Join us Thursday, Sept. 18 at 6:30 p.m. for the launch of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s fall exhibitions: Unsettling Conservation Collective: Reworldings, curated by Alexandra Nordstrom, as well as Soft Internet Theory, curated by Tristan Sauer, winner of the 2025 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. These are accompanied by two exhibitions curated from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collections: Earth Dreams in Colour: Soft Explosions, curated by Nordstrom, and Glass, Concrete, and Stone, curated by Sauer.

Rooted in Indigenous knowledge and collaborative practice, Reworldings features Glenn Gear, Melaw Nakehk’o, Sheri Osden Nault, Adrian Stimson, and Michelle Wilson, whose work reimagines how Land and Water are valued and protected, foregrounding relationships of care, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity often obscured by settler colonial conservation frameworks.

In Soft Internet Theory, Devlin Macpherson, Shihab Mian, Laura Moore, Marisa Müsing, and Matt Nish-Lapidus use net art, sculpture, video, and textile to explore technology with empathy, envisioning a softer, more human digital future rooted in connection, pushing back against the isolation and automation central to dead internet theory.

Artists and curators will be in attendance. All are welcome—refreshments will be served; cash bar.

Image details (right to left): Adrian Stimson, Lone Bull II – Kenow Wildfire Waterton Park (detail), 2025, oil on birchwood, 45.7 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist | Laura Moore, BlackBerry 8700 (detail), 2023, second hand clothing, 100% cotton recycled fabric, 129.5 x 81.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary | Pete Smith, Early Sun Over the Don Valley Parkway (going to work) (detail), 2023, oil on canvas. Purchase, 2025 Art Gallery of Guelph Collection | Janet Kigusiuq, Landscape (detail), 2997, coloured pencil on paper. Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 1998 Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph