TORONTO.- To commemorate Canada’s sesquicentennial, the Gardiner Museum has commissioned a multimedia exhibition by one of the country’s most exciting young ceramic artists that both celebrates and questions notions of Canadian identity.

“As we enter the 150th anniversary of Confederation and the Gardiner’s “Year of Canada”, we wanted to recognize the creativity that has helped Canada forge a unique and thoughtful place in the world,” says Kelvin Browne, Gardiner Museum Executive Director and CEO.

On display from February 16 to May 21, Janet Macpherson: A Canadian Bestiary conveys a very personal view of Canada that draws on the artist’s own experiences, memories of her Catholic childhood, and a distinct visual language characterized by hybrid animal creatures that stand in for the complexity of human interactions. The exhibition is made up of four immersive installations, each a distinct environment, with music by Macpherson, sound design by Justin Haynes, and videos by Renée Lear.

“The vignettes are connected by overlapping themes and questions: ideas about Canadian history and identity, the symbolic meaning of nature and our impact on the environment, and the mythic idea of the North,” says curator Karine Tsoumis.

“A Canadian Bestiary is my rumination about Canada, using a vocabulary of animals and images I find compelling, but like the animals, these installations are ideas, thoughts, an attempt to define the ephemeral, starting a conversation, not ending it,” explains Macpherson.

Animal heads and bodies are interchanged and faces are masked and obscured. Wrapping forms in damp porcelain sheets—binding, bandaging the figures, contemplating the intentions of these gestures— Macpherson examines the boundaries between devotion and coercion, pleasure and pain, animal impulse and domesticity.

Reliquary
The opening section of the exhibition focuses on Canada as a relatively new country, the encounters of Aboriginal peoples and settlers, and for Europeans, an introduction to a vast wildness. Tree trunks of varying heights act as pedestals for a collection of human hearts—a shrine that bears the scars of the past, including colonization. The accompanying audio is a collection of songs interpreted by Macpherson, including three original compositions, and traditional English and Scottish folk songs that deal with themes of loss and change.

North of North
The next section, enclosed by shifting fabric walls with lighting that evokes the aurora borealis, explores the myth of the North and its role within the collective consciousness of Canadians. Macpherson’s North is filled with mysterious creatures, their strangeness emphasizing the role of fantasy in conceptions of the unknown.

Migration
The vastness of the land and the migration of diverse peoples are central to Canadian history and identity. Migration features a herd of miniature hybrid animals crossing a low bridge. The image encapsulates thousands of years of migratory movements from the Paleolithic migration across the Bering Strait land bridge, the movements of nomadic populations, and the journeys of early European settlers, to present-day migration. It is accompanied by Renée Lear’s original video, The Migration Stops Here, which illustrates how large populations of Canada geese no longer migrate due to habitat loss.

Decoy
The fragility of our ecosystems and the impact of human activities on the natural world are central themes in Decoy. For the first time, Macpherson introduces life-sized figures; an owl, a coyote, and a deer stacked on top of one another are at the core of the installation. Viewers are encouraged to reflect upon the reality of Canada as a vast territory that has continually been exploited for its resources.

Janet Macpherson was born in Barrie, Ontario, in 1974, where she grew up. She moved to Toronto to pursue her studies, obtaining her Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy at York University in 1996. While at university, she discovered the medium of clay through pottery classes, a hobby at the time. Her training in ceramics continued at Sheridan College in Oakville from 1999 to 2002, and for the following six years she maintained a studio practice in Toronto, making functional objects.

Macpherson started exploring a more figurative approach to ceramics at the Ohio State University, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in 2010. In 2013, she received the Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics from the Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario. Her work has also been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

Macpherson was an artist in residence at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, and more recently at the Zentrum Für Keramik in Berlin, Germany. She lives and works in Toronto.