detail of a a mural, titled Respect the Architechts

Cultural and Community Resilience in Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art

As a newcomer committed to uplifting Black artistic production, I long to connect with people whose experiences help situate my presence on this land. Instead, I often feel isolated in my desire to see more diverse audiences—until the opening of Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on September 21, 2024, in Halifax. At the opening, the gallery’s warmth struck me immediately: the sound of laughter and the beat of DJ DTS’s set created a palpable sense of belonging. For the first time since moving to Halifax from Toronto over a year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by my community, which transformed the event into a celebration of presence and belonging in a space so rarely welcoming of Black people. 

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Open Call for Fall 2024 Issue

We’re eager to hear from writers, artists, and critics to expand and deepen conversations inspired by the artistic vision of emerging and established artists who are pushing the boundaries of art and culture in the Atlantic. For this open call, we are seeking pitches for features, profiles, and exhibition reviews. We prioritize work that pushes...

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Graeme Patterson’s Strange Birds 

The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film. 

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Embed, Embody and Adorn (2019)

Socially Engaged Art: On Making with Others

There are many ways people are brought into the process of making art. Through my own art practice and experience with producing and participating in socially engaged art projects, I understand that collaboration, participation, and social engagement have the capacity to create transformative experiences and dynamic artwork.  Yet, I have felt the edges of collaboration...

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Alan Syliboy’s The Journey So Far

Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy’s retrospective The Journey So Far, curated by Pamela Edmonds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (May 9 to August 11, 2024), spanned more than fifty years of work. The exhibition included paintings, collage, photography, music, print, mixed media, video, drums, and guitars and even a commissioned wall mural featuring a great horned...

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Eastern Edge Moose Sign (designed by Ray Mackie

Eastern Edge: 40 Years of Art and Dancing on the Edge of the North Atlantic 

This summer marked the fortieth anniversary of Eastern Edge Gallery, Newfoundland’s only artist-run centre and the site of some of the wildest and most boldly political art exhibited in Newfoundland since the early 1980s. In preparation for celebrations, which took place in St. John’s in August, the gallery staff dug into their archives, hosted story-sharing...

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Installation view of the exhibition Daze Jefferies: stay here stay now stay (2024). Courtesy of The Rooms.

Daze Jefferies’s stay here stay how stay 

Curator Emily Critch notes that the exhibition “presents a visually poetic archipelago of transfeminine and sex worker belonging in Newfoundland and Labrador. Responding to contemporary discourse about trans and sex worker experiences, with hope and histories held by water, an entangled narrative of care, intimacy, and resistance emerges from the coastlines” (2024). Collaboratively, Critch and Jefferies have questioned how we might hold and be held within this archipelago. 

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Lifting As We Rise

Multiple works on gallery walls As We Rise at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery

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Portrait-of-Lance-Sampson-aka-Aquakulture

Jenn Grant’s Something to Believe In at the Prow Gallery

"Being able to express myself in more than one way has been a gift and something I didn’t really realize I was missing. I think that form of expression and being connected to such a strong local gallery has firmed up my yes’s and no’s. I am more careful with my time. I am seeing how quickly time can pass. Being a mother and demonstrating to my kids what is important to me in a day, what brings me joy, and the power of saying no is a daily practice and certainly something I want to be ingrained in them as well."

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Keel William Robinson 2023 Grand piano top 213.4 x 157.5 x 53.3 cm (84 x 62 x 21 in) Image courtesy of the artist Photo by Meghan Tansey Whitton

Pitchpole

If the church is a display of God’s glory, Pitchpole is a display of conceptual art’s glory. Poetry by Erin Langille (acting as a psalm), Pitchpole (the hymn), jewellery by Shaya Ishaq (the relic), a sturdy set of speakers (the organ), and Ader (the saint). Does it matter that we don’t know the story of Ader and his ill-fated journey, or the many legends that have surrounded him since? Or is Ader's story simply Robinson’s invitation to work through whatever unfinished grief we hold in the cathedral of the contemporary art gallery?

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