MACLARENARTCENTRE, BARRIE
WINTER 2013 EXHIBITIONS
![pic]()
Duane Linklater
Decommission
December 5, 2013 through March 9, 2014
Reception: Thursday, December 5, 7 to 9 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, December 6, 10:30 am at the Campus Gallery, Georgian College, admission free
Duane Linklater is a Sobey Award-winning artist of rising international stature. Working in a variety of media, Linklater explores notions of exchange, ownership and the authority of language, and raises powerful questions that stretch well beyond the artworks themselves. His practice often stems from cooperative and collaborative interactions and focuses on process and gesture.
Decommission features a new sculptural work, 2005 Grand Jeep Cherokee, Linklater's retired family vehicle stripped down to the frame. The work functions as an inquest into the jeep's problematic model name, which stereotypically associates land and nature with Indigenous cultures. Stranded and vulnerable, the dismantled jeep memorializes the vehicle's service as a workhorse to the artist and his family, as well as the decline of the SUV—a car that was branded for forays into the great outdoors. Here, Linklater acknowledges his own contradictions and compliance with systems of consumerism and identity, and similarly prompts us to consider our own complicity.
Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation on James Bay. He obtained a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. Linklater is the 2013 winner of the Sobey Art Award, Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary art. Over the past year, he has had solo exhibitions at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Family Business, New York. Modest Livelihood, a film installation co-created with Brian Jungen, debuted at the Walter Phillips Gallery as part of dOCUMENTA (13) and has since traveled to Chicago, Vancouver and Toronto, where it is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario. His work has been included in group shows at the Esker Foundation, Calgary; Le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal; The Power Plant, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; UBS Gallery, Redhook, New York City; The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta; and Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton. Linklater lives and works in North Bay, Ontario.
Decommission is accompanied by a publication with texts by cheyanne turions and Tanya Lukin Linklater, produced by the MacLaren Art Centre.
Nadia Myre
Needle Works
December 5, 2013 to February 23, 2014
Reception: Thursday, December 5, 7 to 9 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, December 6, 10:30 am at the Campus Gallery, Georgian College, admission free
Nadia Myre is a Montréal-based artist of Algonquin heritage whose work examines complex issues of history, memory, identity and repatriation. Needle Works is a thematic survey that features works from 1997 to the present, highlighting beadwork, stitching and sutures as strategies fundamental to Myre's practice.
With a needle and thread, Myre creates powerful and moving works that mine territories of loss and healing and reconcile disparate aspects of experience and identity. In Everything I Know About Love (2004), Myre externalizes her inner wounds with a scar-like form that stretches across an expanse of raw canvas. Here, the artwork becomes a space to heal. Similarly, in her 2010 series Scarscapes, Myre renders bodily scars in symbolic abstract patterns. Woven on a loom, these intimate beaded works are then digitally scanned and printed as monumental, pristine images. The juxtaposition of the flat, impersonal digital prints with the intricate, hand-made originals prompts us to slow down and reconsider real-world objects and the histories embedded within them. In a more recent series, Meditations on Black Lake (2012), Myre presents large-scale prints of textured beaded works in sombre blues, blacks and greys. Hand-stitched in an intuitive, organic manner that Myre likens to painting, these circular forms radiate a meditative, regenerative energy. Again, through the process of digital scanning and magnification, the beaded works are distilled to a smooth two-dimensional surface and removed from the realm of objecthood.
Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Québec and an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg. She received a degree in Fine Arts from the Emily Carr School of Art in 1997 and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal in 2002. Her work has been widely exhibited, with solo shows in New York, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montréal, Kingston and Vancouver. In 2011, Éditions Art Mûr published En[counter]s, a bilingual monograph surveying Myre's work, in collaboration with the Carleton University Art Gallery and the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides. Myre participated in the prestigious Sydney Biennial in 2012 and was given a prominent commission for Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada in 2013. Her work appears in numerous public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, National Gallery of Canada, Smithsonian Institute and the National Museum of the American Indian. Myre is represented by Art Mûr. She lives and works in Montréal.
Needle Works is accompanied by a publication with an essay by Colette Tougas, originally published in En[counter]s in French, and translated into English by Tougas for this presentation.
1992
Robert Houle, Duane Linklater, Nadia Myre
December 5, 2013 to February 23, 2014
Reception: Thursday, December 5, 7 to 9 pm
1992 features two works on paper from the MacLaren's Permanent Collection by the renowned Anishnaabe artist, curator and critic Robert Houle. Both works were created in 1992, the contentious year that marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Houle's work often draws on Western conventions to deal with aspects of European colonization of First Nations people. The dual experience of Western and Indigenous traditions is clear in these powerful mixed-media works that combine photography, collage, drawing and abstract painting. Exhibiting artists Duane Linklater and Nadia Myre were both adolescents during the year 1992. In this exhibition, they each contribute a personal response to these works by Houle, an influential artistic antecedent for their generation.
Robert Houle is an Anishnaabe Saulteaux First Nations artist, curator, critic, and educator who has been active in the arts since the mid-1970s. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Manitoba and a Bachelor of Arts in Education from McGill University. From 1977 to 1981 Houle was the Curator of Indian Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. He is known for his role in bridging the gap between contemporary First Nations artists and the broader Canadian art community through his contributions to exhibitions such as Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. Houle has exhibited artwork both nationally and internationally; he has also curated or co-curated numerous ground-breaking exhibitions and written extensively on major contemporary artists. He currently lives and works in Toronto where he is represented by Kinsman Robinson Galleries.
Image credits: (Left) Nadia Myre, from the series Meditations on Black Lake, 2012, digital print, 112 x 112 cm. Courtesy of Nadia Myre and Art Mûr, Montréal. (Right) Duane Linklater, 2005 Grand Jeep Cherokee, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
![pic]()
About the MacLaren Art Centre
The MacLaren Art Centre is the major public art gallery in central Ontario serving the residents of Barrie, the County of Simcoe and the surrounding area. The Gallery has a permanent collection of over 26,600 works of art and presents a year-round programme of innovative, world-class exhibitions, public art projects, art education activities and special events. The MacLaren is housed in a 24,000 square-foot award-winning building. This architectural landmark in downtown Barrie combines a renovated 1917 Carnegie library and a contemporary addition by Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects. The complex includes multiple galleries, an education centre, a sculpture courtyard, café, gift shop and framing department. As the cornerstone of culture for Barrie, the MacLaren is a central meeting place and a cultural hub of activities for residents in the city, a tourist destination for visitors from across the province, and an economic driver for downtown revitalization.
Acknowledgements
The MacLaren Art Centre gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of its Friends, Patrons, Donors, Sponsors, Partners, the City of Barrie, the Ontario Arts Council through the Government of Ontario and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Gallery Location
37 Mulcaster Street, Barrie, Ontario, L4M 3M2, 705-721-9696 www.maclarenart.com
Directions
From highway 400 north, 90K north of Toronto, take the Dunlop Street East exit to Mulcaster Street and turn left. The MacLaren is one block north on the right hand at the intersection of Collier Street and Mulcaster Street.
Gallery Tours
Join us every Wednesday evening at 6:00 pm for a free public tour of the exhibitions.
Guided tours for groups and schools are available by appointment.
Gallery Admission
Suggested admission $5
Gallery Hours
Monday to Friday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Saturday and Sunday 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Wednesday 10:00 am to 7:00 pm
Closed statutory holidays
Wheelchair accessible
