Janna Watson | What Falls From The Sky

Janna Watson | What Falls From The Sky
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 9, 5:30 - 7:30 PM | Artist in Attendance
September 10 - October 5, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto

Emerging from Janna Watson’s deepening relationship with the landscape surrounding her Grey County studio, her newest exhibition explores the exchange between opposing energies - water and light, earth and sky, the human and the spirit. Drawing on the shifting moods of the forest and sky, Watson’s newest abstract paintings consider nature as a generous, creative force, and our place within the living relationships that connect us to it.

Artist statement: 

“And the brush, always overhead, dripping, until my face is the floor it decorates.” - Michelangelo Buonarroti, from a sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia, 1509, written while he was painting the ceiling that includes The Creation of Adam.

The work proceeds from an exchange between two energies, water and light, earth and sky, the human and the spirit, and from the interval that holds them. It is a continued investigation into my developing language with abstraction and in my own deepening experience of being in nature.

I have never felt I belonged anywhere the way I belong when I open the gate of the property to my studio in Grey County and walk into what is waiting there. It feels like the land receives me. In the evening, a wood thrush sings from deep in the forest. It is almost melancholic, a deep sound, as though it is singing something that existed before language and borders. The bees and hummingbirds move from weed to flower with a purposefulness that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with relationships. The forest changes every day. Silly and bright one morning, moody the next, depending on how the sky is casting shadows.

The sky, for me, is the original abstract painter. Clouds compose and decompose in light, mood moving across them like breath, casting feeling, unclaimed and unowned, onto the land below, available to everyone willing to stand still long enough to witness it. Skywoman, in the Haudenosaunee story, falls from a world above into one that wasn't finished yet, no ground waiting to catch her. She is known too by the Anishinaabe, on whose territory my Grey County studio stands. The animals gathered to help her, and together they built Turtle Island, a world made through generosity. It is one of many stories that have deepened my sense of nature's generosity, and of what it means to be part of the creative energy in nature. – Janna Watson

The story of Skywoman referenced above is drawn from the Haudenosaunee tradition, as retold by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

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