Art: What's in store for Ottawa galleries this autumn and winter

Long knives and a silent symphony

A dry, federal compendium is the launching point for Laure Bourgault’s “canadas” at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.

Peter Simpson

Editor’s note: All dates and times are tentative, as pandemic public health rules evolve. Please contact galleries before visiting to learn of any changes. Concurrent exhibitions at AXENÉO7 may challenge a viewer’s sense of how Canada looks, and how it is governed .

The exhibitions, which run Nov . 3 to Dec . 11 at the artist-run centre in Gatineau, include Laure Bourgault’s canadas, and Simon Belleau’s Pour Quelques Arpents de Neige (For a Few Acres of Snow).

Belleau’s exhibition revisits, 40 years later, a notorious moment in Canada’s political history, when prime minister Pierre Trudeau, behind Quebec’s back, turned the provincial premiers toward support for the new and bitterly contested Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms . Almost all premiers had been opposed to the Charter as an incursion on provincial jurisdictions, and none more than Quebec’s René Lévesque .

Overnight on Nov . 4, 1981, after Lévesque and his delegation had returned to Gatineau, Trudeau’s team doggedly won support for the Charter from the other premiers . The next morning Lévesque, outraged at what he saw as backstabbing by other premiers, decried it as “the night of the long knives” — a provocative label, given its origin in a night of extreme violence by the Nazi party in Germany in 1934 .

Outside of Quebec, the event and its

Simon Belleau’s For A Few Acres of Snow reconsiders an infamous night in Canadian political history.

players are better known as “the Kitchen cabinet” or “Kitchen Accord,” which describe the politicos who pushed Trudeau’s deals through overnight . “Kitchen cabinet” has its own distasteful historic connotations from the ignominious administration of American president Andrew Jackson .

“I am interested in the irony of the distinction between these two terms, which nevertheless refer to the same event,” Belleau writes . “Two very distinct terms, which nevertheless name the same event,” and are a starting point to consider “the framing of political and historical events within a larger public consciousness, the tension between individual and collective narratives, and the relationship between historical and physical time . ”

Belleau takes the title for his exhibition from Voltaire, who disdained France’s determination to colonize Canada — “a few acres of snow .” To mark the 40th anniversary of the notorious night, Belleau “takes on the role of director,” the exhibition notes say, “creating a multidisciplinary installation that retraces this almost Shakespearean episode in Canadian history .”

In the exhibition canadas, Laure Bourgault considers “the type of images and texts used to put forward a certain vision of Canadianness — a large space with pristine nature, harmonious and open to the world . Bourgault’s launching pad is the book Canada 1970, a sort of stateof-the-union compendium published in the early 1970s by the federal Dominion Bureau of Statistics (precursor to Statistics Canada) .

“Through paintings, poetic texts and sculptural elements inspired by Brutalist architecture,” the notes say, “the exhibition reworks the official Canadian rhetoric in order to propose a critical re-reading .”

AXENÉO7 is at 80 rue Hanson in Gatineau . axeneo7 .qc .ca

Interns showing the way

Not far from AXENÉO7 at the Canadian Museum of History, a team of Indigenous interns “invite you to witness the sparks currently reigniting the flames of our cultures .” Their display is titled Rekindled — Tradition, Modernity and Transformation in Indigenous Cultures.

“Following centuries of disruption, our nations have struggled to assert their cultures,” the group’s notes say . “Our religions were banned . Our land occupied . Our languages silenced . Yet we remain . It is through family knowledge, the persistence of our art, renewed relationships with the land and the reclaiming of spiritual traditions that our children will come to know the ways of our ancestors . ”

The display continues to August 2022 at the museum, 100 rue Laurier in Gatineau . historymuseum .ca

An out-of-gallery installation

The National Gallery of Canada is making superlative use of its unintended places — meaning, places that are not built as exhibition galleries, per se . The rotunda that’s outside the doors to the cafeteria, for example, is once again home to an ambitious and beautiful installation .

Symphony, by the Brooklyn-based Canadian-Jamaican artist Tau Lewis, is a new addition to the gallery’s Contemporary Projects series . It’s part of Lewis’s ongoing work known as T .A .U .B .I .S ., or the Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls . Symphony is the sovereign of T .A .U .B .I .S ., and she is built of many flowers, each one containing a soul that has been inducted into the alliance,

RBC Indigenous Internship Program co-ordinator Gaëlle Mollen, left, at the Canadian Museum of History, with interns Sarah Monnier, Kaitlyn Stephens, Shaun Canute and Skylar-James Wall. Their display, titled Rekindled — Tradition, Modernity and Transformation in Indigenous Cultures, invites you to “witness the sparks currently reigniting the flames of our cultures.”

A detail of Tau Lewis’s Symphony at the National Gallery of Canada. An image from Playing Dead, an intensely intimate exhibition by Project X Award winner Joyce Crago, at the Ottawa Art Gallery.

Andrew Morrow’s Here’s A Place To Start is scheduled to open in November at Studio 66 in the Glebe.

Drew Klassen’s work shows at Galerie St-Laurent + Hill in the ByWard Market. Onwards (But Not Forgotten), by Ava Margueritte at the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO).

“an institution similar to sainthood . They regulate the moral compass of the Universe,” she writes .

Responding to the legacy of the Black diaspora, Lewis’s textile works “are exuberant and lively sculptures, stitched together from discarded materials that have been revived by Lewis’s hand,” writes Jack Levinson, of the Night Gallery in Los Angeles, in the National Gallery’s magazine, Muse . “Immersed in falling blossoms, Lewis’s stunning sculptures create a new world from scraps of our shared history, bridging the terrestrial and the celestial, the intimate and the communal, the archival and the imagined . ”

Symphony continues to at least January, with an exact closing date TBA . 380 Sussex Dr ., gallery .ca

The enigma of detritus

One person’s trash is another’s treasure, the saying goes, and Ottawa photographer Joyce Crago’s work has been rich proof of that maxim .

Crago’s previous work has seen her mining trash as far afield as Washington, D .C ., where she searched trash cans for a “back story” of those who participated in the inauguration of U .S . president Donald Trump, or in the massive Women’s March on the capital . Her photographs of the trash are sometimes eloquent, sometimes enigmatic .

In the exhibition Playing Dead, at the Ottawa Art Gallery, Crago gets much more personal — intensely so . She uses the detritus from her sister Hazel’s funeral, and some of her late sister’s clothing, to reflect on mortality, to question “our impulse to hold onto each other and reconstitute ourselves through remnant traces,” she writes .

Playing Dead marks Crago’s selection as this year’s winner of the Project X Photography Award, which “celebrates the merits of a publicly presented photographic project by an Ottawa-based artist .” The show runs Oct . 29 to Nov . 28 . Enter the gallery on Daly Avenue . oaggao .ca

Also showing . . .

Canadian Museum of Nature: Shadowland, Dec . 10 to April, 240 McLeod St . Montreal artist Lorraine Simms’s drawings are built of ghostly layers . Simms’s graphite-on-paper works show “transcribed shadows” cast by taxidermied animals and skulls and bones . “In these works, the cast shadows become the actual subject .” nature .ca SPAO: Stay Silent Run Deep, Nov . 5 to Dec . 19, 77 Pamilla St . Artists Ava Margueritte, Margo McDiarmid, Shaelynn Tredenick and Steven West completed residencies at

the photography school during the pandemic, and the work they produced addresses questions such as, “Is there peace in solitude?” “Can my mental health be mapped?” “Where are the spaces for selfdiscovery?” “How deep does this grace go?” spao .ca

Jean-Claude Bergeron Gallery: Michel Savage, Nov . 4 to Dec . 6, 150 St . Patrick St . Montreal artist Michel Savage’s work “follows a path that privileges a symbolist poetry of the image” as he “seeks the shortest route between the emotion and the sign . ” galeriejeanclaudebergeron .ca .

Studio Sixty Six: Here’s a Place to Start, works by Andrew Morrow, Nov . 26 to January, 858 Bank St . Ottawa artist and University of Ottawa professor Andrew Morrow’s paintings “engage broad, historical themes such as war, eroticism, beauty, the apocalypse and death, complicating these through a resistance to narrative closure and spatial coherence,” the gallery says . His new works, created in studio sessions often held via internet video, explore “notions of friendship and (are) rooted in mutual recognition, opacity, stewardship, transparency and appearance .” studiosixtysix .ca Sivarulrasa Gallery: Constructs — Eric Walker and Louis Thériault, to Oct . 29, 34 Mill St ., Almonte . Walker and Thériault offer distinctive perspectives on transpor-

Anna Williams’s Untold Stories I Once Wished Lost will show at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery from Oct. 14 to Dec. 5.

Galerie St-Laurent + Hill: Drew Klassen, Nov . 11 to 30, 293 Dalhousie St . New works, including impressionistic landscapes . galeriestlaurentplushill .com tation landscapes, their work bound by an inchoate sense of unease . sivarulrasa .com .

Wall Space Gallery: Claire Desjardins, Nov . 18 to Dec . 24, 358 Richmond St . Claire Desjardins’ abstract patterns are “vibrant and dynamic compositions” that have been collected worldwide, and even reproduced on clothing and other consumer goods . wallspacegallery .ca

Carleton University Art Gallery: Nuvisi — Threading our Beads at Qatiktalik, to Dec . 12 at St . Patrick Building . Using “photographs, cultural belongings, texts, artworks and stories,” Krista Ulujuk Zawadski focuses on Qatiktalik on Hudson Bay, and explores how Inuit, including her own family, engage with the community and its cultural material . cuag .ca

Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery: Anna Williams — Untold Stories I Once Wished Lost, Oct . 14 to Dec . 5, 110 Laurier Ave . W . Ottawa artist Anna Williams says she seeks “to provoke audiences to reflect on what we have lost in our passage from nature to culture — our skewed experience of the natural world and female identity, and how this dissociation has impacted the stability of the human mind .” She does so with a fantastic world of ecology and mythology . ottawa .ca (search for “city hall gallery .”)

Contact Peter Simpson at pete@petersimpson .ca with details of your upcoming art exhibitions .