Halifax artist Eleanor King’s practice fuses drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, audio, and video.  These and other genres come together in her immersive installations to consider a broader dialogue that promotes ideas such as recycling, sustainability and community.  Interactive elements invite the public to take part in a rich investigation of these and other weighty topics.  This Emerging Artist Series project will feature King’s most recent output as well as new works created at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Eleanor King obtained a BFA from NSCAD University in 2001, where she has taught media arts courses and held the position of Director at Anna Leonowens Gallery.  She has shown her work nationally and internationally in exhibitions at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, and Galleri F15 in Moss, Norway, among other venues.  In 2012, she represented Atlantic Canada for the Sobey Art Award .

Artist Talk October 31 at 4:30pm followed by an Opening Reception at 5:30 pm.

Anna Torma’s multi-layered, embroidered and painted silk tapestries seethe with brilliantly coloured fantasies, facts and curiosity about life, especially her life, as she does not separate her life from her art.  The virtuoso installation, Bagatelles (2011), embraces viewers in a colourful extravaganza narrating imaginative scenes of biography and biology, paradise and nightmare.  Having grown up on a farm in Hungary, Torma is completely at ease in her garden as the site of real life and source of metaphors for love, lust, nourishment, poesy, as well as evil and fear of the unknown.  Her narrative montages flow freely between representation and language, juxtaposing floral anatomy with the alphabet while questioning your role in life.  Adam and Eve often activate these scenes of screaming trees bending under storms of language, monstrous guardians roaring among fire-breathing serpents and barking dragons, all watched over by children, cats, and trickster smurfs.  While the images might be hers, the stories are ultimately yours.

This exhibition at StFX marks Torma’s turn from colourful narratives towards linear abstraction in an austere palette of black and white.  As she explores the depths of transparent layers of silk, we follow her venture into uncertainty as a shifty destination, as she strips away the familiar, working in layers that can be switched around so that their “plans” are defeated.

Torma stands at the forefront of world artists whose craft-based practices demand recognition as fine art.  With its vivid and earthy post-feminist concerns with domesticity, desire, and finding one’s way through life’s conundrums, Torma’s work has won acclaim throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe and China.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Anna Torma, RCA, grew up near the Hungarian village of Tarnaörs, east of Budapest. Through her grandmother’s and mother’s instruction she became skilled in the rich tradition of Hungarian embroidery.   She almost studied medicine, but instead earned a degree in Textile Art and Design at Hungarian University of AppliedArts in Budapest (1979).  With her sculptor husband, Istvan Zsako, Torma came to Canada in 1988, settling in Hamilton, ON.  They subsequently moved to Baie Verte, NB, where she pursues her practice, and gardens.

ASAP Art Centre is hosting a workshop in embroidery techniques led by Anna Torma at the gallery on Saturday, November 8, from 12-5 pm. Although free, space is limited. For registration and information please visit www.facebook.com/asapartcentre or phone 902-867-2303 or 902-867-1852.

Stephen May was born in Témiscaming, Quebec in 1957. In 1976, after one year of study in the Photographic Arts Program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Stephen began to attend art classes at the Ottawa School of Art. Three years later he enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Mount Allison University, from which he graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During his fourth year of study, while in the process of creating a landscape painting, he came to understand the relationship between the success of a painting and the spirit of the painter. Stephen realized that drawing and painting were the media most natural to him. His convictions in that respect remain strong to this day.

Following his formal education, Stephen traveled through Europe for eight months exploring collections of great art to deepen his appreciation and knowledge. On his return from Europe, he accepted a seasonal position with Theatre New Brunswick as a prop builder, allowing him five months per year to pursue painting full time. After being awarded a Canada Council “B” grant in 1992, Stephen was able to take a one-year sabbatical from Theatre New Brunswick which provided a stepping stone to his decision to resign and paint full time, which he has been successfully doing since 1996.

Stephen has been a resident of Fredericton since 1984. In that time, he has exhibited extensively, been an active member of the arts community both professionally and as a volunteer, raised two daughters, and been formally recognized as one of the province’s most respected painters. Gallery 78 has represented Stephen since he assumed residency in Fredericton, and has presented many solo and group exhibitions of his work. In 2006 the Beaverbrook Art Gallery presented Stephen May: Embodiments, a solo retrospective, and in April 2007 Stephen was awarded the prestigious Miller Brittain Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I really just try and make good paintings and drawings, beautiful ones. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. When it happens, though, it tends to be obvious.
The 18th century French painter, Chardin, said you use colours, but you paint with feeling. If I can just manage to paint respectfully, lovingly, like him, that would be enough.

Works by Aboriginal artists from Labrador up to Cape Dorset–Selections from The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery collection.The exhibition includes work by Michael Massie, Annie Pootoogok and Pitsuilak. CANADA’S REEL NORTH is a shorts program organized by imagineNATIVE Film Festival.

As the terms and conditions of personal and cultural construction radically shift with the use of a proliferation of internet platforms and android devices, Kelly Hill’s hyperbolized narcissistic persona deploys performative garment construction to dig into varied self-presentation and self-censoring behaviours.

Chantal Khoury is based in Montreal. She Seeks questionable moments, awkward beauty, lost glamour and the workings of human behaviour.

High Tide: Paintings from the Atlantic Collection, as selected from the permanent collection by Gallery Director/CEO and Chief Curator Terry Graff. This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to view a cross-section of some of the best-loved paintings from the Gallery’s extensive reservoir of Atlantic-based works, and allows each individual work to speak for itself. Presented are paintings by Mary Pratt, Tom Forrestall, Molly Lamb Bobak, Fred Ross, Miller Brittain, Jack Humphrey, Christopher Pratt, and others.

A series by the P.E.I.-based painter that reworks documentary photographs of Australian women convicts of the early 20^th century. Curated by Pan Wendt

Emerging Artists Series sponsored by RBC Foundation

Site-specific installation by Canadian conceptual artist engages with the earliest acquisitions in the Gallery’s collection.

In this nationally touring exhibition, Johnson explores ideas of ancestry, identity and cultural practice. Organized by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and curated by Robin Metcalfe

By seeking to understand the influence of the constructs of home spaces/places/nonplaces on one’s psyche, Jeneen Frei Njootli’s installation for Connexion ARC explores present-day ideas of tradition, performativity of race and gender, while questioning the continual construction of culture.

Through a recurrent use of chipboard, wood wall paneling, ric rac, floral textiles, alcohol, the chevron and fiddle music, Frei Njootli explores the specific histories of these materials and substances, and in particular, looks to how they have helped or hindered Native people in their conception and creation of art, home, regalia, religion and community.