Going there: The playful pain of Neil LaPierre
Delving into the personal and surreal, Neil LaPierre is committed to bringing the HA-HA’s into art discourse.
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Liberated Form
Richard Mueller puts pop imagery in a blender
Richard Mueller is not so interested in coherent pictorial space or literal depiction as in the potential of formal arrangements to engender associative and emotional responses “independent of literal language.”
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Echoes across time and space
L’Acadie Mythique retraces identity and culture
L’Acadie Mythique, a travelling exhibition that recently visited the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, is curated by Harlan Johnson and features nearly twenty different artists from across the Acadian diaspora.
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Q + A: Jordan Bennett
Mi’kmaq artist bringing traditional Beothuk and Mi’kmaq art into contemporary discourse
Visual Arts News was excited to feature the work of artist Jordan Bennett in our Fall 2015 issue. In this online installation of her interview series, Current Conditions & Forecasts, Eryn Foster chats with Bennett about everything ranging from his experiences representing Newfoundland in Venice to his work bringing traditional Indigenous art forms into contemporary art discourse. ERYN FOSTER: You...
Read MoreFound in the Fog
Below the surface with Michael Pittman
As we walked downtown, my friend described how two old hags had chewed on either side of her neck the night before. It wasn’t the first time. “I’ve learned that the trick,” she told me, “is that I just have to let it happen, to remind myself that it’s not real.” This was a...
Read MoreRetracing the past
A conversation with Cathy Busby
Cathy Busby displays the artworks that the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s first director, Moncrieff Williamson, acquired half a century ago on a shoestring budget ahead of a royal visit from the Queen. Or at least, what was left of them.
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Physical Landscapes
Anatomica’s view on the interior
While exploring Anatomica, I experienced several moments of disorientation, unsure whether I was approaching a piece with stronger connections to an artists’ studio or a laboratory. Take the human spine curving from a steel frame in the gallery. From a distance, artist Sarah Maloney’s Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx looks like a replica meant to be...
Read MoreArt World Antidote
Folklore and Other Panics collapses stereotypes
Folklore And Other Panics addresses the impossibility of “alleviating anxiety around elitism” in the contemporary art world. And further, according to the exhibition’s pamphlet, “the works provide a constellation of ideas, responding in various ways to themes of absence and presence, community, the materials of storytelling, and the nature of authority.”
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From the archives: Susan Wood’s Earth Skins
Editor’s note: This review of Earth Skins at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (Halifax, NS, August 23 – October 2, 2011) first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Visual Arts News. A retrospective publication of Earth Skins can be purchased here. I was the first visitor to wander into to Earth Skins: Three...
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From the archives: Cut/Fold/Play
Editor’s note: Paper Doll first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Visual Arts News. Mention paper dolls to nearly any North American woman and the response is a soft “Oh, I loved my paper dolls.” While huge numbers of little girls spend hours happily re-inventing themselves through playing with their dolls, in later life,...
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From the archives: In bed with Carl Stewart
Editor’s note: Laura Kenin’s profile of Carl Stewart appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of Visual Arts News. For many Haligonians living in a city full of students and other transient young people at a time of widespread bedbug fear, the sight of used mattresses may arouse disgust or serve as a reminder it’s end-of-the-school-year time again....
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From the archives: Mathieu Léger transforms cultural detritus
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in the Fall 2014 issue of Visual Arts News. In Acadian author France Daigle’s 2012 novel Pour sûr, Antoinette opens a game of Scrabble against her husband, The Cripple, with a controversial 125 points. Her word, dialyse, she argued, to her husband’s chagrin, contained two vertical words—“y” and “a.” “It wasn’t the 21...
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