Magazine

Paul Édouard Bourque

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...

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Found 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...

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Retracing 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...

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Art 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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From the Archives: Shary Boyle’s voice in the dark

“When creating Music for Silence I was inspired by the idea of the Universal, the power and insignificance of the individual, and how that relates to the idea of ‘voice." —Shary Boyle

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From the archives

Suspended Memory: Decoding Graeme Patterson

Enter into the imaginary world of Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel where memory, invention, and fantasy collide to provoke a multifaceted narrative of childhood friendship, rights of passage and adult isolation.

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