Current & Upcoming
FLUX
April 5 – 28, 2018
Guest Curator: Paul Cvetich
Graduating McMaster BFA Student Exhibition (aka SUMMA 2018)
ARTIST TALKS: Wednesday, April 11, 12 noon
RECEPTION: Due to #onstorm last weekend, McMaster's Graduating BFA student celebrations have been rescheduled. Join us Saturday, April 21 for exhibition visits at the Museum from 1-2:30 pm followed by Reception & Awards in Togo Salmon Hall Flex Studio 2:30-4 pm.
ARTISTS:
D. Clarke Blake, Emerald Bruce, Ruth Cioban, Sabryna Correa, Colline Do, Amanda Dreise, Emily Gaudet, Dina Hamed, Emily Hamel, Kai Jacobs, Clara Laratta, Priscilla Loo, Tiffany Mulholland, Abby Nicholson, Sheetal Prasad, Sarah Sproule, Chantelle Stringle, Christina Ugge
Over the past four years, the Class of 2018 have spent many long hours working together in the Fitzhenry Studios, learning new techniques, refining skills across a wide range of media, and preparing for the art world outside of an academic context. The SUMMA exhibition is the culmination of that hard work. It is an opportunity for the emerging artists to publicly showcase their art and celebrate a significant milestone.
Flux, the exhibition title, represents the continuous change, development, and growth that the students experienced during their time at McMaster University.
PREVIEW: For each week leading up to the exhibition opening at the Museum, @mcmastersumma2018 will be taken over by two artists to showcase their work and see what they are up to in the studio.
Gordon Bennett, Be Polite
Organized and circulated by IMA Brisbane
Levy and Tomlinson Galleries | January 11 – May 12, 2018
CURATORS’ TALK by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh from the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia: Thursday, January 11, 12:30 pm
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 11, 6 – 8 pm
Drawn from the Estate of Gordon Bennett, the exhibition presents a selection of works on paper including drawing, painting, watercolour, poetry, and essays from the early 1990s through to the early 2000s. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and script form the foundation of his practice. Paper is the site where imagery, words and ideas often found their first expression before being combined into the large-scale conceptual paintings for which Bennett is known. Despite their intimate scale, works in Be Polite embrace rich layers of Western and Australian Indigenous art history and contemporary politics, a direction Bennett played a leading role in developing throughout the 1980s and continued to explore in his successful career. As noted by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, in their press release for their presentation of Be Polite in summer 2017, “the shared colonial histories with Canada and in particular the plight of local First Nations are set in dialogue across continents. Issues, events and histories are given compelling voice in these provocative and often disturbing images.” In his 1996 text “The Manifest Toe” Gordon Bennett wrote:
I abhor violence, and I have little compulsion to glorify it in any case, so I thought of the depiction of violence as a way to disturb firstly the complacent acceptance of Australia’s sanitized history, and secondly, through the shock of that disturbance, to “jolt” the spectator “out of accustomed ways of perceiving the world” and perhaps foster empathy and understanding of contemporary issues that affect all of us as human beings.
Gordon Bennett (1955–2014) was of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent and one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists. He has been the subject of major solo presentations and retrospectives at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (touring, Europe), 1999–2000, Griffith University, Brisbane (touring, Australia), 2004–2005, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (touring, Australia), 2007–2009. International recognition and attention for Bennett’s work has been growing with his inclusion in the acclaimed dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, and the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014.
Gordon Bennett, Be Polite is organized and circulated by the IMA, Brisbane where it was first presented in October 2015 and toured to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016. Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, and McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton are the sole Canadian exhibition partners. The exhibition is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Australia Council for the Arts, Ministry of Communications and the Arts through Visions of Australia, The Estate of Gordon Bennett, Milani Gallery, and Sutton Gallery.
Image: Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat: Boogie Man, 1998, acrylic on paper, 120 × 80 cm. Collection: The Estate of Gordon Bennett, Brisbane. Photography: Carl Warner © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.
TH&B, a creative partnership of Hamilton-based artists Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic and Tor Lukasik-Foss, have produced a new work of art for the McMaster Museum of Art’s Artist Garden. The installation is titled Basin and its foundation is a metal structure with forms of the Great Lakes on it. The artists will add a mix of plants to this to reflect contrasting elements of the geography that we share and occupy.
“Our plan is for the Great Lakes billboard to function as a trellis. Over two seasons we essentially want to see it grown over and integrated into the garden site as if it had always been there—a modern ruin,” says Ivan Jurakic.
Rebecca Belmore: MARCH 5, 1819
From the collection of McMaster Museum of Art
May 10 – August 18, 2018
Since 1987, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore has addressed history, place, and identity through her consistently powerful and provocative multi-disciplinary works of art.
March 5, 1819 is a recently acquired video work that considers the frantic final moments before Demasduit, a young Beothuk woman (later renamed Mary March) is captured by colonists at Red Indian Lake in Newfoundland. Her husband Nonosabasut dies trying to save her.
Belmore’s re-enactment of this historical moment in contemporary dress, places the viewer into the middle of the event – as both witness and perpetrator – effectively bringing the historical struggle of Indigenous peoples in Canada viscerally into the present.
Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe/Canadian) is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Art in 2013, and was awarded the 2016 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.
The Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Project
Organized by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery
Principal Investigator and Artist/Researcher: Donald Lawrence
Curator: Josephine Mills
Artists: Dianne Bos, Lea Bucknell, Ernie Kroeger, Holly Ward and Kevin Schmidt, Carsten Wirth, and Andrew Wright
May 10 – August 18, 2018
During summer solstice 2015 in Dawson City, Yukon, the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival brought together an international group of artists and other researchers interested in cameras obscura and related optical phenomenon as a meeting place of art and science, cultural and wilderness settings, learning and play.
Curated from the results of the festival, this exhibition includes one of the actual cameras obscura; images projected by several of the devices; documentation of the event; and new work produced by the artists in response to the initial research.
Gentleman, Soldier, Scholar & Spy:
The Napoleonic era maps of Robert Clifford
From the Collection of McMaster University Library
Curators: Gord Beck and Jason Brodeur
May 26 – September 1, 2018
Curators’ Talk and Public Reception: TBA
While the Honourable Robert Clifford (1767-1817) was an officer in Dillon’s Regiment of the Irish Brigade serving Louis XVI of France, he acquired training in the most advanced methods of military science and cartography of the age. This knowledge of the inner workings of the French military, coupled with the maps of fortifications he smuggled out of France while narrowly avoiding the guillotine, proved to be of great value to his English countrymen.
This exhibit presents a selection of maps from the Clifford collection, some on public view for the first time since they were acquired in 1969.
Undying Hope for this Dangerous World: Bertrand Russell in perspective
Curated by the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library
May 26 – December 22, 2018
This exhibition will explore the life of Bertrand Russell, one of the foremost public intellectuals of the 20th century, through artwork, artefacts, photographs, and his own personal papers with a particular focus on his political activism and personal relationships.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Archives at McMaster University.
Ernest Daetwyler
The Boat Project/everythingwillbefine
Artist Garden | 2018 – 2020
Canadian artist Ernest Daetwyler will build a site-specific work in the Museum’s Artist Garden this summer. He will transform pieces of driftwood into a boat form, embedded with a steelcut text message, creating an environment for both active engagement and reflection. The surreal and poetic installation is intended to symbolize a time of change, challenges, and the existential fluctuations that life can present.
Domestic Vessels from the Greek and Roman World
Ongoing
This new antiquities exhibition presents a picture of daily domestic life in the ancient world through objects familiar to Greek and Roman households. All vessels are drawn from McMaster Museum of Art's permanent collection.
Curated by Dr. Spencer Pope
Ongoing
This is an exhibition of twenty-two coins, mostly from the Roman Republic, dating back to Alexander the Great. They are significant for both their value to McMaster's Teaching Collection and their provenance. The Collection was generously gifted to McMaster University by McMaster astronomy professor Ethan Vishniac, who inherited it from his grandfather, renowned photographer Roman Vishniac.
Image: Vishniac 12: Roman Orichalcum Coin of Emperor Galba (AD 68-69)
OBVERSE: Laureate head of Galba, facing right, "IMP SER GALBA CAES AUG TR P".
REVERSE: Libertas (deity representing Liberty) standing left, holding pileus and rod, "LIBERTAS PUBLICA SC".