The Fiction of Permanence
Curated by Rachel Deiterding
January 14 - May 14, 2027
“If change is inevitable, why is it resisted rather than celebrated?” – Centre for Sustainable Curating, Objects as Temporal Entities: Acquisitions Addendum, 2024.
Image Credit: Shannon Garden-Smith, process image from Dust Ruffle (V), pigmented, found dust (sourced from Western University campus), acrylic panel, 24” x 36”.
Time is a powerful force that museums often work against. Collections hold artworks in perpetuity for the public through systems of care and control that rely on the impossible task of slowing time. They keep an illusion of permanence alive despite the inevitability of change.
In The Fiction of Permanence, artworks evade the aspirational promise of eternity that collections uphold; change is intended, materials misbehave, technologies become obsolete, and things break. These sticky relationships to change undo false perceptions of stability and consider how acknowledging time, material degradation, and the lifespan of artworks can be better integrated into healthy collections management practices and support the long-term sustainability of the collection.
Putting academic research from the Centre for Sustainable Curating into practice at McIntosh Gallery, the exhibition presents work from the collection that requires further research and conversation to determine how it should be cared for and displayed. Other artworks focus on experiments with materials and processes that make them difficult to collect, questioning the practical limits of collections. Together, work from inside and outside of the collection prioritizes change as a central framework for collections care and begins to imagine what a collection less intertwined with permanence could look like.
Additional materials and curatorial texts will be available on this webpage over the course of the exhibition.
Featured artists:
From the collection: Carl Beam, Rae Davis, Wyn Gelensye, David Merritt, Françoise Sullivan, Colette Urban, and Tim Whiten.
Other works: the Centre for Sustainable Curating, Shannon Garden-Smith, Jake Kimble, Joy Wong, and Xiaojing Yan.
This exhibition is part of Connecting to Collections, a project generously supported by Catherine Ellot Shaw.
Related Programming
Opening Reception
Thursday, January 14, 5:00 - 6:00 pm
Remarks 6:00 pm
McIntosh Gallery
Join us in celebrating our winter exhibition, The Fiction of Permanence, featuring artworks from the McIntosh Gallery collection in conversation with new works produced for the exhibition.
Free | Open to the Public
