There are times that the title of an exhibition or an artwork is so perfectly evocative that it augments the experience of the pieces in the show to a higher level (too often, the opposite is the case, sadly). The title ECHOING serves as a fine place to stand when considering the exhibition Echoing: Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter and Corine van Hoeve which is on view right now at the Old Fire Hall at 16 Towpath Street in downtown Thorold : this is a presentation of the Rodman Art Institute of Niagara.
It’s curated by Natalie Hunter, an excellent artist whose work is both aesthetically evocative but also is often titled in a teasing, engaging manner : so a sense of how appropriate words can offer a point of access to artworks is surely in her mind.
ECHOING is a title that reverberates, if I may, in a variety of ways that all have relevance and resonance to the exhibition. Some of these are more about memory and place as encapsulated by the physical building within which the show exists, but also is manifest in the artworks on display. It also, in another way, speaks to the memory of Rodman Hall, and what that says – how that echoes, if I may – through the region, and in our own minds.
There’s an interesting tension between a literal and metaphorical consideration of ECHOING with this show.
Hunter has curated this exhibition, as I stated before, and I offer part of her curatorial statement as an opening :
An echo is a call and response, or a faint trace of the past. In Echoing, Thorold’s
decommissioned mid-century fire station no. 1 is activated by three women artists at different stages of their artistic careers. Conversing with each other, the Rodman Art Institute of Niagara permanent collection, and responding to the immediate site, their gestures echo across the greater Niagara-Hamilton region and connect with heritage, memory, traces, and past experiences. Through sculpture, photography, and painting they consider discarded sites and materials as opportunities for re-invigorating industrialized landscapes around the Golden Horseshoe with initiatives that re-frame their use, highlighting their social, cultural, and historical value. Carefully studying Rodman Art Institute of Niagara’s extensive collection of contemporary and modern art Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter,and Corine van Hoeve contemplate the transformative potential embedded within sites that we take for granted during these uncertain times.
Although there is a symbiotic relationship between the two exhibitions, I will be focusing primarily on ECHOING. This is not a dismissive response, but more so that the works of Barton-Tait, Hunter and van Hoeve dominated my experience when I visited the space. In many ways, the RAIN works are like addendums that deepen or broaden the ideas of the artists, but they’re also strong enough, in the unique post industrial space, to speak on their own in a separate, distinct voice that I may engage with later in another article.
There’s a physicality to the artworks in ECHOING : we see this in the richly textured paintings of Corine van Hoeve, where the colour palette is suggestive of industrial decay and weathered textures of factories and ruins. It’s also present in the sculptures of Susan Barton-Tait, which play between art object, potentially a found object / readymade, and the veneration of something too often dismissed as banal – as in a brick – that actually is a foundation, both for places and how architecture incorporates and encompasses ideas and people (as Rodman Hall once did, in St. Catharines…)
I’m a little reluctant to speak about individual works in ECHOING, as they function as a whole, as though it’s more of a singular installation with respective components that mesh and continue a thought begun by one that is elaborated by another.
As you enter the main space, Barton-Tait’s 1449 bricks – looking so startlingly clean and monolithic – will draw you in first. Around the space, the paintings by Corine van Hoeve (a personal favourite being the one that is emblazoned with HAMILTON in tones of rust and runny colours, just inside the front door) act as punctuation, such as with Brick Portrait 20 (St Catharines Standard). Evoking The Standard building, as ANOTHER site of ruin and abandonment, with the recent fire that decimated that building, offers more echoes of history, place and storytelling, like the Thorold fire station itself.
As mentioned above, an accompanying (and intertwining, in terms of placement of some works) exhibition titled TEASER is also on view. There are conversations and dialogue between TEASER and ECHOING, for sure (such as how Carolyn Wren’s ‘jackets’ are ‘standing’ in a back alcove, observing you observe the artworks), but for the most part, in my experience, TEASER is best enjoyed as a separate exhibition. Perhaps that’s because the art historian in me wants to give those works appropriate space, and I very much enjoyed the works (and their echoes of history in both Niagara and beyond) by Wren, Tobey Anderson, Graham Coughtry, William Ronald and John MacGregor (one of whose sculptures used to grace the grounds of Rodman Hall Art Centre, before it was sold, to fail as a boutique hotel and now perhaps be a rehab centre – do I speak of echoes and such, in that context, and the echo of Brock University and the City of St. Catharines’ greed and apathy, respectively, that are still heard by many of us in Niagara? Is that an echo of the ‘demolition through neglect’ of Rodman Hall Art Centre? Never mind, let’s return to the exhibition, and the support of the city of Thorold, of RAIN, instead, ahem).
To return to ECHOING, there are several more ephemeral artworks, too. These are provided by Hunter, and act as a counterbalance to the more industrial heavy works. In The Shadow of Dust 01 – 03 alternately float in the space but are tethered down with ‘found bricks from the St. Catharines Standard building and Hamilton brickworks’ (another nod to the remnants of history manifest in physical form). There are echos of the reality of the rust belt wonderland that is Niagara, throughout this show.
ECHOING is an exhibition that functions on a variety of levels, where formal and conceptual concerns intersect in a Venn diagram that offer further meanings when they overlap.
When I was amidst the works, I found my mind returning to a line of poetry that has often dominated my thoughts here in Niagara, in the rust belt wonderland : These fragments I have shored against my ruins, from T. S. Eliot’s opus The Wasteland. I wondered if I use that line too often, but I found it apt, and an appropriate response to the artists’ works, that speak of the insistence of ruins and decay in this region and the site in Thorold their works are on display, and even in terms of the legacy of Rodman Hall, or the larger legacies of Niagara, and the rust belt wonderland.
In a nod to the fine choice of title that Hunter uses for this show, these words seem to match that resonance. It may also be informed, on my end, by how many artists I’ve worked with over the past four years in my own curatorial ventures that are showing that art is the most direct and also the most subversive form of history, especially on a civic or regional level (this includes Julianna D’Intino’s meditations on the old GM site in both the present and past, or Laurie Morrison‘s fascination with architectural remnants that also manifests in her use of older forms of photography, Sandy Fairbairn‘s almost methodical documentation of spaces abandoned and revived and abandoned again or even Chelsea Ostaficzuk’s evocative photographs of the fire – and aftermath – of the Welland House in St. Catharines).
This evocation is present in ECHOING, where you can consider that a brick, for example, is also a foundation upon which much can be built, and that a building is not just steel and mortar but a space for ideas, and remembering…
Perhaps this idea is not excessive, but a response to the pervasive nature of ruins – and the erasure of history, in tandem with the demolition of the physical space – in this region. And the echoes are still there, if you’re listening, among (to return to Eliot’s Wasteland) this heap of broken images and sculptures presented in ECHOING.
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Echoing: Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter and Corine van Hoeve (a presentation from Rodman Art Institute of Niagara) is installed at the Old Fire Hall at 16 Towpath Street in downtown Thorold. It’s on view until September 13th 2026 : hours are Tuesday, Friday & Saturday 10 to 5 PM, and on Wednesdays and Thursday 10 – 9 PM.
All images (except the header image) are from Natalie Hunter, natalie-hunter.com, @natalogue