John Devlin :
Out of a heart of quiet
Some thirty works by John Devlin are exhibited until August 27, 2022 at Erin Stump Projects (Toronto).
Out of a Heart of Quiet is the first solo exhibition of John Devlin’s work in Canada outside of Nova Scotia. It is also the first exhibition, anywhere, of the artist’s post-1980s body of work, that comes out of his erotic relationship to the cosmos and his Catholic spirituality.
Curated by Kate Whiteway.
John Devlin was only 25 years old when he left Canada to study theology at Cambridge and set himself on the path to priesthood. Although he adored Cambridge, he had to return and abandon his ecclesiastical dreams because of a psychotic disorder. He thus devoted his life to drawing his own Nova Cantabrigiensis, an idealized Cambridge that became both a symbolic projection and a healing protocol. Once his great work - developed in secret - was discovered in the late 1980s, he was the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications including the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles for the iconic exhibition Photo Brut.