EXHIBITIONS
Light Revealed: Scratchboard Illustrations by Scott McKowen was the main summer exhibition at Gallery Stratford in 2013. The show featured many of the drawings in the illustration section of this website. 32 of the books in the Sterling Classics series were displayed in a grid (it was an interesting challenge to find a way to fasten books of varying widths directly on a gallery wall). And there was a surprise for viewers to discover — a mockup of Scott’s scratchboard studio, including his wonderful Victorian drawing table, was set up inside a U-shaped alcove, not visible when you first entered the room.
In March 2017, Gallery Stratford exhibited Scott’s original illustrations for Jane Urquhart’s A Number of Things: Stories of Canada told through Fifty Objects. This book of essays was published by Harper Collins as a sesquicentennial project; the exhibition was the Gallery’s way of joining in those nationwide celebrations. The drawings, in identical frames, were displayed on a narrow shelf around the perimeter of the room (much easier than trying to hang them on nails at precisely the same height). A typographic frieze above the shelf formed a kind of index to the show with the titles immediately above each drawing.
Cameron Porteous invited Christina to bring an exhibition of her costume design to his small gallery in the century-old train station in St Marys, Ontario, over the summer of 2018. Four costumes formed the centerpiece of the show, surrounded by layouts of sketches and production photography digitally printed out on 60" rolls which were simply stapled to the wall panels of the gallery. Seana McKenna, Lucy Peacock, Tara Rosling and Harveen Sandhu — the actors for whom the four dresses in the exhibition were designed — each contributed text about how the costumes helped them find the characters they were playing.
Scott curated and designed the 2002 summer exhibition at Gallery Stratford. Worth a Thousand Words: International Theatre Poster Design travelled to the Design Exchange in Toronto that autumn, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa that winter. The core of the show was a juried selection of posters from around the world, all created in the previous five years. Also featured were sidebar collections of the Polish theatre poster tradition, works by Ikko Tanaka, Theo Dimson, illustrations by Milton Glaser for two editions of Shakespeare's plays (from Signet Classics in the mid-1960s, and from Pelican in 1980), and a history of Stratford Festival season posters to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.