KC Adams, Panya Clark Espinal, Suzanne Morrissette, Dana Prieto + more

with Curatorial Assistant Shalaka Jadhav

ART GALLERY OF BURLINGTON

January 19 - April 28, 2024

Opening reception and programming details TBA.

This exhibition draws upon research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Suzanne Morrissette would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario for their support.

to notice (2023)

What forms of language can one use in an attempt to replicate the wind? Thinking about the movement of trees as an index of unseen forces, this artwork draws upon light and screens to engage with the unknown. Pause near the shores of Lake Ontario to take notice and observe.

Shoalings
Curatorial Statement

Bordered by Lake Ontario to the south, Humber River to the east and Etobicoke Creek to the west, South Etobicoke is a site where land and water are near to each other. Communities are fed through relationships of reciprocity, looking beyond ourselves – sometimes all the way into the universe. Shoaling was a multivocal exhibition that focused on connections between the land and the water, linking threads of memory, climate, race and labour. Featuring local, national and international artists, this exhibition responded to the neighborhood’s proximity to water and states of transition and growth.

As a naturally submerged landform consisting of sand or other loose materials that rises from a bed of water to near the surface, the shoal functions as a metaphor for South Etobicoke – a gathering space, linking the land with what lies beyond us. Using performance, video, sculpture and various forms of technology, artists address the complex relationships between human life and plant ecologies, reflecting on interspecies approaches to sustainability.

Ursula Biemann, Lindsey french, Grace Grothaus, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning & Mary Bunch, Suzanne Morrissette, Joel Ong, Raitis Smits & Rasa Smite

Onsite Gallery

February 01 to May 13, 2023 

Opening Reception  – Wednesday, February 01, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West 

more-than human Artists’ Panel Discussion Part 1  – Thursday, February 02, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery (199 Richmond Street West) and Live Streamed Online   

Onsite Gallery

curated by Jane Tingley

more-than-human presents media artworks at the intersection of art, science, Indigenous worldviews, and technology that speculatively and poetically use multimodal storytelling as a vehicle for interpreting, mattering, and embodying more-than-human ecologies. The artworks in this exhibition aim to critically and emotionally engage with the important work of decentering the human and rethinking the perspective that sees nature as a lifeless resource for exploitation. Many of the artworks use technological and scientific tools as entry points for witnessing and interacting with these more-than-human worlds, as they help visualize phenomena beyond human sensory perception while nevertheless situating us within them. Combined, the artworks in the show weave a story that tells a tale of symbiosis, intersections, and more-than-human relationality. They incorporate scientific, philosophical, and Indigenous perspectives to create an experiential tapestry that asks the viewer to reconsider, reorient, and rethink relationships with the more-than-human. 

Suzanne Morrissette, Pamela Palmater, Laura Ortman, Casey Koyczan, Tom McLeod, Marc Fussing Rosbach

A SPACE WINDOWS, MAIN GALLERY

October 18 – November 12, 2022

Art Crawl: Thursday October 20, 2022
FREE and open to the public!* Tickets are subject to availability. Details below.

Proudly presented by A Space Gallery and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

FLOW is a commissioning project featuring six durational audio works by Indigenous artists that connect distant listeners to site-specific bodies of water. Meditating on sites such as lakes, rivers, bays, glaciers, ponds, and seas, these original works explore intersections of water, Indigenous geographies, and bodies. Collectively, these methods instigate pathways towards the transformation of inherited oppression, shifting toward fully-rounded ancestral embodiment. Audiences are encouraged to engage with these works on the land, communing with water safely and socially distanced. FLOW seeks to provide opportunities for Indigenous artists to explore ancestral ontologies concerning water through sonic storytelling.

Lii Zoot Tayr (Other Worlds) is the third in a series of exhibitions curated by Amy Malbeuf and Jessie Ray Short exploring the work of Métis artists. In this iteration, the artists—Malbeuf, Suzanne Morrissette, Tannis Nielsen, Tiffany Shaw-Collinge, and Short—ground themselves within and move beyond the earth and solar system to ruminate on outer, inner, and deep space.

Lii Zoot Tayr at Art Gallery of York University Website

Morrissette’s exhibition at daphne links works that attempt different methods of material translation: the translation of sight into drawing, physical form into sound, sculpture into song, and body movements into audio and video. The purpose of these acts of translation is to explore other ways of understanding that can assist in hearing and comprehending histories and knowledge which have been quieted, but not silenced.

daphne art centre website

This exhibition was made possible with support from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, in addition to the funders of the daphne art centre.

What does good work look like? This is a question I am asking about how we evaluate what has been learned and whether what has been learned and then what has been determined to be right, has also been heeded. But what are the rubrics of this evaluation? As an artist I am developing this body of artwork to think about this question from the perspective of my family and our home, and our pasts and futures as people who come from Indigenous and settler histories. It is here where I am brought to consider how I can contribute in a good way to future-thinking which foregrounds the brilliance of Indigenous people while simultaneously tending to the ongoing impacts of profound injustice. This exhibition is a reflection upon the act of imagining these futures from within the context of climate catastrophe, ongoing colonial violence, and inequities and familial tensions exacerbated by the global pandemic. The question asked by this exhibition aims to develop tools for evaluating the successes of endeavours towards good work from within values rooted in a sense of futurity that is sometimes personal, sometimes shared, and always dynamic.

Gallery 44 Website

Exhibition Catalogue with essay by Taylor Wilson