TORONTO.- “I’m a Canadian,” Joyce Wieland told the New York Times in 1971. “I believe in Canada. We should work for a unified Canada —English and French—as Canadians, not as anti-Americans. We should be more positive about ourselves.” Just in time for Canada Day, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) welcomes home the radical beauty of famed Toronto artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland (1930-1998). The most ambitious retrospective of her work ever mounted, Joyce Wieland: Heart On opens today, featuring more than 120 works of art, including newly restored films and plastic hangings, paintings, textiles, collages, sculptures, drawings, and a recreation of her 1982 earthwork, Venus of Scarborough.

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During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Wieland’s humorous and biting artistry helped give shape to this country’s changing ideas about gender, nationhood, and ecology—topics that again dominate the headlines. For co-curators Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, AGO, and Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Wieland’s renewed relevance is no surprise.

“Wieland was an artist ahead of her time in so many ways —in her multifaceted approach to materials, her feminist politics, and in her generosity in collaboration,” says Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, AGO. “Her concerns are still very much our concerns – and as US imperialism again dominates headlines, her complicated, joyful brand of nationalism is needed more than ever. A Toronto artist whose legacy continues to inspire generations, she taught us that it is possible to question and refashion our patriotic symbols in our own likeness so that we might see Canada for what she really is and love her all the more.”

“As excited as I am for visitors to discover the beauty of her sensational paintings, the layered wit of her textile pieces, and the eloquence of her experimental films, I am just as excited for them to see her authentic voice—one that consistently strove to be inclusive, that saw artmaking as an act of care —which resonates strongly today,” says Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art at the MMFA.

On view on Level 5, with more artworks in the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art and in Grange Park, the retrospective is loosely chronological, highlighting how, through a range of materials and techniques, she explored female sexuality, civil rights, Canadian sovereignty, the threat of US imperialism, and ecological devastation.

Wieland’s love of drawing was foundational to her becoming an artist, and the exhibition opens with a selection of her earliest paintings and drawings, including the ink-on-paper drawing Portrait (1954) and oil on canvas self-portrait Myself (1958). Her works from this period, which spanned the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, were informed by her study in graphic design, film and animation, and her own sexuality. They reflect her early engagement with international abstract art movements and experiments with the materiality of paint and collage.

Painted in 1961, Laura Secord Saves Upper Canada marks the beginning of Wieland’s adoption of Canadian subject matter. In an approach that echoed her peers Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg, the figure of Laura Secord is present only in the artwork’s title. The symbol of the British flag, a spiral, and hand-drawn numbers and arrows that are visible evoke the classroom context in which the artist first learned about Secord and her heroic flight to warn the British during the War of 1812.

Throughout the 1960’s Wieland established her reputation as an experimental filmmaker in New York City’s avant-garde scene while also producing paintings, assemblages, and textiles. This exhibition places side by side for the first time ever her experimental films, Sailboat (1964), Water Sark (1965), Handtinting (1967), and Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), with what she called her “filmic paintings,” highlighting the parallels between her visual arts and cinematic practices. Also, gathered for the first time since 1967 are 12 of her 15 plastic hangings, refreshed thanks to extensive conservation treatment.

Harnessing the skills of Canadian craftswomen, Wieland appropriated, personalized, and feminized many of Canada’s official symbols, including flags, anthems, government reports, and political slogans. The exhibition includes a wide selection of her textile works—quilted, embroidered, and knitted. Unique for the time, Wieland credited her collaborators, among them Joan Stewart, Valerie McMillan, and Joan McGregor, cementing her prescient belief in craft as high art and in collaboration. Their names are included in the exhibition labels. Making its AGO debut, on loan from the City of Toronto’s Public Art and Monuments Collection, is Barren Ground Caribou (1978), a 9-meter-long quilt commissioned for Spadina Station.

Throughout the 1970s, Wieland’s ecological activism and fascination with the Arctic deepened. “I am” she said in 1974, “very aware of the fact that there is Art and there is Politics, and I have been working on putting them together for aesthetic terms for years.” Making its public debut, the exhibition includes the 7-meter quilt Defend the Earth (1972), a bilingual artwork commissioned for and housed at the National Research Council Canada Science Library in Ottawa.

Highlighting her relationship with Kinngait artist Surusilutu Ashoona, the exhibition includes Wieland’s two portrait prints, Soroseelutu, Cape Dorset (1977) and Soroseelutu, Artist of Cape Dorset (1979). In tandem with the exhibition, beginning June 28, the AGO will feature an installation of Surusilutu Ashoona’s prints.

Celebrating the female form and the sensual language of creation, visitors are invited to get up close with the delicate, coloured pencil drawings from Wieland’s The Bloom of Matter series. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of her late paintings, including Artist on Fire (1983) and Mozart and Wieland (1986). Blending vivid colour and figuration with a dramatic gestural painting style, they recall her early stained canvases as well as her early explorations of female sexuality and affirm drawing as the foundation for Wieland’s artistic practice.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication celebrating Wieland’s multifaceted career as a painter, filmmaker, and cultural activist. Richly illustrated and 288 pages, Joyce Wieland: Heart On is co-published by the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Goose Lane Editions and includes texts by art historians, artists, and curators, as well as personal reflections from her friends and collaborators. French and English editions available. In addition, archival materials, a deeply researched chronology, and excerpts of Wieland’s own writings offer a deeper understanding of the artist’s extraordinary career and the social and political context in which she was creating.