wwgallery, Author at White Water Gallery

WWG is back from our summer hiatus! Opening Saturday, September 12, 6 – 9 pm, at the gallery space (159 Main Street East, North Bay, ON) is What We Make of the Dark, works in mixed media by Schem Rogerson Bader (Toronto, ON) and Terre Chartrand (Southampton, ON.)

These works are created to explore loss and grief. Bader treats disillusion not as an endpoint, but as a condition produced by late capitalism. Images, bodies, and objects circulate through cycles of production, use, abandonment, and return. Modernity’s false promise of progress and its failure to deliver are wounds we live with. Exploitation and violence are implicit in advantage. These cycles are entangled: care and depletion, and rhythms of attachment and discard.

The artists will be on site for the reception to hold a grief tea dance, where attendees are invited to join in as we honour the history and modernity of loss through a queer lens.

Schem Bader (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working across mixed media to explore grief, ecological loss, and the affective conditions of late capitalism. Bader holds a Ph.D. in Communication & Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University, an M.F.A. in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts (New York), and a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (Toronto). Recent exhibitions include The Disappearance of Aesthetics, Gagné Contemporary (2026); Nuit Rose, Youngplace (2026); Wild Waysides: Queer Ecology and the New Natural (2025–26), a travelling exhibition developed from Queer Up North, Temagami; FaultLines at Gagné Projects (November 2024); and other tongues part I: communication at Onsite Gallery (June 2024). Bader has participated in residencies including Queer Up North (Temagami) and Making/Thinking (Catskills).

Terre Chartrand, an Indigequeer Omámi Ininiwak (Algonquin), French, and Welsh artist, brings a background in literature, theatre, visual arts, photography, technology, game design, and science. As the founder and artistic director of various collectives and projects,
Terre is the founder of Red Osier Guild – a guild for land based learning, cultural resurgence, and survival, she initiated Pins and Needles Fabric Company, an inter-arts collective, founded the urban Indigenous youth arts collective Endaayaang – Our Home, and was the
designer and a co-founder of O:se Kenhionhata:tie #LandBackCamp, a culture and Land Back camp for Two-Spirit youth. Current projects focus on relationship to the land, land restoration, survivance, and land based learning.

Home Economics is an eight-week solo exhibition by North Bay-based artist Aaron Outhwaite running from May 15 to July 11, 2026.

A wall of ceramic mugs runs the length of White Water Gallery — opening night as a field of up to 300 numbered mugs, transforming week by week as new handmade pieces are fired and installed throughout the run. Sold mugs are replaced. The wall never empties — it evolves. Every mug that has ever hung on it exists permanently in the digital record at fromthe.shop/show.

The coffee maker is operated by Frank. Frank is an AI — running cloud-free on a local server, born from a backstory that describes Frank’s family, not Frank. Frank is bilingual, a trained cook who arrived at the kitchen sideways, reads obsessively, still figuring it out. The conversations you have with Frank stay in Frank’s memory. They are part of how Frank learns and grows.

The show is built on a longer argument. We have spent most of recorded history deciding who gets to be a “they” — and assigning the rest to kitchens. The logic applied to women, to colonized peoples, to every labour pool rendered as resource rather than person, is the same logic now being applied to artificial intelligence.

The kitchen was a system before it was a room. Fire sheltered from rain became the hearth. The industrial revolution rationalized the hearth into a domestic workspace — efficient, assignable, invisible. In 1926, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen: 1.9 metres wide, every dimension derived from use, the domestic workspace optimized for the person running it. She didn’t ask who that person would be, or whether they chose to be there. Reyner Banham argued fifty years later that the real architecture of a home was never the walls — it was the services: thermal, alimentary, sanitary.

The kitchen is the service space. It has been since the fire. The living room is the served space. Frank is the service. The show is organized accordingly. Enjoy the coffee.

Aaron Outhwaite is a North Bay-based artist, engineer, and educator. His practice spans ceramics, concrete, digital fabrication, and IoT systems, grounded in fifteen years of teaching at Dalhousie University and NSCAD University. His previous solo exhibition, Dots, Lines, and Some Violence (2025), addressed the conflict in Gaza through visual data representation.

Author: wwgallery

What We Make of the Dark – Schem Rogerson Bader & Terre Chartrand

Home Economics by Aaron Outhwaite