Thames Art Gallery 2021 Exhibitions
Legends Are the Rivers that Take Us Home
Guest Curator: Cara Eastcott
January 17 – March 15, 2020
Curator Talk: March 1, 2020
Legends Are the Rivers that Take Us Home celebrates a collection of storytellers and storytelling through art based on sound, fine craftsmanship, film-making, dance, movement, and space. It highlights those who endeavour, through their stories, to shape the meaning of “now” – through concepts of place, history, and the power of listening. This thought-provoking exhibition encourages us to explore our own paths and the paths of others, and examine the places where these paths intersect.
Messagers’ Forum:
Patrick Mahon
September 16 2020 – January 10 2021
Artist Talk: September 18& 19, 2020
Messagers’ Forum extends from Mahon’s longstanding practice with print media, sculpture, and art projects that engage themes of environment, and decolonization. With Messagers’ Forum, Mahon addresses a world filled with beauty, contradiction, and injustice to ask two essential questions, “Can we be Messagers that connect, build, hope, and dream - together?” And if so, “How do we reach across?”
The Question’s Project
A Collaboration with Ursuline College Students in Chatham, Ontario
September 16 2020 – January 10 2021
Accompanying Patrick Mahon’s Messagers’ Forum, a graphic poster installation entitled The Questions Project was presented by the students of Ursuline College. The students developed works that spoke directly to questions they had regarding various unfolding social circumstances – including questions that arose amidst the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and those that surrounded the Black Lives Matter protests. Ultimately, the students’ project had a timely resonance that aligned with Patrick Mahon’s exhibition in pondering how we build community, now and in the future, under conditions of normalcy or otherwise. Inferentially, it asked us: can we be “messagers” that connect, build, hope, and dream together?