Essays
Read our curatorial essays on the shows and events that we’ve presented. Get the insider view on our thinking and approach to the process.
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Essay: Rupen: Full Measure
Rupen’s Full Measure is a show that reveals its complexity gradually. Take your time. Fourteen panels, approximately sixteen inches square are evenly spaced across the long wall of the gallery. Each panel is anchored by a single colour. So far, so simple. But on closer inspection the surfaces reveal structure, lines, and grids. As these…
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Essay: Geometry, The Graphic Power of Simple Things
There is something compelling about art that works with a limited visual vocabulary. A line, a shape, a repeated object, a grid or a simple arrangement can hold our attention without needing to tell us exactly what we are looking at or what we should think about it. The works in Geometry are very different…
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Essay: Anthropomorphism and the Human Need to See Ourselves
Have you ever noticed a face in the front of a car? A surprised expression in an electrical outlet? An old man in the trunk of a tree? Once you see it, it can be surprisingly difficult to make it disappear. Two dots become eyes, a line becomes a mouth, and suddenly an ordinary object…
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Essay: Tanya Read & Viz Saraby
There’s a wall at GUM, thirty feet long. For this show its split in half. On one side: a cartoon everyman who’s been failing gently since 1998. On the other: a traffic cone with opinions and questions about safety. At first glance you might expect light hearted comedy. Look closer, and something else happens. Tanya…
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Essay: Detail to Attention
Eric Busch and Harry Wagter at GUM Gallery, Meaford Detail to Attention, at GUM Gallery in Meaford, brings together photographs by Eric Busch and wall reliefs by Harry Wagter in an exhibition that asks viewers to slow down and look carefully. Though their methods differ, both artists work at the point where recognition gives way…
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Essay: The Internal Universe
When the GUM Gallery opened Mikael Sandblom’s showThe Internal Universe from April 30 to May 29, the exhibition helped establish the tone of Meaford’s newest experimental arts space. The exhibition invited viewers into a shifting terrain between perception and imagination, where familiar forms dissolved into layered visual experiences that seemed to change with time and…