Curator:  Ben Portis

Location:  Gallery 3 and The Carnegie Room

Opening Reception: Thursday, December 8 at 7:00 pm Simcoe County painter Joanna McEwen is nearing completion of an eight-year survey of the historic rural churches that dotted the countryside of Oro-Medonte Township. Several of these churches closed after McEwen made evocative portraits of their grounds and interiors. The project is simultaneously a sustained aesthetic meditation on the inevitable passages of time and belief and the creation of an objective pictorial historic record. McEwen's delicate egg tempera paintings are closely observed testimonies of sturdy but bygone social networks yielding to time and change. Interiors of Place will include forty-five small panel paintings created between 2003 and 2011, documented in an accompanying book published by the MacLaren with essays by Ben Portis and guest writer Andrea Curtis.

McEwen is a practicing studio artist, educator and historian and a graduate of Queen's and York Universities (BA, BFA, BEd) and Norwich University, Vermont (MFA). Her practice entails making a record of select historical phenomena that mark place. She currently lives in Moonstone, Ontario.