Opening Reception: Thursday, July 9, 5-8 pm
Remarks: Thursday, July 9, 6:30 pm
Exhibition Dates: July 9 – August 29, 2026
Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to present The Great Lakes, a group exhibition of work by artists Michael Belmore, Robert Burley, Bonnie Devine, and Shelley Niro, curated by Penelope Smart, Curator, Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
In sculpture, images, installation, and film, these artists express their connection–deep and enduring–to water. The Biinaagami map of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence watershed, a collaboration between Canadian Geographic and Swim Drink Fish, invites us to do the same. Visible from outer space, the Great Lakes form a network of lakes and rivers that speak to, and contain, the depths of our collective story. Without water, there is no story.
The Anishinabek called the largest of the five Great Lakes Gichigami (Lake Superior), which translates as “the big lake,” or “the great shining waters.” In Indigenous languages across the watershed, the names for these lakes are often prefaced by variations of the word gichi, or great. These bodies of water have always been part of something bigger, immense, and staggering.
In the gallery, five belts hang from a birch frame. Woven by Devine, these works signal her good tidings as a traveller along this vital and interconnected waterway. For Belmore, four granite stones, laboriously transformed by hand-carving and hammered copper, are touchstones to home, the north shore of Lake Superior. Hazy and eerily calm, a series of photographs by Burley places the viewer on shorelines of sand, rock, and concrete barriers. In a new film by Niro a birdbath becomes an allegory of conflict. Her films read as cycles of grief and renewal for loved ones, including the Great Lakes.
