The Thunder Bay Art Gallery Opens Newest exhibition: The North Now

Nov 13, 2019 @ 08:01

The Thunder Bay Art Gallery is excited to announce the opening of its newest exhibition: The North Now.

Featuring art from across Northern Ontario, this multi-disciplinary juried exhibition provides a glimpse of the immense creativity, diversity and innovation by established and emerging artists living in the North of the province. Artists from across Northern Ontario were invited to submit original works of art created within the last two years for consideration by a jury of arts professionals. Artists were encouraged to submit work that challenges, expands and innovates.

98 different artists submitted 232 works for consideration, and 47 artist were selected and 54 works were chosen for the exhibition.

The communities the artists represent in the exhibition are: Atikokan, Fort William First Nation, Gorham, Kakabeka Falls, Kaministiqua, Kenabeek, Kenora, Marathon, Murillo, Neebing, Red Lake, Rossport, Sault Ste. Marie, Serpent River First Nation, Shuniah, and Thunder Bay.

This is the second juried exhibition organized by the Gallery in five years. The last one being in October 2014.

The exhibition jurors are:

Frank Shebageget (Ojibway) is from Northwestern Ontario, and currently resides in Ottawa. As an installation artist, his work reflects his continued interest in the geography of the Canadian Shield and the aesthetic qualities of everyday materials. Through the use of repetition, he explores the tense relationships between production, consumption, and the economics of beauty, often by playing with the incongruity of mass production versus the handcrafted object.

Janet Clark is a researcher, lecturer and visual artist. She is a former Curator at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at Lakehead University. Currently she continues to work as an Independent Curator and also as Course Co-ordinator for Women and the Arts courses in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Department of Thorneloe University in Sudbury, ON. As a visual artist, she maintains a studio practice revisiting an earlier career investigation of collage by integrating colour, texture, and landscape elements in works on paper and canvas.

“As jurors, we endeavoured to choose work for this 2019 Northern Ontario Juried Exhibition that reflected the general guidelines given to us by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.  The guidelines were straightforward: to present a diversity of artwork from emerging, mid-career and senior artists from across Northern Ontario, and to showcase artwork that conceptually challenges as well as aesthetically pleases. For us, the selection process itself was not quite so straightforward and was most certainly a challenge. With over two hundred works by ninety-eight artists to consider, we had to whittle down the submissions into a cohesive exhibition that would showcase art making across this vast geography that is northern Ontario.  We hope we have been successful and that viewers will appreciate both the broad range of mediums presented, the high calibre of work within these mediums, and the uniqueness of expression whether it be responses to the northern environment, its history or politics, or individual explorations of themes, concepts and contexts.  Finally, the artists in the exhibition collectively reflect a commitment to exhibiting and professionalizing their craft and we congratulate them and wish them continued success.” — Janet Clark & Frank Shebageget

Director Sharon Goodwin explained, “The Thunder Bay Art Gallery is proud to present this outstanding exhibition highlighting the amazing diversity of contemporary work created by artists from across Northern Ontario.” 

This Media Release