Until November 24, the Northern Ontario Visual Arts Hive (NOVAH) will host its first touring exhibit.
The Portraits North of 17 exhibition displays the “characters” of Northern Ontario and will feature a group show of paintings, prints and photographs by eight artists from across Northeastern Ontario. The curators say the beautiful lands to the north of Highway 17 are populated by some very fascinating characters and this exhibition focuses on “folks we’ve known or know and on artistic tradition of the portrait.”
Co-curators, Bruce Cull and Dermot Wilson reached out to a very select group of artists in the communities of Timmins, Kirkland Lake, the Tri-Towns and North Bay. It was, in many ways, an artistic experiment that would challenge the chosen artists and would perhaps be important as an expression of what it is to be a Northerner. The result of this experiment is a wonderful selection of works depicting many different folks from many communities across Northeastern Ontario. It includes eight self-portraits by the artists, portraits of friends and a Northern Ontario “take” on the finest of all portrait artists, a selection of “collaborative portraits” and a nod by each artist to the greatest portrait painter of them all, Rembrandt van Rijn.
The exhibit, on display at the new NOVAH gallery at 176 Lakeshore Drive, also includes portraits reproduced in many different artistic mediums. Part of the appeal of the exhibit is that it is very much about traditional and contemporary practices as they are employed by the artist working within the genre of portraiture.
The eight artists participating in Portraits North of 17 include Catharine Cribbs, Reno Couchie, Cesar Forero, Sue Gamble, Bruce Cull, Tom Red, Margot Cormier Splane and Iris Shields. Gamble and Forero are from the Kirkland Lake area. Cribbs and Cormier Splane are professional artists working in Timmins, Ontario. Cull and Shields live in the Tri-Towns area and Couchie and Red work out of North Bay.
