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Jimson Bowler: Muskrat Love (Zhusk Ode Min)

Opening Reception
Thursday June 13, 2013 - 8pm to 9pm

  • Muskrat Love (Zhusk Ode Min) exhibition view
  • Spear-It Canoe
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  • Muskrat Love (Zhusk Ode Min) exhibition view
  • Spear-It Canoe
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For more than a decade, Peterborough-based artist Jimson Bowler has created installations, performances, and paintings that explore relations between history, the native body, and the environment. In contrast to the scale and durability of monumental sculpture or architecture, Bowler’s land- and water-going, vessel-like sculptures, that come replete with travellers gear and map like paintings, are deeply concerned with ‘the people’ who activate them and their place in world.

Created using materials found in the natural and industrial worlds, the artist’s solo AGP show is inspired by pictures and stories of the muskrat, trickster/nanaaboozhooo, found on the Peterborough Petroglyphs and gathered from Elders.

Using found colonial landscape paintings as the ground for a suite of ten works, Bowler prompts viewers to notice that historically, European artists appropriated the North American landscape and represented it in a European style. To complete the look, the landscape is enclosed in traditional ornate frames. Jimson reappropriates or reclaims this imagery by painting Anishinaabe symbols and animal tracks over these varnished surfaces, transgressing their frames. The artist reminds viewers that first animals and first peoples have always been there.

Addressing this and the interconnectedness between the gallery’s architecture located on the riparian zone between Little Lake and downtown Peterborough, Bowler’s love song of a show allows visitors/participants to enter nature through a diverse collection of sculptures and paintings presented in the gallery and on its grounds.

Curator: Carla Garnet

Both Meryl McMaster: In-Between Worlds and Jimson Bowler: Muskrat Love (Zhusk Ode Min) support the school education program Bimaadiziwin-The Art of Living in a Good Way, exploring First Nations contemporary arts.
Available for one day, June 21, 2013

Bimaadiziwin-The Art of Living in a Good Way, is presented in celebration of National Aboriginal Day.

Regular Hours: Wednesday to Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is by Donation.

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