The Christopher Cutts Gallery is excited to present Eldon Garnet’s “Recent Post Conceptual Works,” featuring a selection of new artwork, alongside some earlier work, by one of Canada’s foremost conceptual artists.
Meaning emerges through juxtaposition as Garnet probes the line between the personal and the universal, authenticity and replication, the poetic and the ironic. The exhibition brings together multiple series that merge text, image, and object, including Long Ago The Ice Melted (2025), Mementos (2025), The Romantic (2018), and Authentic Artifacts (2007), among others. Linking contemporary practice with the historical lineage of conceptual art, the works on display underscore the artist’s long engagement with ideas of memory, materiality, and meaning.
The South Gallery features Long Ago The Ice Melted, a suite of aluminum textworks, juxtaposed with ten photographic prints, Mementos. The photographs depict found objects collected by the artist during his travels around the globe. These items serve as records of their own histories, and carry a personal resonance in their collection by the artist, but the Mementos extend beyond biography and documentation to elicit a broader dialogue within a universal semiotic framework. The juxtaposed metal texts offer spare, elliptical phrases that, too, suggest ecological, historical, and emotional narratives, without resolving them.
The Romantic, a set of ten small flags, revives an earlier work of the same title that was first shown at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in 2020 — then described as ‘a colourful investigation into the abstraction of romance.’ Each flag carries a concise, two-word phrase derived from romantic literature. The seemingly random pairing of words forced into dialogue with one another and the surrounding flags.
Authentic Artifacts, in the North Gallery, turns a critical eye toward authorship and the art market. The works consist of objects of ‘uncertain authenticity,’ including a “Kippenberger Broken Centimetre multiple from 1991,” a “Tektite moon meteorite 700,000 BC discovered in 1933 Moaming City, Guangdong, China,” and the apparent pelt of the “Hare used during a 1966 action” by Joseph Beuys. Each object is framed, presented, and priced by the artist with deliberate ambiguity and humour. The exhibition is punctuated by an early series, Reunion (1968/2010), done in collaboration with artist John Abrams, featuring photographs of artist Marcel Duchamp taken by Garnet next to paintings, based on the photographs, by Abrams.
In Eldon Garnet’s “Recent Post Conceptual Works,” the final art objects are less endpoints than thresholds, leading viewers to their own internalized associations and conclusions. Like poetry, the artworks on display invite reading rather than explanation.
Join us on Saturday, November 8th, from 2 to 6 pm for the opening reception of Eldon Garnet’s “Recent Post Conceptual Works.” The artist will be in attendance.
This exhibition will run from November 8th to November 29th, 2025.