Blyth Festival Art Gallery's 2026 season

The Blyth Festival Art Gallery’s 2026 season will again see the space push the boundaries of a traditional art gallery with three challenging professional exhibits over the course of the summer.

Exhibition Co-ordinator Kelly Stevenson announced the gallery’s 2026 professional beginning with the premiere of a documentary film and a corresponding art exhibition. 

Cory Bilyea, a reporter with the Midwestern Newspapers Group, has been hard at work on a documentary on Michael “CY” Cywink, an internationally-recognized artist, author, curator and muralist who is a member of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island. The gallery season will open with the premiere of the documentary and continue with an exhibition of Cywink’s work as its first professional show of the season.

Next up, a joint photography exhibition by Chloé Norman and Ben Dickey will take over the space. Norman was one of the artists featured in 2024’s “Anything But Hysterical” group show at the gallery, while Dickey saw his photography featured in the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto where he also launched a book of his photography.

Stevenson said that both photographers will aim to “approach the body and the world as sites of inheritance - spaces shaped by belief, care and loss.” She continued, “Where Chloé turns inward to reclaim the body from inherited narratives of control and shame, Ben looks outward to trace the echoes of mortality and environmental decay. Together, their works speak to the intertwined fragility of the personal and the collective, the intimate and the planetary.”

The final professional show of the season will be a group effort, curated by Katherine Percival from Guelph, who is an artist in her own right. 

The exhibition will be called, “Colour is...” Colour is never just colour. Colour is ancient and evolving. It is scientific and visceral. It is political, psychological, symbolic, and historical. From the first earth-based pigments made 40,000 years ago, to Newton’s prism experiments, to modern debates over ownership and trademark, colour has always been a site of discovery, invention, meaning, and power.

Colour can heal, energize, provoke, or confound. Red grabs attention and stirs energy; blue can calm or isolate. Indigo was once believed to soothe ailments. Colour affects us in ways both subtle and profound, influencing how we move through the world.

And yet, colour can also be feared, outlawed, controlled, and even fought over in courts of law. It unites and divides, liberates and restrains.

 

Exhibition Dates:

Michael Cywink: June 13 – July 11

Premiere of The Creation Story of Michael ‘Cy’ Cywink, directed by Cory Bilyea; Screenings June 21 and June 28 at 5 pm

Chloé Norman & Ben Dickey: July 18 – August 8

Colour is…, Guest Curated by K. Percival: August 15 – September 13

Blyth Memorial Community Hall, 431 Queen St. Blyth. www.blythfestival.com