility while referencing the subconscious. They recall the Surrealist’s juxtapositions and experimentation with materials, and similarly Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), a fur-lined tea cup.
Layers of white paint occupy the surfaces of Kinsella’s Chapel (rose) paintings, yet beneath the facade lie dramatic layers of dark paint. The artist digs out the deeper layers to create a textured, swirling and mottled surface, evoking an array of imagery. Both the cakes and paintings speak to consumption and over-saturation, narrative and relic.
Fiona Kinsella is a mixed media artist and painter based in Hamilton. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, in the United States and Europe and is represented by transit gallery in Hamilton.
 Click here to download the Cake: Fiona Kinsella exhibition pamphlet (PDF).
|
BACK TO TOP |
|
William Blair Bruce Memorial Donation
On permanent display
A salon-style hanging of the entire Bruce Memorial Donation of 1914 signals the beginning of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Upon the premature death in 1906 of Hamilton-born William Blair Bruce, his widow, sculptor Caroline Benedicks-Bruce, his father William and his sister Bell Bruce-Walkden bequeathed twenty-nine of his paintings to the city, with the proviso that a properly equipped art gallery be established to house and present the collection. When the Gallery opened its doors for the first time in June of 1914, the Bruce Memorial Collection was the permanent collection. Presented here in its entirety, the Bruce Collection continues to be an appropriate touchstone. As an important nineteenth-century Hamiltonian who trained and worked abroad and exhibited both nationally and internationally, Bruce’s skill and activities reflect the scope and nature of Hamilton’s permanent collection: regional, national and international in scope, tracing the efforts and activities of artists who have exerted an impact on the visual arts past and present.
|
BACK TO TOP |
GALLERY LEVEL TWO
Free admission courtesy of Orlick Industries.
|
Max Streicher: Architecture of Cloud
On view March 6, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Curated by Melissa Bennett
Max Streicher’s immense inflatable sculptures spark a wondrous encounter. Created specifically for the AGH’s sculpture atrium, Streicher’s new work draws from the cathedral-like setting of the atrium. Though this soft form is overwhelming in scale, it also invites the viewer to engage with it, walk around it, look upward and inside the form. Filled with air that is blown into the structure using electric fans, the form is intensely captivating, its organic shape inviting a multitude of associations. As Streicher writes, “I use air to animate my work because it provides an effortless naturalism. It not only looks right, it feels right, recollecting our sensation of breath. Inflatables are the medium of enchantment, fantasy and optimism…”.
Streicher is based in Toronto. Since 1991 he has worked extensively with kinetic inflatable forms. He has exhibited his work across Canada in numerous public galleries and artist-run centres. He has completed several site-related projects, most recently in Venice, Siena, Stockholm and Erfurt, Germany. The AGH is pleased to premier this work.
We would like to thank DuPont for their generous donation of Tyvek material which was used in the creation of this work. |
BACK TO TOP |
Robert Mason
On view April 24 to August 15, 2010
Guest Curated by Shirley Madill
Robert Mason was a Hamilton-based artist who influenced a generation of artists in this community. This large-scale exhibition brings together over forty works from public and private collections including the last suite of works he produced prior to his death in 2005. Expressed through painting, installation, photography and sculpture, Mason’s interests can be contextualized within larger artistic movements in North America such as land art and painterly abstraction. Recurring motifs and themes in Mason’s paintings include the landscape, trees, the night sky and migration. His large outdoor installation pieces, including the placement of caribou sculptures in the water at Hamilton’s Cootes Paradise, evoked his sensitivity and concern for the natural environment in the face of increased industrialization. Known for his dedication to arts and education in Hamilton, Mason is remembered and honoured through this exhibition that uncovers significant stages in his career.
Click here to download the Robert Mason exhibition pamphlet (PDF).
|
BACK TO TOP |
Shaped by Light
On view April 10 to August 15, 2010
Curated by Tobi Bruce
Shaped by Light brings together the work of four historical Canadian artists who journeyed to Africa during the first decades of the 20th century, and for whom these excursions resulted in distinct bodies of work. Including the work of James Wilson Morrice (1865 – 1924), John Lyman (1886 – 1967) and Robert Pilot (1898 – 1967), the exhibition explores how the North African experience variously shaped their painting practices. Favoured destinations for these Canadians included Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, where the unique and magnificent light at times utterly transformed the artists’ palettes. Will Ogilvie (1901 – 1989), the fourth artist included in the exhibition, was born in Cape Province, South Africa and as such his connection to the continent and its people runs more deeply, with his work taking on an altogether different character. His closely observed and masterful Xhosa Women Washing (1932), reproduced here, grew out of a series of sketches and watercolors made on the spot at the river below Ogilvie’s family farm in the early 1930s. Of this painting, the artist wrote some years later of his intention to “convey … a mood or feeling expressive of these people in their own environment.”
|
BACK TO TOP |
Kim Adams' Bruegel-Bosch Bus
On permanent display
Repeatedly in his work, Canadian artist Kim Adams has explored the patterns of a mobile society, creating works of art that are eccentric hybrids of the readymade. Blending humour, satire and seriousness, he builds “worlds” as a means of social critique. Adams’ installations exist comfortably in the space that divides life and art. His works have been presented in two very different social worlds: in a densely social environment such as a park or street and in a museum setting like the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Neither setting is privileged.
A magnificent visual masterpiece, Bruegel-Bosch Bus consists of a 1960 Volkswagon that appears to pull a post-industrial universe displaying a cornucopia of fantastic and seductive worlds that play with our senses. It was produced over a 7-year span. This futuristic diorama is a permanent fixture in the AGH Sculpture Atrium overlooking the Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden, past Hamilton City Hall and the Niagara Escarpment. Reminiscent of a previous installation by Adams titled Earth Wagons that presented a micro-model North American society fixed on leisure and entertainment, the Breugel-Bosch Bus encapsulates the next whole world picture, a world in which reality and unreality, logic and fantasy, banality and sublimation of existence, form an inexplicable unity. This ‘bus’ is a Kubrickesque megalopolis made of icons symptomatic in present society and draws upon urban fantasies, phantasmagoric, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and a plethora of different times and cultures. Buildings from different epochs are aligned side by side and space becomes an imaginary territory where chaos prevails.
|
BACK TO TOP |
The Jean and Ross Fischer Gallery
Free admission courtesy of Orlick Industries.
|
Angels of Colour: A Youth Project Celebrating the 175th Anniversary of Stewart Memorial Church
On view July 3 to August 29, 2010
|
Youth from the Stewart Memorial Church community have collaborated on a large scale mural that shows images of angels of colour. The piece is a comment on stereotypical images of angels as white and cherub-like, and is created with the artistic direction of Roger Ferreira. The work represents unity of the sacred and the secular; of historic stereotypes and contemporary understandings; and unity of mainstream art practices and marginalized practices such as graffiti art. The mural shows what Black History means to Stewart Memorial Church; and in turn what Stewart Memorial Church means to Hamilton.
|
*Please note that as a multipurpose space, the Jean and Ross Fischer Gallery is an area where photography is allowed by patrons and members of the public in accordance with the AGH Photography Policy. Click here for the Jean and Ross Fischer Gallery Information Package.
Also, the Jean and Ross Fischer Gallery is a space that can be rented for private or corporate functions and therefore may be unavailable for viewing by the public. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you are interested in viewing this space specifically, please call ahead to ensure the exhibition installed is available at 905-527-6610.
|
BACK TO TOP |
AGH Entrance Foyer
|
Brendan Fernandes
|
Brendan Fernandes
Dada Afrika I-IV: masks 2010
vinyl
These masks are part of the exhibition Brendan Fernandes: until we fearless, on Gallery Level One. Fernandes’ art practice analyzes the cultural specificities and provenance of African objects, and how the Western world perceives them.
|
BACK TO TOP |
|
 |
 |
|
| |
