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Together With Time
From
October 18, 2025
Until
April 5, 2026
Venue
Confederation Centre Art Gallery
The Exhibition
Curated by Pan Wendt
An art collection is a project of preservation, reflecting a public desire for cultural continuity. But it is also a perpetual work in progress, animated and reshaped by changing conditions, attitudes and values, and reawakened by the engagement of each visitor. In a parallel manner, Together with Time—an exhibition that aims to provide a broad overview of a collection spanning over sixty-years—is arranged to make new and unexpected connections between works from different eras and worldviews, as well as with new audiences.
The works selected for this exhibition embody art’s capacity to bring past and present together in imaginative ways. These include the collapse of separate times and spaces; tactics of shapeshifting in which a work can be several entities simultaneously; the capture of a lengthy process in a static form; the activation or participation of a viewer; the combination of multiple perspectives or memories; and the mapping of movement, metamorphosis, and patterns of historical change. The goal is not to flatten history, but to acknowledge its continuity with the present and bring it to life through fresh insights and perspectives.
Leslie Poole, Repositioning the Past: Self Portrait, 2000
acrylic on canvas
101.6 x 152.6 cm
Gift of the artist, 2009
2009.2.4
Together With Time
PEI Spotlight: Brian Burke
February 20th – April 5
These eight paintings are part of MANY YEARS LATER, a series of seventeen portraits of late Charlottetown painter Brian Burke’s friends from the mid-Sixties. The subjects were part of a group of teenagers who hung out together with the artist at the Basilica Recreation Centre, which took its name from the adjacent St. Dunstan’s Basilica. In the early 2000s, Burke reconnected with the remaining members of this tight circle of friends, each of whom was invited to his studio to sit for portraits that would document an intimate, longstanding relationship between artist and sitter.
At times the expressions of Burke’s subjects are serious and contemplative, at others cheerful and laughing; always they are shown against an ambiguous, richly painted background typical of the artist’s stark compositions. While not always flattering, the paintings zeroed in on the unguarded and characteristic gestures and expressions of the sitters. In later interviews with filmmaker Brian Pollard (captured in the 2025 documentary film Portraits), Burke’s friends commented on the way these paintings seemed to capture the subjects’ true personalities.
Cutline/credit:
Sharon and Nadine, 2005, 101.6 x 101.6 cm. Commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, Acquisition Assistance Program, 2005. Collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, CAG 2005.6.7
Homepage banner: Norman McLaren, Mutation IV (detail) from the Mutation series,1975, ed. 39/100, serigraph on paper, 66.0 x 66.0 cm, Gift of Richard LaCroix, 2013, Collection of Confederation Centre Art Gallery, CAG 2013.14.14