Storytelling—its scope and significance—lies at the heart of Stories that animate us. Highlighting a rich selection of works on paper and animations, Stories that animate us draws from a wide range of collectively shared oral histories, knowledge systems, and cosmologies, as well as personal memories, imaginings, and dreams. Whether evoking the spirit world, creating fictional tales or endeavouring to make sense of historical and current events, the featured artists vividly reflect on such themes as culture, community, memory, death, and identity in order to speak to the past, present, and future.  

Foregrounding diverse voices, the stories showcased here span from the small to the sweeping. Joyce Wieland and the Royal Art Lodge embrace the exploratory medium of drawing to stimulate the creative process. David Hockney gleans from the world of fairy tales and fiction as fodder for his drawings. Robert Davidson and Amanda Strong bring Indigenous stories to life as potent acts of cultural reclamation and resilience within the colonialist context of Canada. Francisco de Goya and Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo work through the ongoing traumas of war. Marina Roy, Jérôme Havre, Cauleen Smith, and Camille Turner use the speculative nature of the science fiction genre to imagine new identities and ways of being. Ed Pien finds inspiration in the spectral and the supernatural as radical sites of transformative potential.  

The narratives evoked here resonate well beyond the artists and artworks featured in this exhibition. Stories that animate us invites the public to reflect on the importance of storytelling in their lives: What stories inspire you, what stories need to be told, and which will you pass on?