Seeds to Sow Exhibition

Exhibition Goal

The exhibition aimed to revitalize Barrie’s public spaces, spark meaningful conversations and promote cultural awareness. The exhibition was a moment of inclusion, of kinships new and old, and of deep reflection for our city. It was a bold and thoughtful exhibition, which explored pressing issues and sought to present new visions for our future from a diversity of voices.

Contemporary public art at this scale elevates Barrie’s role as an arts and culture destination, enhance the experience of Barrie’s outdoor spaces, and drives interest and positive engagement from citizens and visitors to Barrie. The goal was to help elevate Barrie, contributing to talent attraction and retention and economic buoyancy, and cultivate a strong community in support of the arts.

Sites, Artists & Artwork

Seeds to Sow was an expansive outdoor exhibition of temporary art requiring many hands to bring it to life. Barrie’s Public Art Coordinator, Carol-Ann Ryan, served as Artistic Director and collaborated with independent curator, Katie Lawson, to identify the sites and artists/artist teams. Download Katie's curatorial statement.

About the Installations

Six site-specific installations were on display during the exhibition (September 27– November 8, 2024).

Location: City Hall (Service Barrie, first floor)
Installation details: Mobile cart, stairs (aluminum, wood, plexiglass), library, and newsprint publications
A New UFO? revisits the history of the United Farmers of Ontario, who governed Ontario from 1919-1923 in a coalition with the Independent Labour Party, led by Barrie resident Ernest Charles Drury. In a short period, this farmer-labour alliance brought lasting progressive change to the province through the establishment of social equity programs alongside environmental conservation efforts and support of critical scientific research.
A century later, so many of our social and environmental problems can be traced to the separation between urban life and the land and the farmers that feed cities. How could a New UFO party for the twenty-first century rally people to connect with the land, to address climate change and inequity? This question is brought to Seeds to Sow by Adrian Blackwell through an installation at Barrie’s City Hall that at once looks to the past political action in the region and to the future, through the creation of a mobile cart that serves as a speculative campaign office and library—activated on weekends to coincide with the Farmers' Market.
Note: This installation will remain in place until spring 2025.
Location: Rooftop Garden at Downtown Barrie Public Library.
Installation details: Steel (fabrication by Millar Mechanical), nylon boating rope
Situated on the rooftop garden of the Downtown Branch of Barrie’s Public Library, Amy Bagshaw’s In Your Place evokes the form of a tent and its many associations. Constructed of a black steel frame, each of the three planes is woven with nylon boating rope, the orientation of which draws the eye to the layers of horizontal lines that map the surrounding area. The required work of on-site weaving itself is physically demanding, each line of rope a record of the artist’s repetitive choreography, her body moving back and forth across the work’s frame.
It is a sculpture which brings our attention to our surroundings and to our bodies with a joyful invitation to move under the fibre tent planes. Alongside these playful associations, tents are also a critical symbol of shelter: used in historic wars and evoking the peaked roofs of settler architecture. The current crisis of the unsheltered in Barrie and beyond is also acknowledged as housing insecurity is on the rise, the artwork itself a transient presence.
Location: North Shore Trail Head (near Heritage Park); the north end of Centennial Beach; and Will Dwyer Park
Installation details: Steel signs on custom supports
We Are Atmosphere is an installation of steel signs in the shallows of Kempenfelt Bay that explore the atmospheric nature of being in and of the world. Fragments of poetic text can be found just beyond the shore’s edge, dispersed across three sites. As Lisa Hirmer’s contribution to Seeds to Sow, these small poems offer ideas about how we live in relationship with and through the atmosphere. The open shapes of the cut steel letters pull the ever-changing lake and sky into the work, allowing the actual atmosphere to become as much part of the work as the signs themselves. Each sign can be read in multiple different ways, subtly shifting as the conditions around it ebb and flow.
Viewers are invited to take time to reflect on the essential and life sustaining role of the atmosphere and the often fraught awareness that comes with the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a significant factor in the escalating nature of climate change. The atmosphere is something that is vital, always in movement and always something collective. It is part of us, and we are a part of it.
Location: Lion’s Pavilion at Centennial Beach
Installation details: Sound installation with graphic scores
Uncharted Waters (Kempenfelt Bay) is an act of reorientation, from an anthropocentric position of conventional charting and mapping of Lake Simcoe to acts of listening and responding to the changes that are taking place there. For Seeds to Sow, Lou Sheppard has created a series of scores that respond to historical and scientific documents relating to this body of water, in addition to pressing concerns about the web of life that depends on it (including fertilizer run off, toxic algae blooms, and increasing salinity). The scores are new navigational charts for Kempenfelt Bay, serving as the basis for a sound installation that will be activated in the resonant concrete shell of the Lion’s Pavilion looking out over the lake.
Reversing the process of navigational sounding, these scores ask us to listen to what is changing in the lake through sound, an echo(dis)location within this shifting environment. How do we navigate beyond our familiar borders? How do we re-orient from fixed point navigation to understanding matter as active, changing and interdependent?
Location: Will Dwyer Park
Installation details: Wood panels, paint
Two existing waterfront facilities buildings in Will Dwyer Park are transformed by Native Art Department International (NADI), the long-term collaborative practice of artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, in East and South Composition. The façade of each simple structure has been covered with painted panels that pay homage to the Woodland School of Indigenous artists and the historic dazzle painting used for naval camouflage during the First World War. The distinct treatment of each building invites us to consider the aesthetics of shared experiences and forms.
NADI’s intervention draws our attention to the built environment of Barrie’s shoreline and the viewer’s own body in space, the experience of the work shifting along with site lines as elements of the work are revealed and concealed. Oriented to be largely invisible from Lakeshore Road, the work reveals itself from the side of water, the edge of Kempenfelt Bay.
Location: Allandale Station Park
Installation details: Cold cast steel
Ted Fullerton embraces the breadth of associations with Seeds to Sow, emphasizing a humanist, symbolic relationship to life valuing experiences—to take root, develop, grow. The presence of Germinate – Green Man aligns with the notion of environmental responsibility as well as a condition of positive change associated with being. A figure emerges as if it is rooted in the ground and alludes to the Green Man, an ancient figure from British folklore reminiscent of an environmental guardian, symbolic of the changing seasons and rebirth—a renewed condition of being.
The synergy between Germinate and its surroundings evolve as surface of the cold casting weathers – a mottled patina of dark brown and green. Nestled amongst the willow trees that line the shore along Allandale Station Park, the Rotary Islands serve as a backdrop for this contemplative site.

Art on display at City Hall — "A New UFO?" by Adrian Blackwell on display at City Hall during the Farmers' Market

Artwork at the downtown Barrie Public Library rooftop garden — "In Your Place" by Amy Bagshaw, located at the Downtown Barrie Public Library Rooftop Garden

Artwork on display in the water, which reads "A reminder that you too are atmosphere" — One of the "We Are Atmosphere" installations by Lisa Hirmer

Art installation at the Lion’s Pavilion at Centennial Beach — "Uncharted Waters (Kempenfelt Bay)" installation by Lou Sheppard, which was located at the Lion’s Pavilion at Centennial Beach

Artwork installed at Will Dwyer Park — "East and South Composition" by Native Art Department International, which was located at Will Dwyer Park

Sculpture installed at Allandale Station Park — "Germinate—Green Man" by Ted Fullerton, which was located at Allandale Station Park

In addition to the six site-specific installations above, the MacLaren Art Centre hosted a satellite exhibition entitled Their horizon was mountain, their distance reveals, with new work by Derek Liddington. See the interactive map of the locations.

About the Artists

Four nationally recognized Canadian artists and two regionally based artists were selected to create the six site-specific installations for the exhibition.

Adrian Blackwell is an artist, designer, theorist, and educator, whose work focuses on the relation between physical spaces and political economic forces. He is a co-organizer and co-designer of Architects Against Housing Alienation's Not for Sale! campaign, which occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
His artwork has shown at public galleries across Canada and the US and at the Shenzhen and Chengdu Biennials. His recent projects include Isonomia in Toronto? for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and Anarchitectural Library at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a member of artist collective Gentrification Tax Action, whose ongoing campaign for a tax to raise funds to finance deeply affordable housing has shown across Canada, in C-magazine, and at the 2023 Venice Biennale.

Blackwell's funded research examines the potentials of public space, the exclusionary function of private property, and alternatives to contemporary housing alienation. He has taught architecture and urbanism at Chongqing, Michigan, Toronto, and Harvard Universities, is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, co-founder of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture /Landscape / Political Economy, and co-editor of issue 12/13 c\a\n\a\d\a: delineating nation state capitalism (with David Fortin).
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Amy Bagshaw (she/her) is a Visual Artist and Educator. She earned her BFA from Queen’s University, and MFA from Stony Brook University, New York, with a focus on fibre installation and intermedia. A Graduate Gender Studies Scholar, her art practice extends to Intersectional Feminism and contemporary craft practices. She has exhibited throughout North America and in Europe and has created public art works for the City of Barrie and Alliston, ON.
Amy has received numerous grants, participated in a residency at The Banff Centre and her work can be seen on the cover of Feminist Time Against Nation Time (Dietrich and Hesford, 2008). Her paper “Notes from the Portal: Feminist Teaching Strategies in/post-pandemic Art and Design Classrooms,” was published in Teaching in a Post-COVID Era (Springer, 2021).
Amy has taught Visual Art, Art History, Art Theory, and Architecture/Design History and Theory at Stony Brook University, NY, Yorkville University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Centennial College, and Thompson Rivers University. She is a Professor in the School of Design and Visual Art at Georgian College and Director of The Campus Gallery at Georgian College. Amy volunteers on the Board of Directors for the MacLaren Art Centre and lives in Alliston with her family.
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Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist working in visual media, especially photography; social practice/community collaboration; performance; and occasionally writing. Her work is focussed on collective relationships—that which exists between things rather than simply within them— both within human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. Much of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency, on the edge of planetary collapse.
Her work has been shown in galleries across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, KIAC, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Third Space, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others.
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Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland. Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre. He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and was the winner of the Emerging Atlantic Artist Award in 2017. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia.
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Native Art Department International (NADI) is a collaborative long-term project created and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan that began in Brooklyn in 2016 and is now based in Toronto. NADI seeks to circumvent easy categorization by comprising a diverse range of undertakings such as unannounced actions, curatorial projects, video screenings, paintings, collective art making, and mixed-use installations. All activities contain an undercurrent of cooperation and non-competition while at the same time functioning as emancipation from essentialism and identity-based artwork. NADI has been featured in exhibitions at Varley Art Museum (Markham), Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), and Mercer Union (Toronto). Their works are present in private and museum collections including Markham Public Art and Art Gallery of Guelph, as well as several corporate collections.
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Ted Fullerton is a Canadian artist who works in painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture and has achieved awards in all four media. As a figurative artist his work is symbolic in nature. The conceptual foundation and ideology within his artistic practice is humanist in nature emphasizing the notion of belief, purpose and relationships: being and becoming. His work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in numerous private and public collections. He has participated in over 70 solo exhibitions and 110 group exhibitions. He was awarded, Excellence in the Arts by the City of Barrie in 2010, the Georgian College Board of Governors Award of Excellence in 2012 and has been a member of the Royal Canadian Academy since 2009. He has been commissioned for a number of public sculpture commissions - the City of Guelph and the City of Kitchener - St. Albert, Alberta - Manitoulin Island; a sculpture to recognize Reconciliation and the City of Waterloo to mention a few.
The Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton acquired and installed a large permanent sculpture in 2019. In 2021 the City of Guelph commissioned 6 small sculptures by the artist to honour and celebrate excellence in regional urban design and the City of Newmarket have acquired three large outdoor sculptures sited outside the main entrance of their regional gallery, Old City Hall Gallery. In a ½ hour documentary titled, Street Sauce – Public Art in the Waterloo Region three public sculptures of the artist are featured.
Ted Fullerton was invited by the European Cultural Centre to exhibit in Venice, Italy during the 2022 Venice Biennale at the exhibition venues of Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and Marinaressa Gardens. As an educator, he was professor and head of the Fine Art Program at Georgian College, School of Design and Visual Art from 1978-2013. His work is represented by Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto and Vancouver.
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About Katie Lawson, Guest Curator

Katie Lawson is a curator and writer based in Toronto. She was a curator for the Toronto Biennial of Art, working with Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien on the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions. She has also curated exhibitions at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2024); Images Festival, Toronto (2023); MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie (2021); the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2018); the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Y+ Contemporary, Scarborough (2017), and RYMD, Reykjavik (2017).

Katie is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies Curatorial program at the University of Toronto, where she previously completed her Master of Arts in Art History. She is currently working towards a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, with an interest in contemporary art and climate change. Lawson was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency in 2023.

Visit Katie's website, katieblawson.com, to learn more.

Exhibition Support

Community Partners

Thank you to our community partners: Downtown Barrie BIA, MacLaren Art Centre, Spare Room and Tourism Barrie.

Grant Funding

Grant funding is provided through the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the project timeline?

The project timeline is outlined below. Dates subject to change at the sole discretion of the City.

Milestone	Date
Competition announcement and circulation	December 20, 2023
Deadline for Submission of Design	January 31, 2024
Review of submissions and selection of artists/artist teams	February, 2024
Selected artists notified	Mid-February, 2024
Artist Agreement submitted and implemented	March 1, 2024
Artwork installation	September 21–26, 2024
Artwork de-installation	November 9–13, 2024

The selection process was facilitated by the Public Art Coordinator and exhibition Curator, and the selection panel included members of the Barrie Public Art Committee and Seeds to Sow Stakeholder group.
Two of the installations featured work from regional artists. Regional artists were selected based on strength of experience creating temporary outdoor art in the public realm, diversity both in terms of art media and representation and inclusion, as well as artistic themes that suit the project aims.
The remaining four installations featured work from nationally recognized artists. These artists were identified based on previously executed public artwork and its relevance to the theme and goals of Seeds to Sow.
The artwork was displayed in Barrie, which is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg people, which include the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Pottawatomi Nations collectively known as the Three Fires Confederacy. We also acknowledge the Wendat Nation (Huron) who occupied these lands prior to the middle of the 17th century.
Artists were selected based on strength of experience creating temporary outdoor art in the public realm, diversity both in terms of art media and representation and inclusion, as well as artistic themes that suit the project aims.
Applicants could choose to indicate sites in Barrie’s downtown and/or along the waterfront. Artists were encouraged to develop work that is site specific and responds to the place in which it will be displayed.
Artwork was required to be suitable for public display over a duration of six weeks and engage both locals and visitors in our city. Applicants were encouraged to consider a range of possible media including but not limited to eco- and environmental art, sculpture, lens-based media, ephemeral and performance-based projects.