Director and Chief Curator Aidan Ware and the staff of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery invite you to attend a reception in celebration of the public re-opening of the Gallery featuring two new exhibitions in freshly renovated spaces. Generously sponsored by Tamming Law, guests are invited to join in a champagne toast, light fare, and music by local band G.R.I.N.D. Drinks will be available for purchase.

Director and Chief Curator Aidan Ware will provide remarks, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities of navigating these unprecedented times including launching the new Vision and Strategic Plan for the Gallery, deploying adaptive approaches to programming, and committing to innovation at all levels of curatorial programming.

Due to capacity limits pre-registration for this event is required. Guests can pre-register here, or to Hillary Weppler, [email protected], 519-376-1932 ext 5002.

Proof of vaccination is required to attend this event.

Celebrating New Exhibitions:

Kristine Moran: swimming at the edge of utopia

A solo exhibition featuring a new series of paintings by local artist Kristine Moran. Formerly based in New York City, Moran now resides in Owen Sound where her practice has focused on an obsessive exploration of durational swimming including all the sensations, rhythms, and mental states that surface while slowly moving across a large body of water. The exhibition immerses the viewer in a space with the swimmers; vying to reach a utopian destination as represented through the depiction of idealized, abstracted landscapes. Cumulatively, the works evoke the nature of human persistence, desire, and the endurance to overcome obstacles.

Facing It

A unique collaborative curation that brings together contemporary artists including Willy Waterton, Don Kwan, Dustin Seabrook, Kimber Sider, Vanessa Tignanelli, and Tamyka Bullen, and works from the collection by artists include Edwin Holgate, Rae Johnson, Edward Burtynsky, and April Hickox, to reflect on the ways in which the pandemic has shifted our perspectives and challenged our lives. The exhibition draws out themes of social isolation, the power of kinship, and the vulnerability of the human body. It meditates on our profound human interconnectedness, which is across time, cultures, and demographics. In the narratives of individual and community, it illuminates the darker potency of solitudes and our deepest desire to find a reflection of ourselves somewhere in each other.

source: media release, Tom Thomson Art Gallery