2023 exhibitions

January 26 to April 16, 2023  

Opening: Thursday, January 26, 5:30 to 7:30 pm 

Artists’ tour: Sunday, February 12, 2 pm
Free admission. Presented in English. 

Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance during exhibit events. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF - 5.3 MB ]

This exhibition brings together artists offering different generational perspectives on queer politics. What connects these distinct artistic practices is a common critique of pervasive heteronormative structures that aim to preserve traditional social values and render queer lives silent. The artists simultaneously caution against the dangerous effects of “homonormativity,” a term which suggests the assimilation and erasure of queer thought in exchange for 2SLGBTQ+ representation, recognition, and inclusion. Notably, the works on display suggest the urgency of foregrounding diverse, intersectional voices in queer political discourse. In addition, exploring themes of social acceptability and sexual freedom, Loewen, Pantieras, and Stewart address the question of erotic attraction that lies at the heart of queer community-building. The viewer is thus invited to contemplate definitions of queerness that stray from the capture of normative life. Yet the underlying question remains: What does it mean to reimagine community against the backdrop of a digital pre-post-pandemic society? Connecting the weight of history to possibilities of the future, Thresholds articulates modes of queer desire that center on pleasure, care, and resilience.   

- Excerpt by Adam Barbu

Biographies 

Sam Loewen is a queer, interdisciplinary artist and creative designer living in Ottawa. Loewen earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. His artistic practice explores codification methods within Western culture to discuss queer ‘masculine’ identities through various mixed media and creative outputs. 

Christos Pantieras works in sculpture, installation, and mixed media to explore themes of communication, relationships, and personal connections. Select exhibitions at the following galleries include: The Ottawa Art Gallery (Ottawa), The ArQuives (Toronto), Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre (Kingston), CIRCA Art Actuel (Montreal), and Artcite Inc. (Windsor). He has received professional grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Ottawa, and some of his work is included in the City of Ottawa Art Collection and the Permanent Collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery. Pantieras was shortlisted for the Ottawa Arts Council Mid-Career Award (2019) and was the Artist-in-Residence for the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum (2022).  

Christos Pantieras gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa.

Carl Stewart is a weaver living and working in Ottawa. For more than thirty years his socially and politically engaged and enraged textiles have celebrated, memorialized, documented and commemorated the intimate, the fabulous, the egregious and the tragic. He has received professional grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Ottawa. His work hangs in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the City of Ottawa Art Collection and the Permanent Collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery. 

Carl Stewart gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and Fiber Art Now. 

April 27 to July 16, 2023  

Opening: Thursday, April 27, 5:30 to 7:30 pm 
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance.

Artist tour: Friday, May 12, 12 pm       
Free admission. Presented in English. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 1.4 MB ] 

In The Other Side of the Vent, Ottawa-based painter Peter Kohut explores uncertainty and captivity by repeating a banal yet evocative household object – a vent in his apartment. Using pastels and printmaking rather than his usual observational oil painting, he offers a mindful look into the cracks in his walls, begging the question of what lies beyond them. He performs a modern archaeology of his space, scratching at the walls that enclose him, hoping to find meaning.   

The artist’s emotional state at the time of production – boredom, loneliness, and a yearning for a world beyond his own – is beautifully echoed in the visual qualities of these works. Likewise, Kohut’s choice of language in the title of this series evokes uncertainty in facing any boundary – of time, place, or feeling. The vent evokes an impenetrable boundary between spaces and its repeated lines, taken out of context and presented vertically, recall the enclosed spaces of cages and prisons. Thus, from our inability to penetrate the lines mounted on the wall, a sense of helplessness emerges. Beyond the vent lies a liminal space unexplored by Kohut and other tenants who have occupied his space before him.   

- Excerpt by Marianne Brown 

Biography 

Peter Kohut is an Ottawa-based painter and printmaker, born and raised in Winnipeg. After living on the West Coast (Victoria) where he worked as a graphic designer for 15 years, he then moved to Ottawa, where he is now based. Kohut holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa (2021). He has exhibited nationally in various group and solo exhibitions, and his work can be found in both the City of Ottawa Art Collection and the collection of the University of Ottawa. He is represented by Galerie St-Laurent + Hill in Ottawa.  

August 3 to October 22, 2023  

Finissage: Thursday, October 5, 5:30 to 7:30 pm 
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance.

Artist tour: Sunday, September 24, 2 pm
Free admission. Presented in English.

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 3.70 MB ] 

As soft as a minnow’s breath, the photographs in Ruth Steinberg’s exhibition The Leave-taking capture a fragility, a resilience, and an inescapable element of human existence: life, a breath, and death. The exhibition tells the story of Steinberg’s friend and neighbour Alma as she waits for her final moments in life through the services of Medical assistance in dying (MAID). While contentious for some, the exhibition doesn’t grapple with the practice itself, but instead takes the time to be with someone as they go through the process, right to the end.    

What Steinberg has captured so softly and so masterfully in The Leave-taking is a kind of legacy for both artist and subject that acts as both a personal memorial to Alma’s last days and a public meditation on living fully and dying authentically. Philosopher Martin Heidegger would argue that it is in relation to being-towards-death that one becomes passionately aware of one’s freedom. Freedom to choose, to live, to breathe, and freedom to die.   

- Excerpt by Darren Pottie 

Biography 

Ruth Steinberg is a photo-based artist who uses the camera as a tool to open doors of conversation, uplifting the voices of her subjects. Through visual storytelling she examines facets of dignity, resilience, and presence within marginalized communities, particularly with the elderly. Her work has been shown across North America and internationally including the Atrium Art Gallery in Ottawa, LACP: Centre of Photography in California, and FotoNostrum, Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona. In 2017, as part an intergenerational chain of mentorship, Steinberg was selected to exhibit in Continuum: Karsh Award artists welcome a new generation. In 2022, she received first place for the Figureworks Award. Steinberg lives in Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation.  

The artist gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council. 

November 2, 2023 to January 21, 2024  

Opening: Thursday, November 2, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance.

Artist tour: Monday, December 4, 6 pm
Free admission. Presented in English. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 3.6 MB ] 

I built this garden for us exhibits a new body of work by the talented and compassionate Martin Golland. The mixed media artworks you are invited to explore are Golland’s investigation into the duality of death and living, decomposition and creation, permanence and impermanence. The one thing he discovered all these states of being have in common is the process of transformation. All things in the practical world experience thorough and sometimes dramatic change—often, more than once.  

Inspired by the philosophical questions of the states of being and transformation, Golland’s research found him in the garden, exploring where he ends and where nature begins, and the art that may exist through the symbiotic existence of the two. Does the earth die each winter or does it just take its time to renew itself again? Does an artist live in seasons? If the vibrancy of an artist’s practice fades, are they allowed to slowly work toward their own renewal? So much of what it is to be successful in the industry of Art is to be recognized. Is this practice limiting the potential for what can be grown? Editing is like pruning, but is this aesthetic practice of pruning for the benefit of growth or does it stunt growth? 

- Excerpt by Erin Galt

Biography 

Martin Golland seeks to open emotional spaces between living forms and their representations by allowing his process to move away from logic, reason, and coherence. As images give way to the materials’ tactility, unruliness, and affective potential, the works strive to embody forces at the edge of the visible. Golland received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph (2006) and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (1998). His past exhibitions include Adisokamagan: We All Become Stories at the Ottawa Art Gallery (2018), Human Nature at the Carleton University Art Gallery (2016), Imaging Disaster at Museum London (2013), and the 11th Annual RBC Painting Competition at the National Gallery of Canada (2010). His work has been written about in numerous reviews, articles and publications and has been acquired by public and private collections across Canada and abroad. He is an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Ottawa. 

Gillian King, Cynthia O’Brien, Jakub Zdebik