Holiday Recommendations Guest Post #11: Crystal Mowry

[Maggie Groat, ed]
The Lake
Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2014
148 pp., 27 x 21 x 1.3 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Edited by Maggie Groat, with contributions by: Cheyanne Turions, James Algie, Gina Badger, Diane Borsato, Joseph Boyden, Jennifer Castle, Sarah Cullen, Dana Fountain, Maggie Groat, April Hickox, Elle Kurancid, Tiziana La Melia, Maryse Lariviere, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Jimmy Limit, Duane Linklater, Tegan Moore, Julie Nagam, Parker Branch, Simon Pope, Sandra Rechico, Ann Sanderson, and Simon Starling.

The Lake is anthology of images and text that serve as “an alternative body of research” on Lake Ontario. If you are familiar with Maggie Groat’s artistic gestures, you will immediately recognize her sensibility throughout the pages of this book. The book’s contributors do a fine job of making Lake Ontario seem elusive, resistant to any singular role within a collective imagination. What I love about this book – and Maggie’s work in general – is how it makes room for aspiration and speculation in the guise of knowledge. By reworking a basic definition of taxonomy to include fiction, poetry, and criticism, The Lake makes a convincing argument for an unconventional approach to the writing of natural histories.  


The Lake can be purchased at Art Metropole in person or online here.

Maggie Groat is a visual artist working in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists books, site-specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, her work explores studies for possible futures, relationships and reconnections to Indigenous land and the interdisciplinary potential of artistic intervention and envisioning. Maggie studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is lives and works on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. She is represented by Erin Stump Projects, Toronto.



Crystal Mowry is Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery