From July 10 to August 28, 2022, the Stewart Hall Art Gallery is happy to present the Traversée/Crossing exhibition curated by Didier Morelli, featuring works of artists Lori Blondeau, Chris Boyne, Michelle Furlong, Mark Igloliorte, Hazel Meyer, François Morelli, Nadia Myre and Derrick WoodsMorrow.
Traversée/Crossing explores the rich connections between watersports and contemporary art, featuring practices, spaces, and rituals associated with swimming, diving, surfing, canoeing, kayaking, and boating. In doing so, it considers how aquatics address important cultural, socio-political, and economic questions. Artworks by Lori Blondeau, Mark Igloliorte, Derrick Woods-Morrow and Nadia Myre show, for example, how present-day water sports are often rooted in colonial histories or sites of exclusionary behaviours, while celebrating queer, Black, and Indigenous life, reclaiming the water as a safe, spiritual space of leisure.
Vibrant and playful sculptures and installations by Hazel Meyer, Chris Boyne and François Morelli echo a fascination for watersport and seafaring universes. In her in-situ response in the Project Room, Michelle Furlong applies her spatial sensitivities to the ebbs and flows of water. Through site-specific, sculptural installation of varying scales, she bridges the environmental fluidity of Lake Saint-Louis with the interior space of the Stewart Hall Art Gallery.
Each artist in the exhibition presents their own relationship to water, underscoring how below their surfaces, all watersports come with their own individual and complex legacies and histories, all while testifying to a love for water sports and physical activity.
Sunday, July 10, 2022, 2 p.m.: Vernissage
For Family: Art Activity in the Park – with Stewart Hall Art Gallery animators
For adults: Writing Workshop – Swimming as a Catalyst for Creativity – with author and poet Vanessa Bell
