North America’s Great Lakes hold 21 per cent of the planet’s fresh water. These five massive bodies of water are vital to the health and wellbeing of 33 million people in Canada and the United States. It’s little wonder the Anishinaabe call them the “lifeblood of Mother Earth.”

Presented by the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the exhibition Identity: Art Inspired by the Great Lakes offers glimpses of the lakes and their landscapes through painting, photography, sculpture and social media. Among the sundry artists gathered for this show are three with deep OCAD University roots:

  • George Agnew Reid: a student at the Ontario College of Art in 1879 and its principal from 1912 to 1918
  • Bonnie Devine: founding chair of OCAD U’s Indigenous Visual Culture Program
  • Meryl McMaster: graduate of OCAD U’s Photography program

In this InStudio feature, we are re-presenting the works by Reid, Devine and McMaster on display in Identity. And we shot a video that will give you a virtual tour of the exhibition, which is mounted in the Lieutenant Governor’s magnificent nineteenth-century suite at Queen’s Park.

The curators of the exhibition — Debi Perna and Lani Wilson — also kindly shared their professional insights on the show’s origins, guiding concept, landscape art and OCAD U’s participating artists. (Perna also designed the lush catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.)
 

INSTUDIO: What was the genesis of this exhibition?

Debi Perna: Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell’s key objective was to bring emphasis to the Great Lakes as a source of pride and identity for all Ontarians.

Lani Wilson: In order to accomplish that goal, Her Honour sought to showcase contemporary artworks, while at the same time acknowledging the traditional inspirations of historical paintings.

INSTUDIO: What is the significance of the title “Identity”?

Perna: Identity functions as the exhibition’s title on many levels. At its deepest, personal identification with these lakes was a sentiment expressed by almost all the participating artists, however diverse their approaches and experiences. Wanda Koop’s painting, for instance, reveals the powerful impression made on her by a voyage down the St. Lawrence Seaway. Tom Campbell says the shores of Georgian Bay hold a central place in his psyche, while Charles Meanwell returned to the region around Lake Superior where, as a young man, he had spent time planting trees.

Wilson: As we developed the show, we found that artists wanted to tell us about their own connections to the Great Lakes. They spoke of the lakes with awe at their vastness and of their importance to the province and its history. The sense of connection to and identification with the lakes is vivid, for example, in Laura Pedersen’s The Leuty Project, which combines photographs of the same Lake Ontario view she took each day for a year and shared on social media.

INSTUDIO: How do you explain artists’ ongoing engagement with landscape art?

Perna: Identity also speaks to the perennial fascination of landscape art, which itself, I believe, stems from the natural environment’s undeniable presence in our lives.

Wilson: Artists are forever pursuing new ways to depict their surroundings. They seek to re-experience the landscape through new and various media, and to use these outlets to create memories, moods and emotions at the same time as the landscape continues to change around us.

INSTUDIO: How do you interpret the works of George Reid, Bonnie Devine and Meryl McMaster within the context of the exhibition?

Wilson: The eight George Reid paintings that greet visitors as they step into Her Honour’s suite are part of a donation of over 400 paintings Reid made to the Government of Ontario in 1944. They are superb examples of traditional landscape art, and their specific connection to locations across southern and northern Ontario make them easy to relate to and enjoy.

But Reid’s canvases are more than historical illustrations of Ontario’s landscape in the early 20th century. They are high-quality examples of technique, line, form and colour. Each one is a deeply thoughtful composition.


 

 

Perna: Meryl McMaster’s series In-Between Worlds explores her bi-cultural heritage and self-identity. Here, McMaster incorporates imagery that I’m not sure can be confined to the landscape genre per se. That said, both landscape and identity factor significantly into her inspired art.

Bonnie Devine’s conceptual mixed media and cast glass sculpture bring a powerful contemporary connection to her Ojibwa heritage. Devine’s visual interpretations of cultural stories from her past and her strong link with the place where she grew up in Northern Ontario express the essence of the theme of landscape and identity this exhibition sought to illuminate.

 

 

 

 

Video by Martin Iskander