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 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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As if being anything other than White in Halifax doesn’t already make you hyper-visible, the women in Rita Malik’s short film On Being Brown sometimes navigate quintessential Maritime markers wearing gold-embroidered jewel-toned lehengas. Even though it’s an ornate shirt-over-skirt set that South Asian women reserve for celebrations, the women in the film wear lehengas on...
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Driving my car down the winding Bonavista highway, I remember how many times I’ve done this route – to watch whales, to go for a good slice of pizza, and, since 2017, to see contemporary art. Growing up in Clarenville, a town an hour and a half away from the Bonavista peninsula, I thought I...
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Stemming from generations of near-forgotten knowledge, Carley Mullally’s work transfigures discarded marine detritus into thoughtful contemporary artworks by employing traditional maritime rope making and net repair methods. Originating from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Mullally discovered sewing at a very young age. This led her to diligently pursue fashion and garment making during her adolescent years....
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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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