La Ronge Drawings

Gregory Hardy RCA

Main Gallery

November 12 —  January 15, 2022

Reception with Catalogue Launch and Artist/Curator Talk: Friday, November 26 (doors open 6:30PM)

Gregory Hardy is much admired across the country and beyond for his vigorous and direct landscapes of the prairies and boreal lakes and forests of northern Saskatchewan. This exhibition features work produced around his island cabin on Lac La Ronge. He draws quickly and aggressively, en plein air from his kayak, with subsequent refinements completed in the studio. A remarkable feature of his landscapes is the weighty prominence given to the sky and its clouds. Curator Grant McConnell writes: “The clouds in a Hardy painting are as physical, as tangible as a mountain in a work by the Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris.” Hardy has exhibited extensively since 1975 and his work can be found in collections around the world.

Carbon Capture

Ken Van Rees

Project Space

November 12 — January 15, 2022

Reception with Artist Talk: Friday, November 26 (doors open at 6:30PM)

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Ken Van Rees is a landscape painter, and a member of the well-known collective Men Who Paint. However, it was as a soil scientist that he first expressed his life-long love of forests. In 2015, a forest fire burnt his research plots in northern Saskatchewan, and while inspecting the damage to his equipment, he became engrossed with the patterns inscribed on his clothes from the charcoal of the burnt trees. This planted the seeds for an entirely new series of abstract works on canvas that take the form of rubbings and controlled imprints – produced by leaving canvases in the charred forest for extended periods. In Carbon Capture, Van Rees doesn’t work “strictly as a researcher studying the ecological functions of the forest, but as an artist/researcher designing and experimenting with burnt remnants to create new landscapes.” (KVR)

The Secret is the Paper

curated by Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Breanne Bandur

Education Studio

November 12 — January 15, 2022

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The Secret Is the Paper (exhibition title from John Berger’s essay, “To Take Paper, to Draw”) features selected works on paper from the permanent collection. From quick notations on torn pages and in sketchbooks, to elaborate prints on carefully handled rag, this exhibition surveys diverse approaches to the treatment of paper, as well as the range of relationships artists share with their substrates. The Secret Is the Paper shares some of the material histories held in the permanent collection.

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