Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents around the world—in particular mothers—have faced the conundrum of working from home while simultaneously providing comfort, care, and distraction for their children. The illusion that work is work and home is home, bred from decades of capitalism, seemed to dissipate. For many, the lockdowns over the past...
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Karen Stentaford has a long-standing preoccupation with place, geography, and belonging. Often the nature of Stentaford’s work requires her to spend long periods of time alone, enveloped by the landscape she is photographing. In some images—particularly in her Island series—the solitude is visceral. However, this quietude is not to be coerced into an extension of...
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Trickster child Brandon Hoax, son of a Stonecoat mother and Dullahan father, summarizes their work using the following visual descriptors: being alone at a party, standing in a parking garage listening to the hum of a fluorescent bulb, and staying up late waiting for you to message me. Undoubtedly, aloneness is intricately woven into Hoax’s...
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Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread stunningly explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, as it reconciles queerness with faith and offers the ingredients of spirituality, family ties, and intergenerational trauma to create a debut novel like no other. Born in Nigeria, Ekwuyasi moved to Halifax for graduate school, but writing has always been...
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I met visual artist Julia Hutt on the children’s floor of the Alderney Gate Public Library just before the second wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in Fall 2020. It was eerily quiet. All of the toys and board books had been removed, and the library’s programming was cancelled. I brought my seven-month-old son with me, who...
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By Carrie Allison Sustenance for our bodies, lands, and spirits are inherently interconnected in Indigenous teachings, language, ceremony, art, and contemporary ways of being. Sustenance is often cyclical and reciprocal; it asks for nothing but trusts that we won’t take too much. It is through creating that I gain sustenance, through my work as an...
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"I realized that, for the first time, there would be no cake. It was a hard day. It made me realize that baking a cake was, for my mother, an act of love."
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Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of...
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Tremblett’s Reprise is deeply personal, as it weaves text, photography, beadwork, natural found materials, and textiles to connective tissues of ancestry. This illustrates the artist reconnecting to lost histories and refining her relationship to her identity and Innu heritage. It’s both powerful and vulnerable.
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Wren Tian-Morris is a trans Chinese Canadian artist, facilitator, and organizer. Their creative practice is interdisciplinary and explores themes of pleasure, queerness, and the diaspora. Raised in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), they frequently consider leaving, but are finding themselves rooted in “the little nooks and crannies of the city,” which speaks to the transient nature of this...
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In being invited to contribute to this issue of Visual Arts News on the theme of Change, we decided to put forward a conversation about how important it is for settler cultural workers to embrace and embody not knowing, in order to let go of and mourn attachments to the status quo—a status quo built...
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Gut Feeling showcases a roster of artists who, in Halifax, are nothing short of beloved. Even on a snowy night in a busy week of exhibition openings, Dalhousie Art Gallery was packed with friends and community members who are deeply devoted to the artists featured. Many artists have practices that intersect with their roles as...
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