Mike Gough: To Look at the Sea Again

Christina Parker Gallery is pleased to announce To Look at the Sea Again, an exhibition of new work by Mike Gough.

The exhibition will open with an artist reception on Friday, September 11 from 6–8pm, and will continue until October 3. Music at the opening reception will be provided by Boyd Chubbs.

Download the Visual Catalogue

My practice has long considered how lived experience is transformed through painting – how places, images, and moments can shift through distance and recollection. To Look at the Sea Again is an extension of this ongoing inquiry through the experience of loss, and the way it can fundamentally alter our relationship to what came before. What once felt ordinary can become unexpectedly significant, its value revealed only in retrospect.

The exhibition takes its title from a line in David Woo’s poem The End of the Visit, in which a familiar landscape is seen differently after a devastating moment. The phrase resonated with my own process of returning to images after the sudden loss of a close friend in February 2025 – finding them outwardly unchanged, yet impossible to see in quite the same way.

Drawing from photographs, travel, observation, and even dreams, these works move between remembered and invented spaces, where places are reconstructed as much through recollection as through study. While shaped by loss, the paintings are not defined by melancholy. They preserve the tenderness and beauty of the moments they depict, allowing celebration and sorrow to exist simultaneously. Painting becomes an act of sustained attention and preservation.

The exhibition also reflects a shared experience of grief and the ways a close circle of friends carried one another through uncertainty. Revisiting fragments of everyday life, the paintings become vessels for what remains. At times they function almost as altars as they have become objects that can be visited and where absence, joy, and remembrance can coexist.

To Look at the Sea Again considers what it means to revisit the past knowing what we know now. Holding moments of friendship, beauty, and ordinary life, these paintings are less about recording what has passed than allowing it to remain in view – altered by time, by loss, and by the act of looking again.

Mike Gough is a visual artist whose practice examines the instability and resonance of memory. He holds a BFA from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (2007) and an MFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2010). Drawing on personal histories rooted in Newfoundland & Labrador, his work situates figures and interiors within enduring landscapes, merging lived experience with elements of idealism. Gough has exhibited nationally and internationally, with works held in public and private collections including The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, Global Affairs Canada, Scotiabank Corporate Collection in Ontario and Atlantic Canada. His work is found in The Fortis Collection (St. John’s), the Cox and Palmer collection (St. John’s) and in the collection of TD Canada Trust (St. John’s and Toronto). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Ontario Art Foundation Laura Ciruls Painting Fund (2020), awarded annually to a mid career artist for their contribution to painting in Canada. In 2015 Gough was awarded the EVA People’s Choice Award and he has been the recipient of more than 10 Professional NLAC Project grants. His work is found in private collections worldwide.

Mike Gough CV

Mike Gough Brochure