Event type: Exhibition

The social and moral implications of retreating oneself in solitude were vigorously debated in early modern Europe. While the benefits of a solitary state were exalted in the context of study and devotional practice, they were also understood to carry a moral obligation of mental fortitude. Theologians warned that time away from family and community could lead to depressive episodes or leave one vulnerable to temptation. Who was advised—or perhaps permitted—solitude, then, was carefully negotiated by cultural and societal norms.

The artworks brought together in this exhibition illustrate how artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Campen, Heyman Dullaert and Cornelis Bisschop confronted the accepted limits of seclusion in their work. Representations of figures solitarily engaged in studies, prayer, or song provided opportunities for an artistic exploration of human interiority and helped inspire ideals of devotion and
erudition. Situated in the context of the 2020–2021 pandemic, Studies in Solitude also considers how such images participated in the development of gendered and class-based conceptions of privileged space that are still felt today.

Curated by Suzanne van de Meerendonk

Studies and Solitude and its related programs are generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Find out more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/studies-in-solitude-the-art-of-depicting-seclusion/

This exhibition explores how artworks are authenticated. During his brief six-year career as a painter, Tom Thomson (1877–1917) produced hundreds of oil sketches and a handful of canvases that responded to the mid-northern Ontario landscape. In the century following his death, he has been the subject of national myth-making and critical myth-dismantling. Perhaps one of the most recognized historical painters in Canada, he is also one of the most copied.

Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication is a kind of laboratory, organized around five themes or areas of investigation: signature, subject matter, style, materials and provenance. Each helps to guide the authentication process, providing clues but not necessarily conclusions. Bringing together forty known Thomson paintings, along with possible panels and known fakes, the exhibition makes public the behind-the-scenes work of authentication.

The exhibition is accompanied by the documentary film Finding Authenticity (2021), directed by Tyler Tekatch, and featuring artists Nathan Carson, Chaka Chikodzi, Dorian FitzGerald, Suzy Lake, Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, Anong Migwans Beam, Shelley Niro and Tim Whiten. Finding Authenticity is created as a contemporary conversation about authentication. Using the same themes explored in Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication, these nine artists reflect, respond and question notions of authenticity in artistic practice today.

Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication is organized and circulated by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, in partnership with the Canadian Conservation Institute. This exhibition is generously supported by the Museums Assistance Program, Government of Canada, and the Janet Braide Memorial Fund, Queen’s University.

Find more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/tom-thomson-the-art-of-authentication/

Chris Curreri is a Canadian artist working across film, photography and sculpture. His work lingers in liminal states, capturing processes and focusing in on the moments before identity is fixed or concepts come into light as fully intelligible, and thus taken as normative. His production is premised on the idea that things in the world are not defined by essential properties but constituted through messy exchanges with other things—all folded together in a fabric of relations that erode simple dichotomies of tenderness/violence, beauty/abjection, self/other. Curreri asks: To what extent do we open ourselves up to, or close ourselves off from, such possible penetrations? This exhibition is an allegory of these issues as if they have emerged between the closure of the aperture and the exposure of the photographic image.

A Surrogate, A Proxy, A Stand-In connects, through the artist’s own history, the experimentation of the dark room to the nighttime freedom of the gay bar. The latter is represented by the solarized photographs of the interior of the defunct Beaver, Toronto’s legendary Queen Street queer bar. Thus, the exhibition places itself on a continuum of intimacy and exchange, of haunting and helping, with Canadian Queer art history—Rodney Werden, General Idea, Will Munro and their contemporary avatars: Luis Jacob, partnering in one of the works, and Curreri himself.

Find more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/chris-curreri-a-surrogate-a-proxy-a-stand-in/

This exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, and the Toronto Arts Council. Special thank you to David Clare for his generous support of Curreri’s upcoming Agnes published monograph and for facilitating the recent acquisitions of the artist’s work for Agnes’s permanent collection.

Portrayed in simple dwellings, cave-like crevices, inhabiting trees and pondering waters, the main protagonists in this exhibition are hermits based on designs by Flemish artist Maerten de Vos (1532-1603). They were created to invite learned male urbanites to imagine themselves ensconced within such remote and secluded places. Mostly representing early Christian saints whose renunciation of bodily comfort served as examples for spiritual emulation, these intricate engravings functioned as aids in the construction of interior spaces for meditative and imaginative retreat.

Along with the hermits, these private worlds are populated by a variety of fantastical creatures that alternatively represent the boundless nature of creation and relentless pull of temptation. While such presences may denote ingrained patterns of shame surrounding sexual desire, the viewer is shamelessly implicated in these intimate scenes of withdrawal—winding landscapes and distant urban vistas serving as further reminders of what one is encouraged to escape.

Acknowledging the powerful potential of mental refuge that is inherent to viewing these prints and with a curious connection to the work of contemporary artist Chris Curreri, The Dark Room proposes a collective re-imagining of these prints to accommodate tangible but unwritten histories, vulnerable affections and shared artistic futurities.

Find more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/the-dark-room/

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Sign up: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/thursday-tour-chris-curreri-2/

Gain a new perspective and understanding of the current exhibition Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication. Join us for this free, in-person, lunch-hour tour led by our friendly Community Docents.

The exhibition Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication explores how artworks are authenticated. During his brief six-year career as a painter, Tom Thomson (1877–1917) produced hundreds of oil sketches and a handful of canvases that responded to the mid-northern Ontario landscape. In the century following his death, he has been the subject of national myth-making and critical myth-dismantling. Perhaps one of the most recognized historical painters in Canada, he is also one of the most copied.

Tom Thomson? The Art of Authentication is a kind of laboratory, organized around five themes or areas of investigation: signature, subject matter, style, materials and provenance. Each helps to guide the authentication process, providing clues but not necessarily conclusions. Bringing together forty known Thomson paintings, along with possible panels and known fakes, the exhibition makes public the behind-the-scenes work of authentication.

The Community Docent training program is supported by the Iva Speers Fund for Art Education.

The social and moral implications of retreating oneself in solitude were vigorously debated in early modern Europe. While the benefits of a solitary state were exalted in the context of study and devotional practice, they were also understood to carry a moral obligation of mental fortitude. Theologians warned that time away from family and community could lead to depressive episodes or leave one vulnerable to temptation. Who was advised—or perhaps permitted—solitude, then, was carefully negotiated by cultural and societal norms.

The artworks brought together in this exhibition illustrate how artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Campen, Heyman Dullaert and Cornelis Bisschop confronted the accepted limits of seclusion in their work. Representations of figures solitarily engaged in studies, prayer, or song provided opportunities for an artistic exploration of human interiority and helped inspire ideals of devotion and
erudition. Situated in the context of the 2020–2021 pandemic, Studies in Solitude also considers how such images participated in the development of gendered and class-based conceptions of privileged space that are still felt today.

Curated by Suzanne van de Meerendonk

Studies and Solitude and its related programs are generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Find out more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/studies-in-solitude-the-art-of-depicting-seclusion/

Portrayed in simple dwellings, cave-like crevices, inhabiting trees and pondering waters, the main protagonists in this exhibition are hermits based on designs by Flemish artist Maerten de Vos (1532-1603). They were created to invite learned male urbanites to imagine themselves ensconced within such remote and secluded places. Mostly representing early Christian saints whose renunciation of bodily comfort served as examples for spiritual emulation, these intricate engravings functioned as aids in the construction of interior spaces for meditative and imaginative retreat.

Along with the hermits, these private worlds are populated by a variety of fantastical creatures that alternatively represent the boundless nature of creation and relentless pull of temptation. While such presences may denote ingrained patterns of shame surrounding sexual desire, the viewer is shamelessly implicated in these intimate scenes of withdrawal—winding landscapes and distant urban vistas serving as further reminders of what one is encouraged to escape.

Acknowledging the powerful potential of mental refuge that is inherent to viewing these prints and with a curious connection to the work of contemporary artist Chris Curreri, The Dark Room proposes a collective re-imagining of these prints to accommodate tangible but unwritten histories, vulnerable affections and shared artistic futurities.

Find more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/the-dark-room/

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Conceived by Montreal-based, transdisciplinary practitioner Berlin Reed, Brown Butter is a curated conversation between Black Canadian artists and gastro-artist/chefs in the form of a multi-sensory arts residency and installation in Etherington House.

Brown Butter is an internalization of Black thought and a gavage of Black expression. Over six weeks, Brown Butter’s immersive, succulent environment fills every capacity for human perception. Directly inhaling, imbibing and ingesting these works, viewers of Brown Butter are implicated: some bites may taste or feel unpleasant; experiences may jar rather than soothe. Brown Butter is where gastronomic arts branch away from culinary discipline and where we return to exploring through sense our elemental roots as oral inquisitors.

Brown Butter is part of a year-long series of projects staged in Etherington House as part of “Rehoming Agnes.” These projects anticipate our closure and foreshadow our reopening, marking the transition of the house back to its original use as a residence. Brown Butter will smooth this transformation, grounding Agnes’s re-emergence as a living space in Agnes Reimagined.

Find more:https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/berlin-reed-brown-butter/

Brown Butter is generously supported by the Canada Council of the Arts.

Portrayed in simple dwellings, cave-like crevices, inhabiting trees and pondering waters, the main protagonists in this exhibition are hermits based on designs by Flemish artist Maerten de Vos (1532-1603). They were created to invite learned male urbanites to imagine themselves ensconced within such remote and secluded places. Mostly representing early Christian saints whose renunciation of bodily comfort served as examples for spiritual emulation, these intricate engravings functioned as aids in the construction of interior spaces for meditative and imaginative retreat.

Along with the hermits, these private worlds are populated by a variety of fantastical creatures that alternatively represent the boundless nature of creation and relentless pull of temptation. While such presences may denote ingrained patterns of shame surrounding sexual desire, the viewer is shamelessly implicated in these intimate scenes of withdrawal—winding landscapes and distant urban vistas serving as further reminders of what one is encouraged to escape.

Acknowledging the powerful potential of mental refuge that is inherent to viewing these prints and with a curious connection to the work of contemporary artist Chris Curreri, The Dark Room proposes a collective re-imagining of these prints to accommodate tangible but unwritten histories, vulnerable affections and shared artistic futurities.

Find more: https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/the-dark-room/

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Conceived by Montreal-based, transdisciplinary practitioner Berlin Reed, Brown Butter is a curated conversation between Black Canadian artists and gastro-artist/chefs in the form of a multi-sensory arts residency and installation in Etherington House.

Brown Butter is an internalization of Black thought and a gavage of Black expression. Over six weeks, Brown Butter’s immersive, succulent environment fills every capacity for human perception. Directly inhaling, imbibing and ingesting these works, viewers of Brown Butter are implicated: some bites may taste or feel unpleasant; experiences may jar rather than soothe. Brown Butter is where gastronomic arts branch away from culinary discipline and where we return to exploring through sense our elemental roots as oral inquisitors.

Brown Butter is part of a year-long series of projects staged in Etherington House as part of “Rehoming Agnes.” These projects anticipate our closure and foreshadow our reopening, marking the transition of the house back to its original use as a residence. Brown Butter will smooth this transformation, grounding Agnes’s re-emergence as a living space in Agnes Reimagined.

Find more:https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/berlin-reed-brown-butter/

Brown Butter is generously supported by the Canada Council of the Arts.