A single, gold-sprayed chicken feather hangs in the balance, catching the sharp Hamilton sun as it streams through the windows of Smokestack Gallery. It is a fragile thing, plucked from a neighbor’s coop and transformed into a royal scepter of the mundane. Beside it, a row of dolls stands guard. They wear 1990s-style hip-hop gold chains, their plastic limbs dark and regal, but their faces are painted a startling, bone-white.
This is Precious Metals, a collaborative exhibition by Roger Mooking and Laine Groeneweg. To walk through these doors is to step into a curated silence where play replaces work, and every shiny object is waiting to fire its emotional payload into your chest.
Most visitors see the gold first; the preciousness that gives the show its name. If you look closer, using the psychological insight Roger Mooking leans on, you find the friction. Why are these black dolls wearing white faces? Roger calls it creative play, but it is a strategic confrontation with how we project our thoughts onto art.
These dolls belonged to Roger’s wife and were passed down to his daughters. They are part of a family lineage, yet they are being passed on, archived in ink and metal before they leave the family fold.
In every great story, there is a catalyst. For Roger, the stakes are life and death. Between 2009 and 2012, Roger shared with me the story of losing a son and a daughter. He recalls that one day a silhouette appeared in his mind; a vision of a child in a triangular skirt and a crown that appeared to him just days after his daughter passed.
In the exhibit, this vision finally manifests as “Butter Baby.” Roger realized, only after the pieces were composed, that he was subconsciously connecting with the children who are no longer on this plane.
Behind the scenes, Roger brings the raw, multidisciplinary vision; Laine Groeneweg brings the technical alchemy. As a premier collaborative printmaker, Laine is the one who helps manifest these hard to grasp ideas into material form. This exhibition is his debut as a practicing artist alongside the very creators he usually supports. Together, they have created a slippery slope of engagement: you come for the reverence of the shiny objects, but you stay for the inquisitiveness of the spoons.
Why choose this over a big headline experience? You will see spoons: silver, and gold, surrounding silhouetted figures in a piece called “Feed the Beast.” You will experience art that wraps the heavy, leaden weight of grief in the high-attention stimuli of shimmering metal and familiar domesticity.
As you exit Smokestack Gallery, you return to that initial image of the gold-sprayed feather. At first, it seemed like a simple play with materials. Now, you realize it was a premonition of the entire journey: something ordinary, something chicken-coop common, elevated to the status of a relic.
You came to see an art show about Precious Metals, but you leave realizing the only metal that truly matters is the one that survives the fire of lived experience. Yes, I walked through an exhibit; I also walked through a 14-year-old vision that finally found its way into the light…
Beyond the shimmering silence of Smokestack Gallery, Roger Mooking’s creative download is a sprawling, living archive of the human experience that refuses to be contained by a single medium.
As Grey County’s first Creative Director, he has orchestrated Community Canvas, a massive 6-foot by 6-foot collaborative dialogue at Grey Roots Museum where handwritten love letters and maps from as far back as 1829 collide with present-day marker strokes from the community.
His strategic storytelling is moving into a new high stakes phase, with his Sound Bites exhibition launching a national tour this September and a major installation, Community by Roger Mooking, slated to transform the transit experience at Pearson Airport’s Terminal 3 in early 2027.
Whether he is navigating the precarious economics of art as the founder of Rocklands Market or continuing a decade-spanning legacy in culinary culture, Roger operates as a multidisciplinary alchemist, proving that the preciousness of living is a narrative that must be captured across galleries, archives, and international gateways alike
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