CUAG: 24 June opening of Rebecca Belmore and “The Past is Present” exhibitions

Please join the Carleton University Art Gallery for the opening of the exhibitions “Rebecca Belmore | What Is Said and What Is Done” and “The Past Is Present: Memory and Continuity in the Tyler/Brooks Collection of Inuit Art” on Monday, 24 June, from 5:00 – 7:30 p.m. The special guest speaker is Lee-Ann Martin, Curator of Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Opening remarks will take place at approximately 6:00 p.m.

CUAG is also delighted to launch two new publications. “Leslie Reid: A Darkening Vision” is published in conjunction with Reid’s recent painting retrospective and features an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Diana Nemiroff. “Erin Shirreff” is co-published with Agnes Etherington Centre (Queen’s University, Kingston) and Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and features texts by Sandra Dyck, Jan Allen, Jenifer Papararo, and Erin Shirreff. We’ll be offering a “launch-night-only” discount on these beautiful new publications.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome. Please see below for information on discount parking.

“Rebecca Belmore | What Is Said and What Is Done”
18 June – 1 September 2013
Curated by Heather Anderson
Presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art

The Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore is a storyteller who creates a poetic language of images, gestures, and actions. Her beautiful and powerful works examine traumas, injustices, and struggles of Indigenous people – past and present. This exhibition – her first solo exhibition in Ottawa – begins by evoking an historical event, the capture in 1819 of a Beothuk woman named Demasduit at Red Indian Lake, in present-day Newfoundland. Belmore’s video installation “March 5, 1819” conjures the event’s emotional trauma, bringing it into the present, and placing the viewer amidst the projected images as witness and perpetrator. Through such works that personalize history, Belmore responds to the history of contact between Indigenous and European settler populations. Presenting video, sculpture, and photographic works, “What Is Said and What Is Done” reflects upon this history, which has begun a new chapter with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Idle No More movement.

“The Past Is Present: Memory and Continuity in the Tyler/Brooks Collection of Inuit Art”
18 June – 11 August 2013
Curated by Anne de Stecher
Presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art

Priscilla Tyler and Maree Brooks’s passion for Inuit art was ignited during a chance visit to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1970. Over the following twenty years and many visits to the North, they formed friendships with Inuit artists and storytellers. Dr. Tyler and Ms. Brooks recorded narratives told by storytellers and elders in the western Arctic, and collected prints and sculptures in the eastern Arctic in which artists explored the same themes. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Priscilla Tyler and Maree Brooks’s gift to CUAG of their collection of Inuit art, “The Past is Present” features prints and sculptures by such artists as Kenojuak Ashevak, Jessie Oonark, Davidialuk, Helen Kalvak, and Luke Anguhadluq. The exhibition reflects the collectors’ holistic vision by presenting these artworks contextualized by audio and textual materials from the oral history archive. It is inspired by the narratives they recorded: accounts of life on the land, the respect for animals on which Inuit depend, and the stories that teach and preserve this knowledge. Today, their collection continues to communicate the importance of art in preserving and transmitting Inuit knowledge and culture.

These exhibitions were made possible with support from Carleton University, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Location and parking:

CUAG is located in the St. Patrick’s building, at the north end of the Carleton University campus. Here is a link to CUAG’s website, with a map and directions.
We sell $4.00 parking passes (a hangtag for your car’s rear-view mirror). Details of this are listed on the “visiting” page of CUAG’s website, below the map.

http://cuag.carleton.ca/index.php/visiting/directions/