Taking Root: An unveiling
The Art Gallery of Hamilton’s exhibition highlights 90 works by 63 artists from different times and places. They are among additions to its permanent collection made over the past 15 years. The exhibition runs until Jan. 4.
While focusing largely on the here and now, history lessons resonate through Taking Root, an exhibition of recent additions to the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s permanent collection on view through the end of this year. This is perhaps seen most clearly in Métis artist Rosalie Favell’s The Collector/The Artist in Her Museum. A painting that mimics the composition of Charles Wilson Peale’s 1822 work The Artist in His Museum, where Favell depicts herself drawing back a red velvet curtain to reveal her personal memories and culture, in marked contrast to the original’s display of material accumulation taken indiscriminately from all corners of the world.
Prior to CEO Shelley Falconer’s arrival in 2014, the AGH collection was shaped largely by private donations that reflected a wealthy bias towards the historical and European, not unlike the distant archives of Peale’s painting. In some ways, the origin of Taking Root lies in the AGH’s sale of the 19th-century painting Christ Before Pilate by Mihály Munkácsy to Hungary in 2015, which restored a historically significant canvas to its original cultural context and generated new funds to purchase contemporary art with a strategic focus on BIPOC and Hamilton region artists.
This purchasing power has been put to very active use. When AGH curators Tobi Bruce and Melissa Bennett requested a database search of acquisitions for the last 15 years, the results filled over 350 pages. Guided in part by the underrepresented voices that shaped Falconer’s selections for last year’s exhibition, Directors Collect, Bennett sought out the themes and ideas that would narrow down this daunting list of options and give shape to Taking Root.
The result is a conceptually rich display of over 90 works by 63 artists that centres the artist’s voice as a recurring motif through sections that focus on portraits, activism, and the role of art in bearing witness to society. These sweeping themes allowed the curators to reveal what Bennett calls the “connective tissue within a collection” – the ways artworks from different times and places speak to each other in a shared environment. Here, local and regional artists are displayed in dialogue with historical works and artists whose reputations reach the international level.
An Whitlock’s Report on Business is among the first works to greet visitors to Taking Root and is exhibited here for the first time since it entered the collection in 2019. A major work by an underappreciated woman artist now in her 80s, this installation owes its sombre punch to a staggering array of papier-mâché shoes made from the cryptic stock reports of the Globe and Mail’s former financial section, all painted a flat black. Each pair is hauntingly realistic down to their tiny straps and buckles, save for the strange hollow space that drops down into their high heels. Impressive for both its craft and scale, this is a deeply human work that gestures towards the unknowable distances walked by individual selves.
The section of Taking Root dedicated to activist stories forges meaningful ties between Hamilton artists and labour communities. Included here are Roger Ferreira’s stoic watercolour Peace March, photocollages of striking factory workers by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, and the iconic etchings of early 20th-century Hamilton artist Leonard Hutchinson. Collectively, these works elevate the everyday heroism of working people in a distinctly Hamiltonian voice. Lorne Toews’ portrait of fellow artist Catherine Gibbon is equally moving, exuding warmth and quiet presence in a tender memorial to the late Hamilton painter.
Alex Jacobs-Blum is powerfully represented here with Echoes from the Stars, a magical photograph of waves breaking on the shore of Cayuga Lake in a cascade of reflected sunlight that sparks like fire. This young artist’s work more than holds its own in a gallery that includes excerpts from Larry Fink’s Social Graces series and the tense human drama of Ruth Kaplan’s The Crossing – a series documenting asylum seekers at the former Roxham Road border crossing into Quebec. Dianne Bos’ pinhole images of World War I battlegrounds echo with the buried human cost of peace, while honouring a Hamilton-born artist whose history with the AGH reaches back to her early years as a co-op student and educator.
While Samuel Thomas’ Four Seasons Bags: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter are still in the final stages of accessioning, these will soon become the first beadworks to enter the AGH collection. The inclusion of an artform with deep roots in this land follows from the 2023 touring exhibition Radical Stitch, which brought Thomas to the attention of both the AGH and the wider public. While Thomas died last year, his raised Iroquois beadwork endures here as testament to his life’s work to preserve and advance an artform embraced by many young artists today.
The AGH’s recent exhibitions reverberate through much of Taking Root, summoning fond memories of Nathan Eugene Carson’s exuberant vinyl nights during his 2022 residency, or the monumental punch of Syrus Marcus Ware’s activist banners in the AGH lobby the following year. Witnessing Take Root Amongst the Stars hung at eye level is an exceptional opportunity to appreciate the frayed edges and safety pins that attest to the scrappy community-made origin of the work and reveal the vulnerable heart of protest. As both a declarative image and fragile object, the banner that lends its title to this exhibition via the words of Octavia Butler, shows that the art worth preserving is also the work of history in the making.
Taking Root runs until Jan. 4.
