# VISUAL ART

Revolutionaries and Ghosts: Memory, Witness and Justice in a Global Canadian Context

May 26 - September 29

Mackenzie Art Gallery, 3475 Albert St. Canadian author Madeleine Thien uses the figure of a book within a book to gently assert the power of stories to preserve memories even as changing political tides threaten to sweep them away. By hiding the true names of lost loved ones amid the fictional Book of Records, her protagonists keep alive the dream of art, beauty, and freedom amidst China’s repressive political regimes. Thien’s novel demonstrates the important role that Canadian authors have played in recent years in attesting to violence on the world stage while exploring its impacts at home.

URL:IRL

June 1 – September 17

Dunlop Central Art Gallery and Sherwood Gallery

From a broader cultural perspective, URL:IRL posits that self-fashioning is no longer possible without the behaviours normalized through social media. Every living generation now uses the internet, gaming systems, and apps to perform their authentic identities, anonymous selves, and constructed online personae. URL:IRL captures the ways that artists attempt to locate and identify where and what the “real” is in the midst of the 21st century’s moral panic around how one is to use (or not use) technology to become one’s best self.