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18:00 – 20:00
Exhibition Dates | January 16 – February 14
Filtered View: Seed-Head Scape, 2026
Baryta paper, Dibond Mounted,
framed in natural roasted maple
40 x 32 inches, Edition of 3
Barbara Brown trained as a visual artist at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and completed graduate studies at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University in England and the School of Photographic Arts Ottawa. Her early work focused on large-scale sculptural installations for architectural spaces, drawing on techniques for enlarging textiles. She has realized public commissions for the City of Ottawa, the Province of Ontario in Thunder Bay, and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Brown has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Recent projects include Terroir: Belonging to place and LifeCycle Conversations, a collaborative exhibition with sculptor Cynthia O’Brien at the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa. She has completed residencies at Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts in New Brunswick, where she began developing deconstructed floral imagery, and at Kala Chaupal in India, where she collaborated on Matka: A Portrait of Traditional Water Carriers.
Alongside her studio practice, Brown became a certified horticultural therapist in 2006 and developed a year-round therapeutic gardening program, working for many years in long-term care with the frail elderly. This sustained engagement with the garden as a lived, relational space has profoundly shaped her artistic approach.
Barbara Brown lives and works in Ottawa on the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
Of Time is Barbara Brown's latest photographic series. This work takes plant material at different points throughout the growing season and brings multiple phases of growth into a single image. The result goes beyond the binary narrative of decline or renewal, offering instead an expanded view of duration.
Brown’s work enters a long-standing tradition of considering the garden and the sunflower within Western art history. From Vincent van Gogh and Emil Nolde to Anselm Kiefer, these motifs have often carried symbolic weight, standing in for vitality, endurance, or historical trauma. They have also been shaped overwhelmingly by a masculine visual tradition that favours assertion, monumentality, and metaphor. Brown approaches this history differently.
Brown’s images remain grounded in direct curatorial observation. Flowers, seed heads, stems, dirt, twigs, and leaves are arranged into living systems. The sunflower, in particular, is not exulted; it is shown as is, in a continuity with its environment.
The techniques used, perspective, ratios, and composition are meant to place the viewer within the garden rather than outside it. This perspective emphasizes proximity, care, and attention. In equal measure, Brown’s images appear as responsive spaces, shaped by human intervention and natural process.
Made during a period of ecological and cultural uncertainty, Of Time centers on presence, duration, and close observation, inviting sustained attention to the subtle shifts that shape lived experience.
Filtered View: Setting Seed, 2026
Baryta paper, Dibond Mounted,
framed in natural roasted maple
40 x 32 inches, Edition of 3
