Reviews

Beyond the Gallery

Beyond the Gallery is an anthology published by Laberinto Press (Edmonton, Alberta), as part of their Beyond series. The editorial team is made up of Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Ana Ruiz Aguirre, and Liuba González de Armas. This publication of essays, according to the editors, seeks to “showcase the talent of some of the best literary professionals...

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Arjun Lal’s Fruits of the Forest

francesca ekwuyasi in conversation with Arjun Lal On a sunny afternoon in June 2021, I meet Arjun Lal at their home studio in the north end of Halifax. Having only seen their leatherwork and performance art as Vagine—their bright eyeshadow and gold tinsel-streaked wig-wearing alter ego—I am eager to see what else they’ve been getting...

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Ursula Johnson’s ITHA: The Livingroom

Ursula Johnson has created a safe and hospitable space to delve deeply into conversational exchanges that reveal our complex relationships with places we call home, consumption, ownership, and one another—specifically what it means to be, as we all are, treaty people. Johnson’s exhibition, ITHA: The Livingroom, was on view at the Blue Building in K’jipuktuk/Halifax...

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Weaponizing Precarity

An Interview With RM Vaughan

We were saddened to learn of RM Vaughan’s passing in October 2020. He was an author, playwright and artist, and beloved member of the LGBTQ2S+ community. We are grateful for his legacy and his tireless contributions to the arts in Atlantic Canada and beyond. The following piece appeared in the Labour issue of Visual Arts...

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Melissa Tremblett’s Reprise

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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Gut Feeling

Dalhousie Art Gallery. 17 January – 15 March, 2020

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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MEMORY OF ROADSIDE FLOWERS

Care and Kinship in the Work of Emily Critch

Emily Critch is a visual artist, curator, and writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry from Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk (Bay of Island, Newfoundland). Critch’s work was recently featured in Future Possible (2019) at The Rooms and her upcoming curatorial project mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew will be exhibiting in Corner Brook in 2020. Critch...

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Memorial Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora...

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Listening to Silence

"What Carries Us" at The Rooms

What does it mean to revisit the stories we’ve been told, the stories that purport to tell us who we are? And why might we do so in the first place? This is the premise that underpins What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based artist, curator, and...

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Postmodern Blackness in Heather Hart’s Northern Oracle

Black American visual artist Heather Hart’s series of rooftop oracles based on the four directions (East, West, North, and South) is an-ongoing series of work that offers prophetic predictions for imagining new futures. Most recently, she’s created Northern Oracle, an exhibition curated by Ann MacDonald and presented in partnership with the Africville Heritage Trust at...

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Abbas Akhavan Explores Faith, Theatre & Architecture in script for an island on Fogo

In fall of 2019, multidisciplinary artist Abbas Akhavan hung two ten-foot wide theatre curtains from a twelve-foot scaffolding on the beach in the small community of Joe Batt’s Arm on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. The wind animated the velvet curtains, choreographing a dance between the undulating fabric and the waves in front of them, transforming the...

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Remembering Africville

Nova Scotia was once home to Africville, one of the oldest Black settlements outside of the African Continent. Africville’s oral history supports its existence as far back as the 1700s. It was located on the Bedford basin of the city of Halifax in the general area the Alexander Murray MacKay Bridge now occupies. In the...

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