FrAmEd: John Hall & Ron Moppett
October 18, 2025, on view through to October 25, 2025
John Hall & Ron Moppett FrAmEd
An intimate look at two practices in conversation.
Ron Moppett and John Hall met in the mid 1960s when they were classmates at the Alberta College of Art, and they both attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 1968. Their first of many collaborative projects was the ground-breaking 1974 Rose Museum exhibition. In the early 1970s, Hall and Moppett each noticed how common the rose was in everyday life and both began using it in their work. From symbolism in historical art, to references in contemporary advertising and pop culture, right down to Hall’s Calgary address at the time (on Rosetree Road in Rosemont), the rose was everywhere. In 1972 they founded the International Society of Rose Painters, and the idea of the Rose Museum was born. The two-member society collected as many objets de rose as possible and mounted an exhibition at the Glenbow-Alberta Institute. It became a uniquely collaborative project; after the exhibition opened people continued to contribute, ultimately assembling; over 1,000 rose-themed items.
The Rose Museum Pins, first produced in the 1970s, and again in 2022 for FrAmEd
Following a national tour the Rose Museum closed, but their collaborations did not cease. In 1975, Hall and Moppett curated a retrospective exhibition at the Edmonton Art Gallery for the influential Alberta artist Marion Nicoll who had taught them both at the Alberta College of Art. In 1978, Moppett curated the touring exhibition John Hall: Paintings and Auxiliary Works 1969 – 78 which was shown at the National Gallery of Canada.
In 2022 the pair collaborated again with FrAmEd, a series of trompe l’oeil paintings—a trick of the eye—causing viewers to think they are seeing a three-dimensional object. John Hall’s own Framed series goes back to 2016 when he began creating hyper-realistic paintings of artworks in frames, with the intention of tricking viewers into believing that they were looking at a painting in a real, three-dimensional frame. The FrAmEd collaboration has both artists painting the same canvas—one painting a trompe l’oeil frame while the other paints the picture, and vice versa.
Both Moppett and Hall have sustained long, and successful careers spanning over fifty years and both hold important places in the history in the visual arts community in the city of Calgary, and across Canada. Both artists are members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Ron Moppett lives and works in Calgary, Alberta; and John Hall lives and works in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Manet/Mirror , 2024
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
John Hall & Ron Moppett FrAmEd
The FrAmEd series, now numbering around twenty works, began in 2022. Each painting, either 30 × 30 inches or 30 × 36 inches (some horizontal, others vertical), depicts a framed painting: in some, Ron painted the image while I created the frame; in others, I painted the centre and Ron the frame. These works moved back and forth between Ron’s studio in Calgary and mine in West Kelowna. The first twelve were shown in Calgary in 2023—six at Trépanier Baer Gallery and six at Loch Gallery.
Collaboration in the visual arts has become relatively common in recent years, so the FrAmEd paintings fit comfortably within current artistic discourse. But Ron and I first collaborated much earlier, in the early 1970s, when we were colleagues at what was then the Alberta College of Art in Calgary. We often spent our lunch hours in the library poring over art periodicals and monographs. One day, after discussing one of Tom Wesselmann’s Pop Art paintings featuring a rose, we realized that we were also engaged with the same rose motif. This discovery led us to search for other examples of roses in art. As the idea snowballed, we conceived of creating an encyclopedic collection of “stuff” that used the rose motif. Our definition of interesting and suitable “stuff” expanded to include not only historic and contemporary art but also advertising images and a wide range of flotsam and jetsam of popular culture— china teacups, wallpaper, fashion, wrapping paper, and much more.
The project culminated in The Rose Museum, presented at the Glenbow Museum in 1974 with the support and help of Bruce Ferguson, the museum’s curator of contemporary art. To assemble the exhibition, we solicited loans from artists, institutions, and private collectors. We even established the International Society of Rose Painters, complete with chenille crest (part heraldry, part varsity jacket), pinback buttons, and T-shirts. By the time of the exhibition, The Rose Museum contained roughly 1,000 pieces.
John Hall and Ron Moppett at Alberta College of Art, preparing for the Rose Museum exhibition, ca. 1973-74
A large portion of the show consisted of 8 X 10 inch framed collages Ron and I made from advertising imagery, magazine clippings, stickers, and wrapping paper. The collection also extended well beyond traditional art media into the wider field of popular imagery: advertising ephemera, china teacups, wallpaper, fashion, and more. At the other end of the spectrum, we were able to borrow a 19th century Fantin-Latour rose painting from the National Gallery of Canada and a fragment of a Tom Wesselmann still life painting from the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. After its Glenbow run, the exhibition circulated in abbreviated form to public galleries in Hamilton ON, Burnaby BC, and Charlottetown PEI. Once it made its way back to Calgary, we faced a storage problem. The solution was a second exhibition at Calgary’s leading artist-run centre of the time, The OffCentre Centre. This final iteration of the Rose Museum project was titled The Rose Museum Sells Out, and the exhibition ended with an invitation for attendees of the show’s opening to take home a piece of their choice. Storage problem solved.
Later in the 1970s, Ron and I collaborated again on three medium-sized canvases that moved between our studios in Calgary. In these works, each of us referenced other artists: in one, Cut to Size, Ron did a trompe-l’œil painted rendering of the head in Picasso’s 1937 Weeping Woman, while I painted photographs of characters from Andy Warhol’s Factory days in Cut to Size and Cutting Remarks.
Ron Moppett and John Hall JH-RM, 2024 acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 36” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Make the Stampede Great Again / Redact (detail), 2024/2025
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
References to artists that interest us reappear in the FrAmEd paintings. Among the artists cited are Vincent van Gogh (Morley’s X), François Boucher (The Abandoned Abode), Wassily Kandinsky (Löwenjagd), Malcolm Morley (Morley’s X), (Cleared), and Chuck Close (Close Reliquary), along with nods to Ron’s and my earlier works (Cleared and Make the Stampede Great Again, which references a class project from Ron’s student days at the Alberta College of Art in the mid1960s). And the François Boucher painting that is referenced in The Cherished Abode he painted in 1742-1743 and discovered by Ron during a visit to the National Gallery of Canada a few months ago. It jumped out because in it Boucher has included a painted frame— proof, perhaps, that everything old becomes new again.
— John Hall
September 2025
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Make the Stampede Great Again / Redact, 2024/2025
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
“FrAmEd is about dialogue, not only between Ron and myself, but between history, imagery, and the act of painting itself. These canvases are conversations, continuing a collaboration that began over fifty years ago.”
John Hall
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Morley’s X, 2025
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Tourist/Perfect Ellipse, 2024
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Löwenjagd, 2022
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Screen Saver/H.H., 2024
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Cleared, 2022
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
The Abandoned Abode/Picture, 2025
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 36” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Reveal/Unfinished Painting, 1978, 2024 acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Cherry / Wood, 2023
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Milagros / Sweets, 2022
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 36” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Constellation/Blue, 2022
Ron Moppett and John Hall
Close Reliquary, 2024
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 36” x 30”
acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 36” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall
A Later Vincent Portrait, 2024 acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
Ron Moppett and John Hall Match, 2023 acrylic, oil, and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 30”
Nuclear Fever (Don), 1994
Framed: Skull 1 , 2024
John Hall
acrylic on canvas, 90” x 65”
John Hall
acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”
John Hall
Ka-Pow!, 2010
acrylic on canvas, 60” x 90”
John Hall
Framed: Skull 3, 2025
acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”
John Hall
Framed: Skull 2, 2025
acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”
John Hall
Framed: Skull 4, 2025
acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30”
John Hall
Framed: Phoenix 8, 2020
acrylic on canvas, 24” x 24”
Ron Moppett
Sand & Stars, 2020
oil, acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 57” x 68”
Ron Moppett
Red / Window / Stars / (Matkat), 2024
acrylic, oil and alkyd on canvas, 60” x 48”
Ron Moppett
Painter / Four, 2025
oil and alkyd on canvas, 30” x 36”
Ron Moppett
Painter / Shadow, 2021
oil, acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 24” x 30”
Ron Moppett Miro on Mallorca, 2022 oil and alkyd on canvas, 24” x 18”
