Churning currents, lapping futures

Churning currents, lapping futures

Getulio Alviani
Kazuo Nakamura
Kim Adams
Rita Letendre
Ron Martin
Shelley Niro
William Perehudoff

Curated by Darryn Doull

3 May to 10 August 2025

No person ever steps in the same river twice. 
For it’s not the same river and they’re not the same person. 
    Adapted from Heraclitus, c. 6th century B.C.E.

Rivers can draw us in, for better or for worse; a siren song for the soul. They beguile with their power, their lore, their physical grandeur and, for some, nostalgic memories of the rivers made familiar through literature and life. For others, they may evoke trepidation with their destructive, elemental power. A loving embrace or a desolate reverie; a site of idle amusement or one of utilitarian labours . . . the river holds it all. With reference to the writings of the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), a connection with rivers can often be owed to the contact of years, loves, associations, and ages. 

Travelling roads or walking the edges of rivers becomes an end in itself, 
a way of observing society from outside its bounds. 
    Rupert Martin, in A1 – The Great North Road, 1983

Bookended by Niro’s views of the Grand River—a place of solitude and strength for the artist—this exhibition takes up the fluid mobility of the river as a reminder that change is natural. These works visually and conceptually flow, move, glimmer, shift or accrue. Radical imaginations of modernity and whispers of utopian idealism might be found just around the river’s bend. Innovative formal abstractions, shifts in scale, and careful inclusions of colour point toward possible and impossible futures. They harbour the depths to reimagine it all. 

I talk to the wind, 
My words are all carried away. 
    Peter Sinfield, in I Talk to the Wind, 1969