Student Gallery Spotlight: Morningtide

Morningtide washes in, half between the shore and woods. Featuring a collection of paintings, Leah Gertzen reflects on the translucence of life through stories—inviting viewers to find repose within the art: a misted morning, the lingering smoke on a wool sweater, the boot under the cabin floor, an unwoven braid, or the darkened, snow-filled sky.

For Gertzen, Morningtide began as an echo of her final Honours work, Sweetest Con, “an installation of a cabin and a forest.” While creating this new body of work, she found herself returning to the emotional atmosphere of that earlier installation—only this time through painting. “I found it was a reflection on certain things I’d have liked to say but didn’t know how to,” she writes, “and the creation of my work became a meditation on life and nature.”

The paintings in Morningtide hold a sense of being immersed—inside weather, inside memory, inside a place you can’t fully name but still recognize. Gertzen describes the work as being inspired by “memories of being within art,” and “the feeling of being alive and within nature, such as the wind or the sun on the river in the morning.” A central presence throughout the exhibition is her Gramma, Helen, who “taught me to love the earth and to create my work as if it were alive.” That sensibility—tender, attentive, animate—threads through the exhibition’s landscapes and quiet objects.

Carrying forward what she learned through installation-making, Gertzen approaches painting with an awareness of space and shelter: “the landscapes I have created within Morningtide echo the same feelings I was trying to convey within my installation work”—“feelings of warmth and peace, magic, nostalgia,” and “a space for the viewer to explore but also feel at home in.” The works offer a kind of soft architecture—places to enter, wander, and pause—where narrative flickers at the edges of the visible.

That invitation to rest is not only formal, but emotional. Gertzen hopes viewers leave with “an inner peace,” or “perhaps something warm that reminds them of someone they love or loved,” carrying that feeling “throughout the gallery and their day.” Morningtide doesn’t rush you toward meaning; instead, it lets meaning gather slowly—through atmosphere, through attention, through the tenderness of ordinary details made luminous.