DON GILL
DETAIN
11 JULY 2026 - 17 OCTOBER 2026
OFF-SITE | LETHBRIDGE TRADE & CONVENTION CENTRE (101 EXHIBITION WY S, LETHBRIDGE, AB)
EXHIBITION BOOKLET (COMING SOON)

Viewable in the Lethbridge County Corridor and digital screens throughout the building.

As an artist for whom walking and wandering is integral to his practice, Don Gill’s exhibition DETAIN builds upon a 30-year long project documenting sites, landscapes, and architectures that were subverted by nation-states to imprison and confine their own residents, denying them their civil liberties.

For Gill, movement is a necessary condition for experiencing the sensations, topography, and emotions of a place. In preparing for his exhibition at the Lethbridge Trade and Convention Centre, he walked the site and photographed the historical buildings of the Exhibition grounds. Among these are stables that, during the First World War, were converted into an internment camp. This camp held immigrants hailing from nations that Canada was at war with, suspending their civil rights.

Alongside the images from the Exhibition grounds, Gill presents photographs where features of the landscape or pre-existing structures were used by governments to restrict movement of its own residents. Sites such as: the Langham building in Kaslo, B.C., Ellis Island, USA, and internment camps in Jasper and Banff, in times of perceived crisis, were used to partition and  contain human lives. [1] Unfolding across Gill’s survey of these locations are troubling patterns across time and geography where alienation from one’s neighbour is a condition of their confinement.

Curated by: Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Preparator: D. Hoffos

[1] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, trans. Jay Miskowiec (October, 1984).

Don Gill A conceptually-based photographer and artist, Don Gill is in the fourteenth year of a blog project of unbroken daily mapped walks: Erratic Drawings: dongillwalking.

Gill is a process oriented and a peripatetic artist with an absorption in history. With these defining characteristics it is an organic gesture to have merged the processes of photography, walking and collecting into an intellectual and visual practice. Erratic Space is a methodology; a performed work; and an archive, which together make up the complete work.

Don Gill: DETAIN is made possible through a partnership with Excite Lethbridge and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin.

Funding for this exhibition is generously supported by the Rozsa Foundation's Audience Development Funding Program.