The Art Gallery of Windsor Presents Hot Nights – Cool Art

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Joyce Wieland, Reason Over Passion, 1968

The Art Gallery of Windsor presents Hot Nights-Cool Art, an opening reception & party to launch the summer season with exciting and innovative exhibitions that examine the complexities of national identity in contemporary Canadian society.

Join The galleries newly appointed Curator of Contemporary Art, Srimoyee Mitra, guest curators Minh Nguyen and Johanna Mizgala and well-known artist Annie MacDonell for a tour of the exhibitions. 

Patriot Loves: Visions of Canada in the Feminine, curated by Minh Nguyen explores three distinct perspectives in the feminist critique of Canadian nationalism with landmark work by Joyce Wieland, Nadia Myre and Cynthia Girard. Canadian women artists have long embraced the challenges of illuminating the complex terrain of our nation — its history and many distinctive cultures. Through imagining and representing their experiences from often personal points of view, these artists assert the importance of women’s roles as nation builders and storytellers.
Organized and circulated by Carleton University Art Gallery.

Contemporary Voices with Jeff Thomas and Shelley Niro expand on narratives of Canada’s national identity from Indigenous perspectives. They open up a dialogue on agency and control, absence and presence of Indigenous cultures within Canadian society today. Their photographs draw on a wide range of references from personal photographs, historical paintings to figurines of Indigenous chiefs that are found in toy and souvenir shops to stage nuanced perspectives on the changing and amorphous conditions in which Indigenous cultures exist today.
Organized and circulated by Portrait Gallery of Canada / Library and Archives Canada.

Annie MacDonell : The Abyss and The Horizon invites the audience to re-consider humanity’s fraught relationship with nature. MacDonell’s work is not delimited by a specific medium. Her practice often intersects photography, installation and sculpture. The most recent work in the show, the series To Everything There is a Season, departs from found landscape photographs of locations including Ellesmere Island, Drumheller and Black Diamond. MacDonell uses both traditional and digital collage processes to reconfigure the original images, generating a mediated and psychological vision of these epic locations.

Diana Thorneycroft: Canada, Myth and History Group of Seven Awkward Moments Series are images of everyday contemporary life and historical events familiar to Canadians. They represent historical figures, celebrated personalities, pop culture characters, and the general public absorbed in social activities (such as fishing, camping and skating) that tell the stories of the Canadian nation. On the surface, the images are amusing – they appear to engage in harmless parody of a people focused on daily mundane pursuits. In so doing they bring to the fore issues that are unpleasant and uncover a ‘reality’ of the Canadian condition that is not all perfect. The very same images that boast native pride are also marred by references to identity crisis, social anxiety and apathy, existential absurdity, environmental destruction, and human propensity to violence.

The opening reception will also feature live music by Windsor’s Bob Gabriel, part of an AGW partnership with 100 Years of Music.

Hot Nights – Cool Art is this Thursday from 7pm to 10pm on the third floor of the Art Gallery of Windsor.