Rémi Belliveau, Marika Drolet-Ferguson, Julie Thibault-Forgues, Thaddeus Holownia, Mathieu Léger, Aaron McKenzie Fraser, and Blake Michel Morin

Focus on photography is a group exhibition curated by Annie France Noël. The exhibition looks at manifestations and uses of photography in contemporary art practices, featuring work by a mix of emerging and established artists.

“Hortus siccus” is the latin name for Herbarium. It was a scientific recollection and desiccation of living plants’ specimens. This exhibition is a poetic gardener’s chronicle of Ilaria Facchin’s artistic residency at Ross Creek. Vegetal strolls through symbols and myths. A breathing installation, with small botanic pencil drawings; 3D paper hand cuts; poetic and sound fragments and photos; a cycle of atmospheric piano improvisations and performances. The aim of this exhibition is to come close to the nature, its fine meaning and frail rebirths in our present times; to capture the emotions of spectators with simple natural details.

Cadenza is a collaborative project by artists Don Andrus and Jinny Yu. The two artists created murals based on an 18^th century mural by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Each mural is 5 feet by 44 feet long. Instead of being an homage to Tiepolo or the history of painting, Cadenza is an inquiry into the nature of painting today and their respective studio practices.

The title Cadenza comes from a term in music referring to improvisations within a scored piece of music. “It is a dialogue on the walls,” as the exhibit’s curator, Ihor Holubizky, has put it. Yu and Andrus both create “their own particular variation on Tiepolo’s mural.”

Snyder’s work examines two aspects of how we see the world around us.  The first is the strong human propensity for horizontal perspective and the aesthetic curiosity it generates. Most of our ordering, abstraction and recognition seems to occur in the horizontal plane regardless of scale.  The second is our comprehension of scale and the fact that we unconsciously combine the various scales of our landscapes. We are aware of the two separate visual experiences but blend them continuously. This series hopes to show how they co-exist as two separate forms within our whole experience.

By transposing his charcoal drawings into a wooden structure, Steve Higgins will create a temporary sculpture on an ambitious scale rarely seen in Halifax.

Among the source images for the complex structure are Mesopotamian ziggurat forms and the landing platforms on aircraft carriers. Viewers will receive contradictory impressions of the piece depending on whether they view it from the mezzanine (top down) or from the lower gallery (bottom up.) The experience of observational privilege, as determined by vantage point, is key to the work’s engagement with social inequities as expressed in built environments.

The public nature of the building process and the artist’s availability to discuss it with visitors during the residency phase are consistent with the political critique implicit in his handling of constructed space. At the close of the exhibition the piece will be dismantled, and the materials donated. According to the artist, “The way it goes will be as significant to my work as the way it becomes.”

Opening Reception
Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, 20 April, from 2 to 4pm.

This group show aims to obscure the functionality of the often domestic nature of ceramics and crafts. We will present works by contemporary artists that are unbounded by these guidelines and who are exploring new (dys)functionalities in their work. Gestural, intuitive, unrefined versions of familiar objects brush shoulders with other pottery of questionable function. As a group, the works finds greater strength in the uncertain and unexpected and create a dialogue of inspiration to other odd balls of clay.

Once Upon a Time in the East begins with Askevold’s early, ground-breaking video works from the early 1970s, considered to be the first conceptual video art ever made in Canada. It includes The Nova Scotia Project, a large-scale, multi-disciplinary work from the mid-’90s in which Askevold systematically documented the thousands of harbors along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia. This epic project comprises four elements: Once Upon a Time in the East, a series of aerial photographs of small craft harbors taken by the provincial department of fisheries and oceans; The Road Journal, photographs taken at road level on the way into the harbors; the End of the Road Matrix, photographs of structures such as fishing sheds from each harbor; and, Don’t Eat Crow , a garden shed housing a video installation. The exhibition also offers a mix of later pieces, primarily photo-based, and a video installation entitled Two Beasts, which was to be his last work. Askevold was collaborating on Two Beasts with his former student and New York artist Tony Oursler when he died in 2008; Oursler completed the project in 2010.

Cossey explores the world of falling water and other liquids, capturing the intriguing shapes and sculptural forms as they interact and collide.  The images are created using high-speed photographic techniques to freeze action that is not otherwise noticed by the naked eye.  Infinite permutations are achieved through playing with such variables as drop size, number, rate, colour, viscosity, surface tension, camera settings and lighting.  www.keithcossey.com

Meet the artist Sunday June 9th, 2 – 4pm.

It takes four to eight hours to make a landscape in the Park. Sitting somewhere in the wild growth, I shuck the city and acclimatize to the rhythms of nature. The sun is on my skin. There are the sounds of wind through the leaves, and squirrels tell me they see me. Chickadees sometimes land on my drawing board. Crows call. The ocean is blazing and sparkling with sunlight. It’s so bright I can’t look at it. The waves are in constant rhythmic motion. The tide comes in. The sun moves across the sky. I can smell the earth and leaves. There is imperceptible movement; the green process of chlorophyll, the upward twisting of bark and branches.
These natural movements of growth are always there, a background of life, a gently humming wavelength, that is largely unnoticed in city living.
Many people visit the Park. Leased from the Queen for a pound a year, it is a special element of Halifax that is cherished by its inhabitants and shared by joggers, walkers, dogs, children, talkers, baskers, readers, and thinkers. They walk along the civilized paths and roads, that are tamed lines carved through natural disorder.
In 2003 hurricane Juan rolled over the park making open spaces where there had been dense forest, and a tangle of fallen trunks where shaded trees once grew. Now, though, six years later, there is the vision of slow rebirth. Some of the old pines survived and stand tall still, watching over the quick growth of the new generation of small trees coming up amongst the fallen branches. The little trees complete the circle; the green creative growth of life balancing the past destructive forces of the storm.