Songs From the Forest – Opus I is an immersive installation that firmly situates Simpson’s perspective that was shaped by a youth spent in the Acadian forests, a professional life in forestry, and an ongoing artistic practice that remains rooted in those same forests. Day lily, iris, dandelion, rush, cattail, and other foraged native plants are processed into fibres and given new life as strange forms of nature. This work is grounded in both lived, practical knowledge and an educational perspective, tying together a studied practice of basket weaving that is at once creative and practical. Woodland Opus reflects the instinctual meeting of the natural world with human need, turning it into a woven composition of locally foraged fibres, sensory experiences (touch, smell, memory), and the complexity of environmental resiliency and adaptation.

Simpson has studied basket-making practices both worldwide and locally, demonstrating a deep understanding of their simultaneous and widespread origins, integral role in daily life, and their connection to culture and identity. This exhibition can be read as a reference of nature, labour, and creativity as well as an encounter with a process that is entangled with history, culture, and shared knowledge. A meditative ritual that creates a fantastical landscape for ecological storytelling and material understanding.

Laura Roy balances humour with the severity of health issues, using textiles and craft techniques to discuss issues like difficult to navigate hospital systems and conceptual explorations such as the blending of time spent sick, spent in limbo in waiting rooms, and moments of reprieve. Roy creates colourful, embroidered tapestries and textile installations that are informed by her own experiences with illness and her medical journey. The work is chaotic and considered, aggressive and soft, evoking a feeling of “too-muchness” and harmony that is at once disorienting, overwhelming, playful, and tactile.

Erin Goodine employs a more subtle theatricality in their paintings. Influenced by film and rooted in their drawing practices, their work blends reality and imagination, presence and absence, inside and outside. Goodine employs a variety of transparent layers and subtle textural shifts but exposes the underpainting. They depicts recognizable, physical spaces but renders them with an even colour and geometric qualities; effectively conflating two sides of the art historical shift between highly realistic paintings meant to deceive the eye (tromp l’eoil) and abstracted works that do not try to escape the inherent flatness of a canvas. The material application of Goodine’s paintings is designed to bridge the core of their practice (drawing) with painting, explore cinematic tropes, and, in doing so, pushes the physical elements of a painting to project their attempt to capture transformation, change, movement, and memory.

The work of both artists rejects the belief that physical spaces are fixed and unmoving. They make visible the fundamental porousness of places and environments that both influence and are influenced by our own bodies, our own experiences, our own memories. Using medical tools and toys commonly found in waiting rooms, Roy positions these objects as concurrent sites for trauma, nostalgia, relief, and joy while Goodine moves in and out of fixed definitions to make the familiar unfamiliar. Both demonstrate a resistance to fixed points that captures that elusive, sticky point of understanding between experience, time, and physical space.

Pastoral landscapes and coastlines form the bulk of the New Brunswick vernacular in art. Like much Atlantic Canadian work, the New Brunswick artistic tradition is an invitation into memory, emotion, and the things we hold close. Whether motivated by a desire to develop technique or to preserve a moment, landscape painting in New Brunswick reflects the artist’s lived experience, attachment to the land, and serves as a record of nature, past and present.

The paintings of Anne Hill and Michel Beaucage share a distinctive graphic quality that emphasizes the energy, lines, and shapes found in the New Brunswick landscape. Hill approaches the land through representation while Beaucage explores the natural geometry of those elements, abstracting them in imaginary and playful constructs that recreate the spectacle of experiences in nature and of nature itself.

In a contemporary space where art is expected to carry explicit meaning and livelihoods are increasingly unstable, landscape and nature painting frequently turn toward environmental concerns. Faced with the magnitude of climate change, it feels counterintuitive to stress the imminent crisis and then advocate for a moment of pause but it is necessary—to be still, to simply enjoy art and nature for the joy and connection they offer in an increasingly fast-paced and uncertain world. Métis artist Christi Belcourt articulates this powerfully: “People are not going to act for the Earth unless they remember how much it means to them.”

Among Other Places explore the landscape as an emotional space  that presents emotional perceptions rather than a geographical one. Landscape painting in New Brunswick often draws from a rooted tradition or provenance of the land, depicting it as vast and beautiful but conventional none the less. This exhibition not only offers a visual contrast to this convention but a thematic contrast as well. Whether depicting the act of travel and time through light and movement or presenting internal contemplations of leisure spaces, the mediums and methods of both artists are intentionally applied to draw us towards our experiences, using landscape as perception and memory rather than documenting the land itself.

Dan Xu’s landscapes unfold the Canadian landscape through Chinese brushwork. This integration of east and west may not be new but it can be taken for granted. It offers an important perspective on landscape painting and its place within Canadian history, where carving out a true, north, strong, and free identity from European art was parallel with colonizing the landscape.

Opposite to Dan Xu’s work is Raina Spalding’s Beach series, instead depicting an absence of landscape that evokes a sense of stillness. Spalding’s simple but iconic style combines simple compositions, people, symbols of travel and leisure, and prioritizes shadow to highlight tension.  Depicting singular subjects with only the lightest of implied context of place (the beach), Spalding presents another type of dual perception between quiet and stillness, alone and being lonely, connection and solitude.