Sculptor Sarah Maloney’s idea of a pleasure ground is a little more literal. It's the title of her most recent solo exhibition, on display at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, until October 12, 2025. Pleasure Ground investigates both the body and sexuality (pleasure) as well as plants and other elements of the natural world (ground).
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Walking into the Treaty Space Gallery at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University on a bitter cold February morning I smell the lingering sage from the exhibition opening of Amalkewinu’k from the previous night. For the public portion of the opening, Michelle Peters sang a Mi’kmaq song, and curators Aaron Prosper and Mackenzie...
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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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Mapping Black Resilience: Three Perspectives at Dalhousie Art Gallery, which ran from February 4 until May 4, 2025, is an exhibition in three acts, which independently, yet in tandem, reconsider archival material and its role in the documenting and redocumenting of Black identity. The exhibition explores personal and collective experiences as archival documentation of Black...
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Spring/Summer 2026 Volume 48 #1 Visual Arts News turns 50 this year. We want to mark the milestone by widening the circle. We’re inviting writers, artists, and critics to pitch smart, generous stories that deepen conversations around Atlantic art and culture. Surprise us. Challenge us. Bring forward practices, places, and people that haven’t had enough...
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While the wild green of a sunny May afternoon blazed outside, the bright white interior of a barn on a rural New Brunswick property radiated with its own kind of energy. These synergies are from a joint exhibition, Behind Moving Eyelids (May 10–11, 2025) in Rowley, New Brunswick, by Jeneca Klausen and Caitlin Lapeña, whose deceptively simple works hummed with ideas about feminine power, both surface and projected, and those of a deeper, darker, more private nature.
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The exhibition This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts centers around themes of autobiography, personal agency, and reciprocity. Featuring emerging and mid-career artists Andrew Quon, Miya Turnbull, Curtis Botham, Laura Kenney, Shauna MacLeod, Lux Gow-Habrich, and Monique Silver, it explicitly examines the connection between autobiographical art and socio-political issues. Guest-curated by Brandt Eisner, the curatorial premise asserts that the personal is inseparable from the political and that the human body and its memory hold a record of the body's interaction with the world at large. It is through this holistic recognition of our existence as social beings that we, as a collective, have the means to enact transformative change for the common good.
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“I think the weight is worth bearing, because I think it's so important that we learn about the people who've walked these places ahead of us and all the successes and the challenges and the failures that they faced,” she says. “It's such a huge responsibility that I didn't understand until I really wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted and tried to get it ‘right.’”
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Coming back to the Island as an artist for the residency in MacKinnon’s Brook helped Farooq harmonize the gulf between both coasts and also redefine his sense of belonging to Cape Breton. He gave an artist talk at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts to conclude his residency, the first artist talk he’s given in his home province, where members of the art community from both sides of the Island gathered. “There was a real sense of homecoming. I think people understood very much where I was coming from in my projects as being one of our own, in a way.” These stories of disorientation and interbeing while in residence, about the art communities on both coasts, help to attune to the rich and complex histories as well as inheritances of Cape Breton’s broader arts ecology. Perhaps what they all have in common is the land on which they practice, how the coastal lands and environment of the Island influence their practices and gather them in its basin of relationships.
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We are seeking an Editor for Visual Arts News. This is a freelance contract position to start September 8, 2025. The first print issue under the new Editor will be Spring/Summer 2026. The Editor should have knowledge of the communities of artists, galleries and institutions in the Atlantic region, and a curiosity to learn more. The ideal candidate will enjoy working as part of a collaborative team. They will share an excitement and enthusiasm for telling stories that shine light on the art and artists who live and work in this part of the world.
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By Shannon Webb-Campbell The biannual gathering Shore Time on Fogo Island from September 26 to 29, 2024, was more than a coming together off an island in the North Atlantic, it was an invitation to the otherworldly. Organized by Fogo Island Arts, part of the longstanding Shorefast and international residency, Shore Time brings together artists,...
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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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