Passages speaker series, 2018–23

—Passages, the RCA’s artist/designer speaker series, was inaugurated during our 2018 AGM weekend at Ottawa Art Gallery. Its intent is to celebrate selected strains of progressive art and architecture, as difficult as they might be to locate. Speakers to date have been Mary Anne Barkhouse, Michael Belmore, Deanna Bowen, Todd Colbourne, Luc Courchesne, Rosalie Favell, Blake Gopnik, Mitchell Hall, Kevin King, Roger Michel, Gordon Monahan, Marina Roy, Annie Thibault, Henk van Assen, and Jinny Yu.

Exhibition and performance programming, 2024

 —Bill Coleman and Gordon Monahan: Sound of Mind & Body (September 25, 2024)

Presented with DARC and Carleton University School of Music, this performance used brainwave sensing technology to produce sound, music, and movement in an extraordinary performance in the restored sanctuary of Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, Ottawa.

> See the poster here.

—Pasapkedjiwanong: Mary Anne Barkhouse and Olivia Whetung (November 2024)

Inspired by the location of the Upper Gallery space overlooking the confluence of the Ottawa, Rideau and Gatineau rivers, new works by Indigenous artists Barkhouse and Whetung will respond to the site within the overarching cultural narrative. Pasapkedjiwanong will include a catalogue with an original essay by Dr. Carmen Robertson, a Scots-Lakota professor of art history at Carleton University and be designed by Robert Tombs. ‘Pasapkedjiwanong’ is an Algonquin word which means “the river that passes between the rocks.”

—New Topographies: Barry Pottle and Leslie Reid (March 2025)

Pottle describes himself as an “Inuk urban photographer” while Reid identifies as “a settler urban dweller.” While Pottle has largely photographed the urban scene, Reid has travelled numerous times to the Canadian Arctic in recent years in order to create works in painting, photography and video. Each artist will create new works that address social justice through depictions of landscape.

Recent programming, 2020–23

—art+language: Contemporary Korean Graphic Design, Korean Cultural Centre Canada (2022–23)

The RCA was selected through a jury process to present the exhibit art+language: Contemporary Korean Graphic Design at the Korean Cultural Centre Canada in Ottawa, from November 10, 2022 to January 10, 2023. This exhibit featured the work of artist/designers Kyungsun Kymn, Kyung Park, YuJune Park, Sulki & Min, and Yongje Lee, and featured a range of exemplary work in video and generative video, installation, book and poster design, letterpress printing, web site design, and Hangeul font design. The conceptual hybridity expressed in these works, of being simultaneously influenced by both Eastern and Western traditions, contributes to South Korea having one of the most vital national graphic design traditions today. This exhibit was curated by Professor WonJoon Chung (Carleton University), Professor Henk van Assen (Yale University) and Robert Tombs (RCA). The RCA thanks the Korean Cultural Centre Canada for their collaboration on this project.

> See the poster here.

—Marina Roy, Jinny Yu & the Painted Object,
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (2023)

This exhibition was comprised of two painted works — by contemporary artists Marina Roy and Jinny Yu — who each use paint amongst an array of art media within unique studio practices. As newly-created responses to the extraordinary limestone, sandstone and shale promontory upon which the modernist white Upper Gallery space is situated — overlooking the confluence of the Rideau, Gatineau and Ottawa rivers — and with an appreciation of the commingling histories of its Indigenous and settler occupants, each artist referenced the many colonial intrusions into the unceded ancestral territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation that began in the early 1600s. Both Roy and Yu’s ongoing dialogues with painting, whether in abstract or representative terms, include references to material, process, identity, and the Anthropocene. This was Roy and Yu’s first exhibit together.

> See the poster here.

—Ghost Stations: Amanda Dawn Christie, Thaddeus Holownia & Radio Canada International, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (2022)

This exhibition was comprised of multiple works including a sound installation, digital stills and a film by Amanda Dawn Christie, Spectres of Shortwave/Ombres des ondes courtes (2016), and a portfolio of banquet camera format silver gelatin contact photographs by Thaddeus Holownia, The Radio Canada International Portfolio 1977–2006. It documented, in still and moving image, aspects of the 13 now-demolished shortwave towers of Radio Canada International’s installation on the Tantramar Marshes of Sackville, New Brunswick. With these documents of Modernity’s industrial footprint, the exhibition positioned the work of Christie and Holownia at a rich intersection of art and telecommunications engineering.

> See the poster here. See the book here.

—Objekt: ett läsrum/a reading room/une salle de lecture, Stockholm, SE (2021)

Objekt: ett läsrum/a reading room/une salle de lecture, an exhibit of 56 book works by RCA members and selected Passages speaker series guests, was held at SUPERMARKET: Stockholm Independent Art Fair. Participating artists were Mary Anne Barkhouse, Diane Leclair Bisson, Deanna Bowen, Jane Buyers, Ginette Caron, Amanda Dawn Christie, Sorel Cohen, Christos Dikeakos, Josée Dubeau, Pnina C. Gagnon, Adrian Göllner, Jerry Grey, Wesley Harris, Lucy Hogg, Thaddeus Holownia, Geoffrey James, Peter Krausz, Guy Lavigueur, Naoko Matsubara, Gordon Monahan, Robert Murray, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Leslie Reid, Marina Roy, John A. Schweitzer, Nick Shinn, Michael Snow, Alan Stein, Penelope Stewart, Robert Tombs, Henk van Assen, George Weber, Andrew Wright and Jinny Yu. We also co-presented, with Elektronmusikstudion EMS, a performance by the composer and sound artist Gordon Monahan, Boiling Water (2016). The library of Konstfack: University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm acquired the bookworks following SUPERMARKET.

> See the poster here.

—Personae: Indigenous and Canadian Portraits, 1861–2020, Portrait Gallery of Canada (2020)

Personae: Indigneous and Canadian Portraits 1861–2020 is an exhibition of portraits by artists Wally Dion, Christine Fitzgerald, Thaddeus Holownia, Ruth Kaplan, Peter Krausz, Arnaud Maggs, William Notman, Karen Stentaford, Stephen Stober, Herbert Taylor, and Robert Tombs. Any landscape where language, identity and territory are contested to the extent that they are in Canada provides numerous pitfalls to any curator who attempts to assemble a representative group portrait. Personae, while negotiating the proverbial tightrope of national portrayal, is ultimately an exhibition of work by ten artists who are each engaged, in various ways, with identity, history, processes, and thematic caprices. The viewer will hopefully be mindful that ‘art’ is a stage, and its performances here, whether graphic or photographic, are things that should be examined through a critical lens, and indeed questioned. Moving beyond this myriad of motivations and techniques, still unanswered is an essential question: who can say what a Canadian is? Afterall, we are a people who define ourselves by what we are not.

> See the on-line exhibition here.