John Dickson at Museum London and University of Waterloo Art Gallery

John Dickson in IMAGING DISASTER 

Museum London

January 19 - March 31, 2013 // opening February 1, 8pm

Tour the exhibition with curators Cassandra Getty and Adam Lauder on Sunday, February 10 at 1:00 pm

Organized by curators Cassandra Getty and Toronto scholar Adam Lauder, this exhibition stages an encounter between historical and contemporary visions of environmental and social crisis. At the heart of this dialogue is the work of Canadian historical painter Joseph Légaré (1795-1855), a Quebec artist whose work challenges common-sense notions of landscape, time and adversity by re-engaging with scenes of calamity. Légaré's striking disaster paintings, presented for the first time as a focus of a museum exhibition, set the stage for contemporary artists' interventions within the imagery of catastrophe and activist calls-to-arms.

Political upheaval and public anxiety inform artistic depictions of nature's wrath; likewise art documents emergencies that are man-made. Far removed from the heroic and pristine Canadian landscapes of the Group of Seven, the imagery assembled for Imaging Disaster―including works by contemporary artists such as Martin Golland, John Dickson, Fern Helfand, Iain BAXTER&, Kelly Wallace, and several others―projects a vision of landscape that is thoroughly mediated by technology, distribution networks, and the perpetual threat of tragedy posed by human intervention in the environment.

See more information here. 

John Dickson in NetherMind

University of Waterloo Art Gallery 

January 10 - March 9, 2013

Opening reception: Thursday, January 10 from 5:00–8:00 pm

Tom Dean, John Dickson, Catherine Heard,

Greg Hefford, Mary Catherine Newcomb,

Reinhard Reitzenstein, Lyla Rye, Max Streicher

The NetherMind collective organized four influential exhibitions in Toronto from 1991–1995, in which the original group of eleven artists focused on creating sculptures and installations in response to unique post-industrial environments. The current group of eight artists has remained individually active in the Canadian and international art scene, but it is a shared sense of camaraderie and affinity for making works that address aspects of the physical that brings them together again. Their sculptures and installations tend to be interactive or experiential and appeal directly to the senses through tactility, sound, light or movement. The group also shares a sense of dark humour, absurdity and perverse playfulness in the way that they juxtapose unexpected materials, forms and concepts. For this reunion tour, the group will debut new works made in direct response to the spaces at UWAG, ironically, the original site of Waterloo Manufacturing.

See more information here.