Description
About the Exhibitions
Jill Price: From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow
Barrie-based artist Jill Price anchors From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow in her concept of UN/making, drawing on histories of maintenance art and walking as creative practice. Together with community members, Price scours regional shorelines, collecting, cleaning, sorting, recycling, donating, and reworking debris. These actions result in meticulous displays and wry assemblages that acknowledge the agency and potential of what has been forgotten or discarded. Inside the gallery, the exhibition builds on her ongoing project called Wht-trSH to visualize the slow violence of plastics and other materials that colonize human bodies and more-than-human bodies of land and water. Still, the truest site of Price’s work is outside, where acts of walking, witnessing, and care unfold, and where she models a shared responsibility toward the environments we all inhabit.
Vicky Talwar: A Shift in Consciousness
In A Shift in Consciousness, Stouffville-based artist Vicky Talwar offers a meditation on hybridity, memory, and spiritual continuity. Rooted in her experience as a Hindu-Canadian artist, Talwar interlaces South Asian ritual and aesthetic traditions with the layered realities of diasporic life in Canada. Through vibrant colours, textured surfaces, and recurring motifs such as flower garlands, mala beads and sacred threads, her paintings become spaces of reflection and transformation. Many of her works are intentionally created with multiple panels, which plays a vital role not only in composition but in meaning: diptychs and triptychs unfold as visual journeys, offering multiple perspectives on a theme, or mapping a transition from one state of being to another.
This October, the exhibition will expand to include a luminous salt crystal mandala installation, drawing visitors further into a contemplative space where the sensory and the symbolic meet. Across media, Talwar’s work honours the act of becoming and invites us to consider the power of creative intention as a form of healing and belonging.
Suzanne Morrissette: The Shape of Transference
Where Are You?
A Collaboration with the Barrie Native Friendship Centre
In the Spring of 2025, the MacLaren opened the PIE Education Centre to community members of all ages from the Barrie Native Friendship Centre. In bi-monthly artist talks led by local artist Bruno Smoky, and Indigenous artists Shelley Genereaux, Cedar-Eve Peters, and Lucia Laford, this small group of emerging artists learned from professionals and worked together to bring their creations to life.
Using a wide range of mediums, from beadwork to paintings, the emerging artists have grown their portfolios while creating an exhibition that honors the land we live on, celebrates ceremony, and acknowledges the survivance of our Urban Indigenous Community. Embedded in the creative sessions were opportunities to build confidence in their voices as artists and to uncover shared threads of experience and expression, which quietly revealed themselves through dialogue and making.
Contributing artists include Caleigh Bailey, Nellie Bishop, Eugene Corbeil, Reid Posine, and Blake Riggs.
Special thanks to the artist mentors, and Petranella Brisco, Josie Fiegehen, January Paige, Carrie Ann Restoule, and Paige Russel from the Barrie Native Friendship Centre for their program support.
Carl Beam: Future Hindsight
Future Hindsight presents works from the MacLaren’s Permanent Collection by Ojibwe multi-media artist Carl Beam (1943-2005). Entangling symbols for human, nature, and technology, Beam’s compositions point to the co-existence of everything, on one plane and at one time. His works critique the perception of time as linear, the dominance of Western ways of thinking, and the idea that we are separate from nature. Confronting Canadian colonial history, they bring awareness to the resilience of and modern struggles of Indigenous Peoples. Beam’s works express his spiritual and political concerns, looking simultaneously into the past and future.
