“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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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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Multiple works on gallery walls As We Rise at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery
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"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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This event occurred on October 14th 2020, as an Anchor project of Nocturne Halifax. Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism with Ingrid Waldron was an online event centering Black and Indigenous solidarity through cross-cultural exchanges on environmental racism in Mi’kma’ki. Speakers and performers were brought together to share stories and experiences of environmental racism...
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Black American visual artist Heather Hart’s series of rooftop oracles based on the four directions (East, West, North, and South) is an-ongoing series of work that offers prophetic predictions for imagining new futures. Most recently, she’s created Northern Oracle, an exhibition curated by Ann MacDonald and presented in partnership with the Africville Heritage Trust at...
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Moon phases are like reading habits, as we move through our days, nights, and lives guided by lunar cycles and folding the corners of pages, mapping meaning and making connections through art, poetry, criticism, and drawing. This past Spring during MagNet 2019, Canada’s Magazine Conference, I had the opportunity to go to the moon, and...
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In Nova Scotia and elsewhere people are grappling with the issue of what to do with monuments associated with a painful past, and are asking whether the action of tearing down statues like that of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax helps to redress a history of violence, or whether the removal simply hides or disguises what has happened. In thinking through the dilemma posed by this question, we are forced to consider when it is appropriate to remove a monument, what should happen to it when it is taken down, and what to do with the space left behind.
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Hosted at Parsons School of Art and Design in New York City as part of Project Anywhere, the “Elsewhere and Anywhere” conference presents art and research at “the outermost limit of site specificity”. The project hosts artists whose work engages micro to macro – bringing smaller, localized stories into the international art realm and beyond. It offered the opportunity to tap into the artistic psyche and methods used to reach public audiences through art.
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This year was Nocturne’s tenth edition. A milestone for the organization, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.
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Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. Her forthcoming book, I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug, 2018) attempts to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of revisioning. Still No Word (Breakwater 2015) was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out In Print Award. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia, a BA from Dalhousie University, and is currently completing a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, and currently lives in Montréal.
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