Meg Harder is a Mennonite female artist working in the Haldimand Treaty Territory/Grand River Watershed. Her practice explores bioregional themes through a variety of media including works on paper, projection, installation, and social choreography.
Harder's recent work, New Fraktur, draws on the Mennonite tradition of fraktur art, a highly imaginative, densely detailed, and symbolic illuminated folk art practiced historically in the Waterloo Region. This work aims to carry forward the aesthetic sensibilities and fantastical elements of fraktur while expanding its visual vocabulary and narrative potential. This is achieved through the integration of appropriated archaic and highly abstracted symbols, pattern, and motifs found within Mennonite visual culture with newly imagined imagery that engages with contemporary themes and interests (e.g. bioregional and local culture, feminist and queer theory). These new works aim to disrupt problematic (e.g. colonial, Christian, and patriarchal) narratives, resist any ultimate interpretation, and create space to reimagine historical and future realities in the Grand River Watershed.
Gallery information
Fall/Winter hours:
Friday
Saturday