CLIENT EXHIBITION: Closing – Michael Belmore in “Confluences and Tributaries” @OttawaArtG Sunday, March 17 final day

MICHAEL BELMORE and A.J. CASSON
Nkweshkdaadiimgak Miinwaa Bakeziibiisan
Confluences and Tributaries
Confluents et affluents

Confluences and Tributaries is the first in the new Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) exhibition series, Firestone Reverb. In this series “contemporary artists are invited to respond to selections drawn from the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art.” O.J. and Isobel Firestone began collecting in the early 1950s. This important collection contains 1,600 works by Canadian artists, including A.J. Casson, a member of the Group of Seven. Donated to the Ontario Heritage Foundation in 1973, the collection was then transferred to the City of Ottawa in 1992. Now the “OAG houses and presents the collection through changing exhibitions that highlight its breadth and diversity.” (more info)

Curated by the OAG’s RBC Emerging Indigenous Curator, Wahsontiio Cross, Confluences and Tributaries “will coalesce the work of two artists from different cultural and generational backgrounds, to bring together the story of the Ontario landscape and the histories which go beyond its beauty.”

Pairing the work of Group of Seven painter A.J. Casson with the copper work of artist Michael Belmore, the gallery space presents two artists unique representations of the way water, rock, land, and sky, in their interaction, produce their own visual rhythms.

As Wahsontiio writes in the curatorial statement for the exhibition:

Michael Belmore will assert an Indigenous, Anishinaabe world view, re-affirming Native ways of knowing into the stories we tell and images we show of the mountains, lakes and rivers which make up the land now geographically defined as Canada. The places depicted in A.J. Casson’s oeuvre are places which, historically, bore spiritual and cultural importance to the various Anishinaabe peoples of the region. Many of these sites are marked with the experiences, legends and knowledge of generations of Anishinaabeg through the pictographs (rock art) which still inhabit these landscapes.

The exhibition opened last fall and will close this coming Sunday, March 17, 2019. Well worth a contemplative visit!

More info can be found on the OAG website.

Thanks to Julia Martin for exhibition installation images of the work of Michael Belmore.