Passages speaker series, 2018–22

—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, Gordon Monahan, Marina Roy, Annie Thibault, Henk van Assen, Jinny Yu, and will soon include Leslie Reid.

Exhibition programming, 2022

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

The RCA has been selected through a jury process to present the exhibit art+language—Contemporary Korean Graphic Design at the Korean Cultural Centre of Canada in Ottawa, from November 10, 2022 to January 10, 2023. This exhibit will feature the work of artist/designers Kyungsun Kymn, Kyung sik Park, YuJune Park, Sulki+Min and Yongje Lee, and feature 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 of Canada for their collaboration on this project.

—Marina Roy, Jinny Yu, and the Painted Object,
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (2022) (This exhibition has been postponed)

This exhibition of new works by Vancouver artist Marina Roy, and Ottawa and Berlin-based painter Jinny Yu, RCA will offer an opportunity for yet-to-be determined responses to the Upper Gallery space. 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 will be Roy and Yu’s first exhibit together.

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

This exhibition will be comprised of multiple works including a film by Amanda Dawn Christie, Spectres of Shortwave (2016), and a portfolio of banquet camera format silver gelatin contact photographs by Thaddeus Holownia, RCA, The Radio Canada International Portfolio 1977–2006. It will document, 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 will position the work of Christie and Holownia at a rich intersection of art and telecommunications engineering.

—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 artist information 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.