Launching into winter

Launching into winter

By Communications Staff

January 19, 2017

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[North Baffin Island]
Cornelius (Kooneeloosee) Nutarak (Pond Inlet), Using Blubber to Make Fuel, 1964, graphite, pencil crayon on paper, 50 x 65 cm, Canadian Museum of History, IV-C-6952

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre will be celebrating the Winter Season launch on Thursday, Jan. 19 with five new exhibitions.

“It’s always exciting to share the fruit of the curatorial team’s creative labour at the season launch,” says Jan Allen, Director of the Agnes. “This winter’s suite of beautiful new exhibitions is especially rich, building as it does on our work with many collaborators and contributors. The program showcases fascinating cultural and technical research, and, at the same time offers unexpected forms of display that invite the visitor to become part of the show.”   

Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawings from 1964 is Curator of Indigenous Art Norman Vorano’s first major research project since joining the Agnes. The deeply original, revelatory show is based on a selection of works on paper from the collection of the Canadian Museum of History, and enriched by interviews Dr. Vorano conducted last summer in Nunavut. The exhibition show will travel to the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, and to North Baffin communities following its run in Kingston.

In Curator of Contemporary Art Sunny Kerr’s inventive The hold, artistic themes of hospitality and collective awareness are extended, stretching the definition of what a gallery space can be.

Amid a selection of works from the collection, the contemporary galleries will be outfitted with study spaces for public use. In turn, the art has been chosen to sympathize with such places for thinking, which are ripe for informal encounters and escape plans. The resulting show is a set of diverse works held together by their spirit of research, searching inscriptions, playful assemblage and imagined collectivities, including pieces by Napoleon Brousseau, Lyne Lapointe and Martha Fleming, Gustav Klimt, Nobuo Kubota, Pablo Picasso, Anne Ramsden, Ted Rettig, Gabrielle Sims, Lisa Visser and Tim Whiten.

Pursuing answers in another direction, The Unvarnished Truth and Key Works Unlocked exhibitions delve under the surface of historical paintings to discover new evidence and inform fresh accounts of their histories.

Two of a Kind showcases the fascinating 18th-century European tradition of pairing prints. This exhibition was initiated by, and honours, a great scholar and long-standing friend of the Agnes, the late W. McAllister (Mac) Johnson.