Âjagemô Exhibit Name
November 3, 2014 — April 14, 2015
Collecting Our Thoughts
An exhibition showcasing selected works by past winners of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, which it is celebrating its 15th year. All works are from the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank.
Robert Archambeau Iain Baxter Carl Beam Sandra Brownlee Eric Cameron Ian Carr-Harris Max Dean Tom Dean Aganetha Dyck Gathie Falk Murray Favro Robert Fones Raymond Gervais Betty Goodwin Arnaud Maggs Liz Magor Michael Snow Colette Whiten Irene Whittome Shirley Wiitasalo
Curated by Carol Wainio
Collecting Our Thoughts: The Canada Council’s Art Bank and Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts
Now in its 15th year, the list of winners of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts (GGAVMA) is long and diverse. Creating an exhibition of their work from the Canada Council Art Bank is a challenge.
The GGAVMAs share with the Art Bank a kind of “collective” approach – a bringing together of community. The act of collecting is also diverse in form and intent. It confers value – and not just the monetary kind. Collecting shells, stones, or pressed flowers was once a common practice that connected us, through objects, to personal and natural histories. Even in an age of (Western) excess, where discarding things is the subject of reality shows, and “selfies” turn our gaze towards ourselves and our backs to what we once looked at and wished to preserve, collecting remains both an act of hope and memory – one that points towards past and future.
Artists, whose end products may be gathered reverently into museum vaults, are collectors too. They are rag pickers for the rest of us, often rummaging in archives of rare materials or second hand stores to make us see things in new ways. Proposing an intersection between the award laureates and a unique art collection that holds many of their works, this exhibition draws together a group of artists whose work touches on aspects of collecting.
