Onsite Gallery presents two impactful new exhibitions

Image credit: Amy Wong, AMY 2 1/2 to 4 yrs., 2024 (detail), cassette tape audio recording. Image courtesy of the artist.

OCAD University’s flagship professional art gallery, Onsite Gallery, is presenting two new exhibitions that open on June 19.

_other tongues part I communication and Jean Marshall: Anikoobijikewin are the upcoming exhibitions at Onsite Gallery, alongside Glenn Gear: TakKik rising, a new digital mural featured on the exterior façade of the gallery.

Onsite Gallery presents contemporary, Indigenous, and public art and design to advance knowledge creation and stimulate local and international conversations on the urgent issues of our time. Onsite Gallery is generously supported by The Delaney Family.

_other tongues part I communication
June 19 to November 30, 2024
Main Gallery

Organized by Ryan Rice, Onsite Gallery’s Executive Director and Curator, Indigenous Art, _other tongues part I communication presents work by 13 artists who are past and current OCAD U faculty and staff: lyanu Ajagunna, Schem Rogerson Bader, Susan Blight, Simon Glass, Ursula Handleigh, Julius Poncelet Manapul, Diane Mikhael, Dr. Kathy Moscou, Par Nair, Julia Rose Sutherland, Tommy Truong, Natalie Majaba Waldburger and Amy Wing-Hann Wong.

Centered around themes of language, communication and cultural heritage, the exhibition highlights the fragility of language, more specifically, “mother tongues” present across our communities.

“_other tongues part I communication exhibits visual translations of Yoruba, Anishinaabemowin, Tagalog, Aramaic (Arabic and Hebrew), Indian, Chinese, Mi’kmaq, Syriac and English alongside interpretations of spirituality, silence and profound embodiment,” says Rice.

Mixed media artworks in the exhibition include Wong’s AMY 2 1/2 to 4 yrs., an audio recording where she has recorded herself learning how to speak Cantonese, inspired by a cassette tape recording from when she was a child; Poncelet Manapul’s Kamayan na! Erasing My Tagalog (Let’s eat with our hands now!), an installation of a dinner table setting constructed from antique plates with basmati rice and stained with Filipino soy sauce, forming Filipino/Tagalog texts; and Nair’s Letters of Haunting, where Nair writes poems to her mother on her silk sarees through hand embroidery.

The opening reception takes place on June 19 at 5 p.m.

Jean Marshall: Anikoobijikewin 
June 19 to November 30, 2024
Special Projects Gallery

Guest curated by Linda Grussani, Jean Marshall: Anikoobijikewin is the second of two solo exhibitions in the series Mawadishiwewin (visits), which delves into the connections formed through visiting, creating and sharing.

“Guest curator Linda Grussani has centered mutual relationships developed with artists at the forefront of the Mawadishiwewin (visits) project by employing Indigenous methodologies of visiting, collaborative creation, Indigenous languages and knowledge sharing,” notes Rice.

“The second solo exhibition in the series, Jean Marshall: Anikoobijikewin , centres and collapses the binary across contemporary and traditional visual culture politically, aesthetically and geographically through the artist’s work and her collaborative process of strengthening cultural vitality expressed through Indigenous ways of knowing and being.”

Marshall is a visual artist of Ahnishnaabe / English descent who was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She is a member of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, also known as Big Trout Lake, Treaty 9, and currently resides on the lands of the Animikii-Wajiw / Thunder Mountain, also known as Fort William First Nation.

She has been practising visual arts for the last 20 years, and has earned a reputation for her vibrant artwork made of beads, porcupine quills, textiles and hide.

The opening reception takes place on June 19 at 5 p.m.

Glenn Gear: TakKik rising
May to August 2024

In partnership with the Inuit Art Foundation, Onsite Gallery presents Up Front: Inuit Public Art @ Onsite Gallery, a series of commissioned digital murals by Inuit artists on the gallery’s exterior façade.

Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and settler descent currently living in Montreal. His mural, TakKik rising, is a digital collage that explores themes of symmetry, geometric design and his personal connection to traditional Inuit craft. TakKik means moon in Labrador Inuttut, and the mural celebrates the moon and natural cycles of time.

The artwork originates with photographs of beadwork and sealskin projects, juxtaposed with collected and gifted natural objects like driftwood, caribou antler and mussel shells. These images serve as the foundation for digital kaleidoscopic designs, drawing inspiration from the natural symmetry found in snowflakes, particularly their six-fold symmetry.