This Late Summer
Monica Tap
October 17 – November 14, 2026
Opening Saturday, October 17, 2-5PM
The exhibition preview is available here.

“Once, in summer
in the blueberries,
I fell asleep, and woke
when a deer stumbled against me.”
– Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York,1957 by Mary Oliver

For over twenty years, Tap has regularly visited a friend’s off-grid cabin northeast of Georgian Bay, near the Pickerel River. This enduring relationship with the area informs a body of work that moves between intimate plein air sketches and large-scale studio paintings, tracing the shifting character of a familiar landscape.

In 2018, the Parry Sound 33 wildfire tore through the area, coming within 500 meters of the beloved cabin. In the blueberries is one of three large canvases depicting the aftermath of that fire. It shows the burn two years on, as a young forest bursting with jack pines – and blueberries. The titles for the canvases in the show come from Mary Oliver’s poem, in which a moment’s encounter with a deer stays with the speaker for thirty years. “Painting is this kind of magic container of time,” Tap says. “It can contain different times in the same space.”

Tap’s work has long been shaped by an ongoing engagement with the history of landscape painting itself, and for this show, she drew heavily on historical Canadian painting. “I feel like painters have given me the eyes with which to see,” Tap says. She approaches the canvas through a process of sampling and collage, bringing together different approaches to mark-making, composition, and the representation of place. Her paintings emerge from this exchange between artists, images, and lived experience, complicating the idea of the individual painter as the sole author of an image.

This approach also informs Tap’s understanding of the landscape she depicts. Rather than treating the land as a passive subject to be captured or possessed, her work acknowledges the many histories and relationships that shape how a place is seen. Her position as a settler working on Indigenous land is part of this consideration, prompting a sustained questioning of the assumptions through which the Canadian landscape has historically been represented.

Across this body of work, Tap brings the changing ecology of the Pickerel River into conversation with the accumulated histories of landscape painting. Her paintings register the particularity of a place while questioning the visual conventions through which land becomes an image, an emblem of national identity, or a resource to be claimed. In doing so, they offer a view of the landscape not as a fixed or singular image, but as a continually changing site of relationship, interpretation, and responsibility.

Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology and memory. Her paintings are arrangements assembled from various fragments: outtakes from painting’s history, elements from her own snapshots, colour notes, memory. Each painting is both an invention and a response to place that she knows and has recorded. She is interested in how location or landscape can trigger memory; akin to how painting readily conjures its own past. This history reveals how aesthetics, among other factors, have operated to tame nature into landscape, and the artifice and assumptions underlying this error.

Tap’s work has been exhibited at The Painting Center (NYC), the Canadian Embassy (Washington, D.C.), Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Dispari & Dispari Projects (Italy) , Oakville Galleries (ON),), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), London Regional Art and Historical Museum (London, ON), and Margaret Thatcher Projects (NYC). Her works are included in many private and public collections including Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (NYC, Berlin), Canada House, (London, UK), Bank of Montréal, TELUS, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts, ESSO Imperial Oil Canada , CIBC Mellon, University of Toronto, Würth Collection (Germany), and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Originally from Alberta, Monica Tap completed her BFA and MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is a Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, and is currently based in Toronto.