…and I think I must already have come to a stop because what happened next is sort of like a photograph in my mind and I see myself in the picture.
— Timothy Findley, The Wars
Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind.
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
We never talked about my impending death. With you I learned that some things are more intimate than sex. I learned that in life, some things like despair can’t be shared, that’s a burden better kept for oneself.
— Nelly Arcan, Folle
Amy Friend’s exhibition Leave a Light on For Me exists in fragments, for me – like life, and like memories do. Thus this show begins with a sense of veracity, in not just conveying the feelings and intentions of the artist but acknowledging the shared experiences with the visitors to the show.
I don’t just mean this in a conceptual sense as seen with the ideas manifest in her artworks, but also in how she negotiates the unique architecture of the Riverbrink Art Museum. The works span several rooms, so you move through it like a story, with rooms as ‘chapters’, perhaps, and the Riverbrink – as it used to be a home as opposed to a gallery ‘cube’ – offers spaces that are more domestic than institutional, implying a familiarity in the sharing of a story.
The final of the three rooms that Friend has installed her work within is the most evocative to me, and this may be because it acts as a final punctuation point for her art and ideas, or it may be that the manner in which she’s installed artworks in that site creates an environment that encloses you and invites quiet consideration and contemplation.
And that is something that Friend’s images and installations, that I’ve been privileged enough to experience over the past decade, not only encourage but demand, and have always been worth that effort of engagement.
There’s a subtlety and simplicity at play here, in Leave a Light on For Me, that belies a depth of thought and intent, but that formal immediacy acts as a welcome spur to the viewer to the ideas, which are anything but simple or easy, but that are heartfelt and as deep – and potentially engulfing – as the rolling and frothing waters that appear in a number of Friend’s images.
The statement about the exhibition offers a point to begin :
Leave a Light On for Me considers uncertainty as an ongoing condition, resisting fixed conclusions and remaining attentive to gestures of care, hope and reciprocity. It asks what it means to stay present within the revolving conditions of life. Amy Friend
In this exhibition, artist Amy Friend draws on images of lighthouses, darkness, oceans and weather to explore spaces of connection. Acts of watching and searching, of looking closely at small details, become a source of resilience and care. we lose each other, find each other, look out, reach out, call for aid, and, in doing so, care for one another.
The sources of the photographs, the closeup images of wind and water, paintings and signals, are metaphors for attentiveness, distance, vulnerability, and orientation. The photographs become a declaration that we are bound together through shared conditions of fragility, and that our survival depends upon one another. The works pushes toward broader spaces of vulnerability, and relations, reflecting on how we sustain awareness toward one another even while separated by geography, history, or experience. To keep watch is not to control what comes, it is to remain open to one another within it. It is to engage in acts of hope.
As I said earlier, Friend’s artworks occupy several rooms. The first is smaller, with some of the antiques and furnishings from the time that Weir lived in the building, the second is longer, wider and more sparse, with works on the walls that envelope the visitor gently (including artworks by Friend and ‘samplings’ from the Riverbrink’s collection, but more on that in a moment) and the final room is a bit darker in both form and intent, with draperies hanging on facing walls, a window that is draped but where light and shadow from outside still interact with the environment, and a portrait sits above the mantled fireplace.
I visited Leave a Light on for Me on a Sunday morning, when the gallery was quiet, and that also augmented my experience, and is how I’d suggest visitors come to the exhibition. This is not just due to being able to enjoy an audio component of one work attentively, but also as (especially with the third room) being alone with these works offer a unique place to stand, and to be open to a dialogue with the ideas and artworks.
The citations (cropped moments), as I think of them, from artworks already in the Riverbrink collection that fill a wall in the second room are done in a manner that is more about feeling than history (the opposite, perhaps, of what the artist Reinhard Reitzenstein did in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton that I greatly enjoyed as well, years ago, but Reinhard was more about historical connections whereas Friend is more about emotional resonance). Friend has taken parts of artworks (reproduced in strips and samples along one long wall), platforming these fragments of pieces that act as footnotes or annotations, in a way, to what she’s doing with her own images : moments of storm within a calm, if I may.
The ‘final’ room is the one that I enjoyed the most, though that seems to be too ‘happy’ a word : the space enfolds you, and acts as a satisfying conclusion to the narrative of the exhibition. We’re enveloped by draperies that suggest a raging sea, with a rich textured darkness punctuated by whitish spatters, suggesting an angry and unsettled ocean that stands as a metaphor for human emotions and interactions. In the midst of this, a portrait (and I’m fairly sure it’s the artist in this image) of a woman looking away, seeking something, casting a gaze away from us and the room, looking both dark but formidable sits above the mantle as a focal point for the installation in this room. The quotes I’ve peppered this article with, in my mind, are what I presume she is thinking as she stares searchingly outwards….
Once could consider the maritime tradition of widows’ walks, or simply that the forlorn gaze we don’t see but know this figure possesses is relentlessly looking outwards, perhaps with hope, perhaps with trepidation, likely both based upon the words of the artist. This is not the only image of Friend presented in this show where she looks away from us, but it’s not in a dismissive manner, but more an act of seeking, peering into a darkness with an implied hope that there is someone, somewhere, out there looking back, or hoping to be seen – like a ghost of a memory or a person we used to know. To cite Susan Sontag from her book Regarding the Pain of Others, “narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
Friend’s exhibition employs the unique space of the Riverbrink to her advantage : a sterile white cube would be too stark, I think, and the domestic interior of the gallery allows the images and installation to function in a more personal manner, hinting more at the emotions behind these fragments and thoughts in visual form than a ‘neutral’ space would allow. Perhaps that’s why I found myself using the word ‘invite’ so often when considering this exhibition, as it feels like a personal interaction rife with honesty and frank interactions….and that also fits with the sentiments expressed by Friend, with the idea of traversing distances between people, not just the viewer and the artwork. I’ll cite Timothy Findley again (his archivist character, from The Wars, as she peruses old photos) : As the past moves under your fingertips, part of it crumbles. Other parts, you know you’ll never find. This is what you have.
It’s interesting to come to Amy Friend’s exhibition Leave a Light on For Me after experiencing the exhibition ECHOES. I sometimes think the best artists offer you not just a point of access through beauty and engagement in a formal way, but also allow – or encourage – considerations outside the gallery space that have larger personal, regional and historical ramifications. Memory, hope, family, history both individual and more monolithic – this is a shared mental and emotional space between Leave a Light on For Me and ECHOES, and an idea from the excellent writer Gabino Iglesias (from his fine novel The Devil Takes You Home) offers a closing point to this consideration : that ‘the past is the present trapped in a perpetual echo.’
Friend’s exhibition has the quality of a diary, and some spaces – such as the third room with its draperies of the roaring ocean and enveloping environment – evoke a contemplation of relations not just between the viewer and the artworks, but also the gulfs between ourselves and others.
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Amy Friend Leave a Light on For Me is on view at the Riverbrink Art Museum until October 17th, 2026. The gallery is located at 116 Queenston Street in Queenston, Ontario and their hours of operation are Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 5 PM. Images in this article are both from the author and the Riverbrink Art Museum.