Quick Pick — Tim Schouten at Soul Gallery

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Tim Schouten, “Monuments (Treaty 5),” 2025, oil, pigment, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, Dammar resin on canvas, 56" x 62" (diptych, each panel 56" x 31"), courtesy of the artist

Manitoba encaustic painter Tim Schouten’s latest exhibition, The Island Lake Paintings, will open May 29 at Soul Gallery in Winnipeg. It will be on view until June 12.

The series is inspired by a trip that Schouten made to a Treaty 5 memorial gathering and the inauguration of Michael Birch as the new Grand Chief of the Island Lake Tribal Council (Anisininew Okimawin) on Manitoba's Linklater Island in 2024. 

The paintings are based on photos Schouten took during that trip, as well as conversations and research he’s done around the Treaty 5 Adhesions that were made between 1908 and 1910. There will be several encaustic paintings on canvas, some on panel, and several watercolour studies, all made within the past year.  

Monuments (Treaty 5), for instance, was painted from a photograph that Schouten took in 2014 of the monuments in Winnipeg at Everlasting Memorials, where the finished memorial was ready “to be shipped north on the winter road to St. Theresa Point, one of the Island Lake Communities,” he said.

Ten years later, Schouten had the opportunity to travel to Island Lake, where he hired Zack Wood to photograph the monument on site.

“Schouten has become a visual historian, rendering form and contemporary context to these historical events through his highly skilled and creative expression,” says Julie Walsh, Soul Gallery’s owner and curator.

“It has been his life’s work over the past two decades to research and visit each site where the ‘Numbered Treaties' (1871 to 1921) were signed between the Crown and Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

An artist for more than 40 years, Schouten has work in myriad public and private collections including the Winnipeg Art Gallery | Qaumajuq and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

“I think of my paintings as history paintings,” he said in a statement. “My landscapes push against notions of traditional western landscape painting and my abstracts reach for the same historicity through their own means. My chosen medium, the hot wax medium of encaustic lends itself to expressing these ideas by its malleability and its mutability. Each painting, in the process of its making, develops a history of its own.” ■

Tim Schouten, The Island Lake Paintings, is on view May 29 to June 12 at Soul Gallery in Winnipeg. 

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