At the heart of My Bones Are Funny are two pieces that face off in the middle gallery space: My Guardian Angel Is Tired (2023) is hung across from the video installation Things I Learn From My Grandmother’s Giggle (2023). My Guardian Angel is a large five-part self-portrait, which exhibition curator Emma Hassencahl-Perley informed me was actually installed by the artist himself. “It was so art school,” she says with a laugh. “He bent the wire against a doorframe and nailed it into a two-by-four.” In each of the five photos, which together form one complete self-portrait, Kimble is covered by a different substance: dirt, sugar, honey, bubbles, and snow. According to Hassencahl-Perley, each material has unique significance. The dirt signifies buried sexual trauma; the snow, an absence of emotion. The honey pulls double duty as a symbol of alcohol abuse and of preservation, honey being the main ingredient in mead but also the only food in the world that never expires. The sugar indicates addiction, and the bubbles, levity.

The video installation across the gallery is domestic, perhaps even mundane at first glance: the artist, off-camera, asks his grandmother to translate English phrases into Chipewyan. “This is my house,” says Kimble from behind the camera. Their grandmother interprets the phrase, bursting into a giggle at the end. Her laugh is warm and infectious, her smile lines deep; she sits with her hands behind her back, open to the camera. “What do you want?” says Kimble. “Who are you?” These questions, in the context of the colonization of Chipewyan lands by European settlers, juxtapose eerily with Kimble’s grandmother’s ease in her home. Interspersed with these interview clips are shots of waves lapping at a shoreline, quiet and constant. Love and affection flow effortlessly between the artist and matriarch. “The things I learn from my grandmother’s giggle can never be taught inside a classroom,” writes Kimble on their website. 

In the series Grow Up, Kimble presents more self-portraiture, this time a combination of current and childhood photos. Over these, they have pasted shiny letters resembling party balloons. They spell out maxims that combine personal reflection with levity: “take yourself to seriously” [sic] reads Grow Up #13 (2022), a pouty glamour shot where the artist sports a string of pearls. Hassencahl-Perley tells me that these pieces were inspired by the artist’s therapy sessions, wherein they spoke with their inner child. Coming of age, the loss of innocence, and surviving one’s twenties (arguably the last time most people can acceptably behave like children) are all mourned in these playful works.

Another exhibition highlight is It’s All So Incredibly Loud (Rage) (2025). This series of self-portraits is embroidered with tiny, blood-red beads, which gather at Kimble’s tear ducts and gradually fall, filling the frame. 

“My great-grandmother was a beautiful beader,” writes Kimble, “my grandmother could bead, my mom can kind of, and I can barely. It’s All So Incredibly Loud talks about having the knowledge of a historical expression inside of you but not having direct access to that knowledge.” 

Beadwork is a cherished art form and traditional practice in many Indigenous cultures; to this day, beading often carries important symbolism, tells stories, and serves as a historical record. Despite the efforts of colonizing bodies, Indigenous beadwork has survived as an enduring art form. 

“While mainly speaking about reviving knowledges within the body, [It’s All So Incredibly Loud] also explores the overwhelming nature of being alive and the loss that comes with it,” writes Kimble. “There are days […] where the grief is barely visible and days where it is the only thing I can see, it really depends on the day, which is also why I made the conscious decision to add loose beads physically inside the frame, it always shows up different.”

When I meet Jake Kimble for the first time, they’re sitting behind a table with Emma Hassencahl-Perley, and I have to dodge the many gallery visitors approaching to have their books signed by the artist. Jake has a new tattoo, which is visibly crispy, and they confirm for me with a laugh that it is definitely itchy. 

“It’s a Florence and the Machine lyric,” they say, indicating that it stretches all the way from shoulder to wrist. “I was just listening to Lungs this morning in my car,” I blurt, which is true but feels like something a journalist would make up to make their subject feel at ease. As more patrons cluster behind me, I quickly get Kimble’s email address and promise to reach out soon.

I visited the Beaverbrook on a warm Thursday evening while most people were still in five o’clock traffic. In the quiet of the gallery, while I was watching Things I Learn, I heard a sudden exclamation: “WOOOAAAAHHH.” Two young men, in jerseys and baseball caps, had snuck in without my notice, and they were staring at My Guardian Angel Is Tired in awe. “Jake…Kimble,” I heard one of them say, as they searched the artist up online on one of their phones. I would love to know what struck them, but I think that’s also the beauty of the piece: it’s multifaceted, such that you never know how it will resonate with another person.

My Bones Are Funny, Sometimes They Ache is human messiness, and that’s what makes it engrossing. Kimble’s self-portraiture plays with Western gender roles, teasing the line between masculine and feminine, celebrating their Two-Spirit identity. Double entendres abound in Kimble’s performance of gender and in the language used to describe it. Translation and interpretation between Indigenous cultural mainstays—art forms, languages, gender expressions, all the practices that make a people—and their Canadian counterparts form an evident throughline in this exhibition. Many of the pieces are named in English but include a Chipewyan parenthetical title; the deliberate historical attempts of colonizers to eradicate Indigenous languages contextualize Kimble’s decision not to translate every single word into English. It feels like the artist is gently saying: Yours are not the only words that matter. Listen, let me (and my grandmother) teach you something.

Emotion spills over everywhere in this exhibition, whether it be in sticky sweet honey, overflowing tears, a pie smashed into a face, or the prints made using paper towels as canvases. Kimble neglects to clean up for us. He flaunts this truth, this reclamation of body and all of its uncomfortable ambiguities. Their (sometimes literally) cheeky self-portraits are strange enough to make us laugh and vulnerable enough to make us cry. 

“Jake doesn’t like to describe [humour] as a coping mechanism,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “It’s more of a survival instinct.” 

After all, the funny bone aches, too. 

Shannon Harvey: It’s clear from my visit and from speaking to Emma that humour is a central theme in this exhibition. What is your personal sense of humour like?

Jake Kimble: I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I am a serious artist. 

SH: Alongside the humour, there are veins of grief, rage, and coming-of-age / loss of innocence throughout this exhibition. Can you speak to how (and why) you wove these feelings together?

JK: One of my favourite lessons I’ve learned with growing older is that those two feelings do not have to be mutually exclusive and are more often than not bedfellows. I had an acting teacher once explain that there will always be joy when expressing sadness because when someone truly allows themselves to feel—whether that be anger, fear, or pain, et cetera—authentically it feels good. Because it feels good to honour your body and your spirit. 

SH: There is a lot of wordplay going on in My Bones Are Funny, and you invoke your grandmother’s first language in a beautiful video installation where you ask her to translate different phrases. You also do not exclusively use English in the titles for your pieces. Can you tell me about your use and choice of language?

JK: I’m thinking about accessibility to language, particularly my access to my native language Chipewyan, which I am still learning. I’m trying to wake up the language for my tongue. I should know how to speak Chip, but it’s minimal at best, so naming works of mine [using] phrases in my language helps me practise and keep it awake. 

SH: Were there any significant challenges or personal struggles that emerged while creating these pieces? If so, how did you overcome those or incorporate them into the works? Or, alternatively, did the entire process go smoothly, and if so, why do you think that was?

JK: It’s been so lovely to see all of these works shown together, because it’s almost a soft retrospective of my development—both as an artist and as a human being. Uncovering who I am and seeing how I operate is a fun thread that connects them all. I think overcoming my preconceived notions of what makes a “serious artist” is something that I learned to get over pretty quick, but making sure I stay over that idea is what has actually been challenging. So just remaining true to me and my funny way of doing things is what I hold on to, because that is what resonates, I find. 

SH: Is there one work from this exhibition that you would consider the “heart” or centrepiece of My Bones Are Funny?

 JK: My Guardian Angel Is Tired, I think, is the anchor of this exhibition, it is very much the work that exists in the middle of all of the pieces and connects them all. 

SH: Are there any other themes that emerged while you were working, perhaps themes you were surprised by? Are there themes that you find people often don’t pick up on, that you wish they saw or felt?

 JK: Seeing them all together was an interesting thing for me, because I never really understood how much pain there is in the works (don’t get me wrong, there is just as much humour). Recognizing that has made me hug myself a little more and treat myself with a little more kindness. 

The first things to catch the eye are the large orange fish. Originally suspended as banners during the exhibition’s presentation at the Venice Biennale, the drawings now stretch across the gallery walls. Rendered in Jonas’s rapid hand, the fish recall the Ensō, the Zen circle, rendered in uninhibited brushstrokes that are said to emerge from a “no-mind” state, conveying the freedom of flow. The fish feel alive, not from any attempt at realism but because they are breaking containment of form, splashing outside of the lines. One can almost hear the smack of a wet brush on paper. 

Passing through a threshold of colour I can only describe as “underwater-photography blue”—a blue that suggests infinite aquatic reaches—the exhibition opens into an environment of moving images, drawings, mirrors, sculptures, and theatre-like viewing boxes. Positioned within are two room-sized theatre boxes inviting visitors inside and two smaller wooden viewers. Sea creatures glide across projected bodies. Everywhere, drawing persists: on walls, on paper, and in the gestures of Jonas’s own filmed performances.

The instinct, at least for this reviewer, is to begin searching for labels. Anything to explain, to provide context. There are remarkably few. It soon becomes clear that this is not an exhibition meant to be consumed artwork by artwork but as a whole, operating as a single environment—an ecosystem—asking viewers to move through it slowly, allowing confluences between its parts to emerge. When I later mention this to co-curator David Diviney, he smiles in recognition.

“It operates as a singular work,” he says. “We invite people to enter the gallery space, immerse themselves in the installation, and experience it on their own terms.”

That trust in the gallery-goers is one of the exhibition’s defining qualities.

Rather than directing visitors toward a prescribed interpretation, We Come From the Sea emboldens the visitor’s intuition. Meanings accumulate, through repeated encounters with recurring images, gestures, sounds, and materials. Given the duration-based nature of the work, Diviney says, “It encourages people to spend time in the space and with each of the different elements. Along the way, a deeply personal experience begins to unfold.”

That unfolding has characterized Jonas’s practice for more than five decades. Widely recognized as one of the pioneers of performance and video art, the New York artist first emerged in the late sixties, when visual artists, dancers, filmmakers, and composers were working fluidly across disciplines. During an artist talk following the exhibition’s opening, Jonas recalled taking workshops with dancers because she’d never formally studied performance.

“I developed a way of moving in relation to a subject,” she said.

That emphasis on movement continues to shape her work today. Rather than illustrating and defining ideas, Jonas circles around them, approaching them from different angles through drawing, choreography, film, storytelling, mythology, sculpture, and sound. Each medium reveals something the others cannot; all are connected by the artist’s curiosity. 

Cape Breton/Unama’ki has been foundational to that evolution. Jonas first travelled there in 1970 with a group of artists that included Richard Serra and Philip Glass, returning nearly every summer since. When Diviney remarked to her that the island has served such a significant part of both her life and her practice, her response was immediate: “I literally fell in love with it.”

The influence runs deeper than land- and seascape alone. Jonas has spoken often of her fascination with Gaelic traditions, ceilidhs (“kitchen parties”), Celtic poetry, local dance, and the rhythms of coastal life. These experiences became woven into an artistic vocabulary that refuses to separate human culture from the natural world.

That relationship—that symbiosis—ultimately led to Moving Off the Land II, the body of work from which We Come From the Sea emerges.

“I started out very simply,” Jonas explained. “I asked myself: How do I make a piece about the ocean, which is a vast subject? How do you start?”

Her answer is not to explain the ocean. It’s to change the way we relate to it. Consider the ways we discuss sea life, calling it “otherworldly” and the creatures therein “alien.” Jonas continually reminds us of how partial our own perception really is, how we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world. We’re wrong to do this, implies Jonas. Look at us with our finlike hands and our tentacle arms, these pieces (especially the video installations) seem to say, we really do come from the sea! In one section of the exhibition, fish, shells, and found objects sit within a thick rippled glass vitrine resembling an aquarium. They shimmer and change slightly as viewers move past them. Elsewhere, similarly rippled mirrors transform the gallery into an aquarium, rendering the visitors as though they were underwater. These strange sea-apes slip in and out of view. Even Jonas’s drawings resist stillness and completion. Their loose lines suggest fish without fully describing them, yet preserving something of their flitting movement and darting, quicksilver unpredictability. Everything in the show becomes slippery, hard to hold. 

Marine biologist David Gruber became one of Jonas’s important collaborators while developing the project. “He deals with the perception of fish,” she said, “and I deal with perception as well.”

Gruber’s research explores forms of marine bioluminescence invisible to the human eye. “We can’t see the fish the way they see each other,” Jonas observed. “Through David’s lens you realize how bright it is down there and how colourful, but we can’t see that.”

The exhibition, in its own submerged way, asks what else remains beyond human perception. Artist and design educator Angela Henderson sees this concern running through Jonas’s entire practice. “I think she alters our perception,” Henderson told me at the exhibition opening. “She’s really skillful at asking us to look more closely at what we don’t see—or what we do see, for that matter.”

Rather than offering certainty, Henderson argues, Jonas invites viewers into a more demanding form of attention. “The viewer has to do a lot of work,” she says, “not necessarily to understand what’s happening, but to feel what’s happening.”

That distinction feels crucial. Much contemporary environmental art relies on urgency, statistics, or catastrophe. Jonas chooses to swim in another stream. Her work nods toward ecological precarity without becoming heavy-handed. It is less interested in persuading than in inviting sustained attention.

“She is paying tribute to the ocean, its creatures, the biodiversity, and delicate ecology,” Diviney explains. “On a certain level, the work is intended to raise awareness, but its core takeaway is the call to action—urging visitors to reflect on their own relationship with the sea.”

That invitation takes on a particularly moving form in the exhibition’s youngest participants. In the films, children perform, read, improvise, and move through imagined underwater worlds.

“The children will inherit this,” Jonas explained to Diviney at the artist talk. “I thought it was important for them to represent themselves in the work because they’re the ones who are going to inherit it.”

This statement lands with surprising force. The kids are not symbols of innocence or optimism. They’re collaborators. Jonas never asks them to perform predetermined roles. “I never tell them exactly what to do,” she explained. “I set up improvisational situations.”

Their presence reminds viewers that environmental stewardship extends across generations.

Rachel Carson’s spirit moves through the exhibition as well. Jonas dedicated the work to the pioneering marine biologist and author of Silent Spring, describing Carson as “a scientist, but also a poet in the way she wrote.”

Science and imagination are never opposing forces here. They coexist comfortably, just as mythology sits beside marine biology and performance beside drawing. Perhaps that is why We Come From the Sea feels so generous. It refuses easy conclusions.

As Henderson observed, “You can’t just go to that exhibition and be an observer. Being a witness and being an observer are two very different things.” To witness requires patience and intuition. It requires lingering inside uncertainty. It asks something of us.

Before leaving the gallery, I found myself returning to one of the theatre boxes, watching the entire cycle of video clips, waiting for my favourite section. In the cycle, Jonas, in a long white coat and white trousers, moves in front of projected video images of underwater life. The clips play across Jonas and the screen behind her. My favourite clip features Jonas dwarfed by an underwater close-up of a seal and dancing with it. She moves, accommodating its bulbous calf-eyes and long whiskers, reacting to its corkscrewing turns, chasing after it, grasping and catching nothing. The seal-image slips through fingers, she can’t even catch hold of a fin. Its movements are fluid and nubile, hers are shaky and elderly. At first, the clip struck me as a practice in futility. She can’t possibly affect it, cannot really interact with the seal, cannot catch in her hands what she is pursuing, and yet…And yet, through her dance with the images flickering over her form and the screen, she does. She does change it. The scene takes on the drama of an artist losing control of her drawing, and it is a glory. 

by Elissa Barnard

The airy ARTSPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Royal, is full of the whispering voices of history, hidden lives, and dropped threads in Julie Rosvall’s poetic and profound exhibit I am Torn and I am Mended.

In this show, the textile artist and printmaker takes two steps forward, adding new layers to an already meaningful, metaphoric art form. She decided to work with found lace garments, instead of her own knit lace pieces, for her soft ground etchings on paper, textile relief prints, and paper lithography. These aren’t Frenchys dive finds but articles she feels personally connected to as a maker.

As a person who loves old things and hates to waste anything, Rosvall has also taken her own damaged large-scale lithography prints, cut them into sections, and “mended” them in large visible stitches. She accents tears and creases with gold leaf in the style of kintsugi (Japanese golden repair).

Rosvall partly perceives her damaged prints and textiles as connected to her own “wonky body” as she continues to recover from knee surgery and a back injury. “Just because my knee doesn’t work doesn’t mean I don’t work,” she says. “You sew it up, you put it back together, and you carry on.”

As a craftsperson and former program director at Craft Nova Scotia, Rosvall cherishes patterning among people as much as in textiles. “It is all about connections whether it’s the mug you drink your coffee out of or a piece of jewelry. It’s about the connection to the maker and their respective world.”

In her diaphanous and mysterious images, she suggests historical narratives as she honours the process of craft-making and the often little-known makers of craft. Her broken and mended works beckon viewers to concoct their own stories, to ruminate on remnants and relics, to see imperfection as part of human life, and to perceive repair as an act of hope and honour. 

Mrs. Trask’s Skirt #1—Rhubarb, 2025, is a life-sized, textile relief print of a torn lace skirt on white cotton rag paper. Delicate, disconnected threads drift into an open hole of frayed edges; this hole becomes the edge of the universe, a jumping-off point into the unknown. 

In Mrs. Trask’s Skirt Remnant #3, 2025, Rosvall stitches up the hole on paper using hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn in highly visible mending, recalling mothers and grandmothers darning socks and sweaters. 

Rosvall reveals her love of nature, art, and community in the stories embedded in her work. Mrs. Trask’s Skirt is about Mrs. Gwendolyn Trask, an avid gardener like Rosvall, as well as a genealogist and baker active in her community of Yarmouth. Rosvall heard about Mrs. Trask on an episode of Sherrie Graham’s Nova Scotia Kitchens podcast in which Graham interviewed Mrs. Trask, her neighbour, as she made rhubarb clafoutis. One day when Graham helped her neighbour clean out her closets, she came across two skirts that Mrs. Trask’s mother, Huldah Guiou, had knit for her in the 1930s. 

As Graham tells it on her Substack: “I couldn’t quite bring myself to toss them without somehow acknowledging the beautiful handwork created almost a century ago, so I secretly squirrelled them away and contacted textile artist Julie Rosvall.”

The artist loves to work in black ink with forays into blue. However, for this piece she concocted a delicious pink close to the colour of the rhubarb in her garden. Viewers have responded so positively to this pink that Rosvall plans to experiment with more colour, specifically yellow for the second skirt. This yellow links to the forsythia in both Mrs. Trask’s and Rosvall’s yards.

In a lovely coincidence, the rhubarb connects to Wolfville fibre artist Jali Giroux (1959–2009), who gave Rosvall one of her three rhubarb patches. Giroux also knit Rosvall an onion-skin-dyed shawl as a thirtieth birthday present. The actual shawl, mended, is on exhibit as well as the artwork, Mended—Jali’s Shawl, 2024, a paper lithography, large-scale detail of the shawl repaired with gold leaf and in stitches that are rivulets of wool, making a landscape of the pattern. The wool Rosvall uses in her repairs belonged to Giroux.

Rosvall decided against any colour for her delicate white-on-white impressions—debossings on cotton rag paper—of the Greenspond doilies she found in the bottom of a basket shoved away on a shelf in a Newfoundland antique store. (They belong to a collection of found objects from her 2024 artist-in-residency at The Rooms / Parks Canada, Terra Nova National Park.)

She calls the doilies “ghosts.” No one knows who made them or how they got into that basket. “So much work went into them; they have an incredible history, and it’s a shame for them to disappear.”

Rosvall started knitting as a child and trained in weaving, spinning, dyeing, and knitting. In 2010 she encountered Canadian artist Betty Goodwin’s soft ground etchings of material and found objects, notably her iconic vest inspired by her father’s Montreal vest-making business. 

Rosvall’s first soft ground etching, in which an object is put directly through a press, was of her own Dutch-lace, six-by-six-inch swatch pattern printed with instruction from New Brunswick artist Bob Morouney of Hidden House Press. “That was the jumping off point.” 

I am Torn and I am Mended was at ARTSPLACE from February 21 to April 11, 2026, after being shown at the St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in 2025. Rosvall hopes to tour it to Newfoundland and her native New Brunswick.

As someone who thrives on human connection, Rosvall is part of an Annapolis Valley art group with Sheri Hancock, Sydney Lancaster, and Bonnie Baker; they exhibit “work that starts from one thing but becomes something else entirely” in Otherwise at Harvest Gallery, Wolfville, August 15 to September 13. She also belongs to the FoodArtNature community-based organization offering visitors and locals connections with Annapolis Valley producers, makers, chefs, and artisans.

In her careful, considerate use of hands-on, technical print methods, Rosvall creates a deeply layered form of contemporary art that is beautiful, homespun, and philosophical. 

(For Mrs. Trask’s rhubarb clafoutis recipe go to: Mrs Trask’s Rhubarb Clafoutis and Sherrie’s Rhubarb Custard Squares )

Bringing together Atlantic Canadian weavers, quilters, sculptors, basket makers, and storytellers to examine textiles, Conversation Threads, curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa, runs at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from February 28 to May 3, 2026. Seventeen artists are included, with work spanning decades and a sense of timelessness woven into their practice.

On opening night, I walked into the reception area through the gallery’s courtyard door, with music and conversations welcoming visitors. People dressed for the occasion with comfort in mind, that particular winter–spring calibration Nova Scotians manage intuitively.

Familiar faces gathered around the spiralling stairwell at the centre, drinks in hand, circling the same conversation: the Nova Scotia government’s recent proposal to cut arts, culture, heritage, and tourism funding. Grant programs were reduced or eliminated. The artists, administrators, gallerists, and others in the room, whose livelihoods are threaded into the fabric of this province, felt the weight, along with a growing frustration at how little care the provincial government showed the sector. The exhibition brought a reminder of why their work mattered.

Descending the stairs, I was greeted by Alana Morouney’s Knotwork, where two hands emerge from the form, one at the upper left and the other at the lower right. Rather than meeting in a handshake, the two wool hands, dyed with knotweed, extend from the intertwined lines of the knot itself. Each hand appears to hold the structure in place, as if steadying the woven form that binds them together. It is Morouney’s homage to the market vendors, local makers, and the people who sustain New Brunswick through seasonal tourism and daily trade. The piece asks what holds a community together once the tourist season ends and the attention moves on.

I walked past Knotwork, past the other pieces on the walls and the crowds who adored them. Then Darlene Baker’s I Am Conflicted About This Relationship stood on its own: a silver gas tank covered in pink tones and floral decoration. The object is both nostalgic and uncomfortable. Baker shows her family’s gas station and auto repair shop as a space that shaped her early understanding of femininity, patriarchy, and ecological cost, experiences she absorbed long before she had the language to name them. The work holds the tenderness of what was alongside the damage beneath it, without resolving either into something easier.

Across from the gas tank, another colourful work stood out: Albert Lohnes’s The Red, White, and Blue Crocheted Rocking Chair. Made sixty years ago, the piece could not have anticipated what the Canada–US relationship would look like now, but it did not need to. The knitted work covers and moulds itself to the chair’s frame, with the American flag woven into the seat. Some tensions, it turns out, have always been rocky.

Next, I walked toward Portrait of the Artist as an Essential Worker by Hannah Genosko and Sarah Mosher. The work consists of two quilts made from uniforms the artists wore during the COVID-19 pandemic, one from Canada Post and the other from the NSLC. The garments hung on the gallery walls, documenting what traditional media and its sensational news cycles cannot by holding in place the anxiety, the daily risk, the labour of showing up. Frontline workers are often spoken about during crises and less often afterward. This work, along with the recent national postal strike, highlights the consequences of overlooking those who hold society together.

Past several more works, Oakley Wysote Gray’s Lapigot — Small Pox is where the exhibition’s weight gathered most intensely. A bodysuit stands draped with a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket, its famous red, yellow, and green stripes marred by bloodstains. Lacework across the fabric suggests the marks of smallpox rashes. Tears and slashes open at the torso and thighs. Gray, from Listuguj First Nation, made the piece as part of a collection titled Mei Eimotieg — we are still here. A fitting title for a work made in 2024, a year before the Hudson’s Bay Company declared bankruptcy after 355 years of operation. The blanket carries centuries of colonial history: the consequences of exploitation, disease transmission, and the displacement of Indigenous communities from their lands. Gray’s piece was already doing its work before the closing. Yet, the collapse of the institution does not erase its history; it just makes the stain more visible.

These five works, among seventeen, demonstrate what textiles have always done: archive the things that official records miss. Labour. Frontline life. Colonial harm. Generational knowledge is passed hand to hand, stitch by stitch, like a community refusing to let go of itself.

Divine timing or pure coincidence, the show opened at the right moment. For everyone in that room carrying uncertainty about what comes next, the works offered evidence of a long-enduring Maritime resilience that has always found ways to hold itself together and pass that knowledge on. Fabiyino lets the pieces breathe out the essence of preservation and resistance rooted in this place. What became clear is that the thread, regardless of how much it is pulled, stretched, or pressed from every direction, does not need permission to hold.

At Treaty Space Gallery, The Best of Both Worlds: 50 Years of Art by Leonard Paul gathers work from across a long career and lets it speak with a quiet confidence. Rivers churn through rock. Birds cling to the rough sides of trees. A wolf looks straight out from the frame. Moving through the gallery, you begin to notice the steady hand behind it all. Paul returns again and again to the living world around him, studying it closely and translating what he sees with patience.

Realism has always been central to Paul’s practice. While many conversations about Indigenous art have focused on symbolism or graphic traditions, Paul followed a different instinct. He was drawn to careful observation and to the painters who worked in that tradition. The works in this exhibition reflect that choice. They show an artist who trusts what he sees and who has spent decades learning how to render it faithfully.

When we sat down to talk about the exhibition, Paul reflected on what it felt like to begin exhibiting in the 1970s. Indigenous artists were rarely visible in the Canadian art world then, particularly in Atlantic Canada. Paul remembers feeling largely on his own at the time, guided mostly by his own ability and curiosity. Over the course of our conversation, he spoke candidly about those early years, about debates around authenticity in Indigenous art, and about the challenge of sustaining a creative life across five decades.

When you began exhibiting in the 1970s, how were Indigenous artists positioned within the Canadian art world? How visible were you?

Not very visible. Not very visible at all. When I came in, I felt like I was all by myself. And it really hasn’t changed much. 

Did that make you feel lonely? Or did you feel unique?

I felt unique. Yes, I felt unique.

Without sounding conceited, I felt I was blessed with a very extraordinary ability to paint, and that ability spoke for me. It opened doors for me.

Over the decades, have you seen any shifts in how institutions approach Indigenous art?

It was very provincial, if they did approach it at all. And that provincialism tended to centre Ontario or the West, not Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island or places like that. In one way we were secondary.

But thank goodness that was the start. We had Norval Morrisseau. We had Bill Reid from out West. People started to take notice.

I felt a little strange in some ways, because I wasn’t painting like they did. In those days I was painting realism. I was more comfortable with people like Alex Colville. I knew him as a good friend. I also knew Ken Danby. I was in that circle with them. I would be on the phone talking to James Lansdowne, the great bird painter. I just wanted to know more. He was so helpful. I never met him, but we had long phone conversations.

So in a way, that kept me at a distance from what people thought of as First Nations art.

There’s often discussion around “authenticity” in Indigenous art. Has that word felt useful or limiting to you?

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we were asking, “What makes Native art? Who makes Native art? Do the artists have to be First Nations?” The answer we came to was yes.

I sat on the national art board for eleven years: SCANA, the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry. We became aware that a lot of people were coming in and identifying as Métis or Inuit when they were not. It became a kind of hodgepodge, and that got in the way.

Through SCANA, we were trying to establish criteria to solidify First Nations creativity, grounded in Native ancestry. We were trying to protect it.

What has been the most difficult aspect of sustaining a creative practice? Has that struggle changed over time?

Today I see emerging artists coming out and saying, yes, we are artists, and we’re not part of white society. We have our own identities, our own methodologies to create these wonderful designs. They’re part of our culture.

The question has always been what’s the criteria? And we’re still going through that today. We’re still trying to find ways to oust the fakes and to concentrate on people who are First Nations and haven’t yet had a chance.

We have more venues now, which is good. International venues too. I’ve shown in France and Germany on behalf of First Nations movements. That was good.

But it was a quagmire in those days. Terrible.

I’ll give you an example. Not too long ago, we went into a museum in Sherbrooke. There was a woman—white—talking to a group of people about her paintings in a Native pavilion. We overheard someone ask if she was Native. She said no.

Her husband had been a legitimate First Nations artist. He passed away. She picked up the paintbrush and painted like him and was selling the work as Native art.

I told the curator, “You’re misleading people. She’s not First Nations.” The curator said, “Her husband was. That’s good enough for us.”

That’s the kind of thing we had to deal with.

Have you ever struggled with creative blocks? What’s the most difficult part of creating a piece for you?

I was very lucky. I opened doors, but I never went into all the rooms.

By that I mean I didn’t go into symbolic, geometric Native design. I was comfortable in realism. You saw my powwow dancers. They’re realism, but they’re Native subjects. That was good enough for me.

I’ve always been honest. I would tell people, I don’t paint symbols. I don’t paint geometric forms. That’s not my path. And people accepted that because I was up front from the beginning.

When I go into First Nations communities, I tell them, if you have a vision in your mind of what a Native artist looks like, I may not fit it.

I’m influenced by cause and effect. You are what you eat. You are where you grow up. I was open-minded to the art I loved…and that was realism.

Does institutional recognition change how you understand your own work?

Yes. It can. You can beat yourself up if you don’t step back and look at what you’ve done. Sometimes you have to take a few steps back and say, look at this. That’s important.

After fifty years of art-making, is there anything unresolved? Anything you haven’t tried yet?

The fifty years came to me in a funny way. My daughter turns fifty this June. I realized: I’ve reached my jubilee. Fifty long years.

There is one thing that hurts me a bit. When I sell a painting and it’s hanging on someone’s wall, I’ll never see it again. That’s the part that’s hard.

What I would like to do now is enter the world of commercial art, writing books and illustrating them. Mass-producing my originals through printmaking. I would love to write children’s books and illustrate them, especially Mi’kmaw stories. I’ve never tried it yet.

People ask me when I was happiest in my career. I tell them I was about fourteen years old. That was the happiest time. I would like to reach that happiness again.

I think about drawing cartoons, doing animation, illustrating children’s storybooks. I think that will bring me back to that fourteen-year-old.

I haven’t done it yet. But I want to.

We want to hear from writers, artists, and critics who are paying attention to what’s happening across Atlantic Canada. That might mean spending time with an artist’s work, spending time with a show, or following an idea that keeps unfolding. We’re interested in writing that feels close to the work and rooted in the Atlantic region.

We publish features, profiles, and exhibition reviews.

We also commission online-only pieces throughout the year. These can be a good way to respond to something more immediate, whether that’s an exhibition, event, or a conversation that’s still developing.

As always, we prioritize work that challenges white supremacy and colonialism. Our approach is grounded in anti-oppression and anti-racism, and we support Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, Queer positivity, and gender diversity.

Pitch deadline: May 8, 2026
Draft deadline: June 10, 2026
Release date: September 15, 2026

You can find writers guidelines here.

Submit your pitch through this link.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Andrea at publisher@visualarts.ns.ca

The first thing you notice is the music, spilling out into the stairway and pulling visitors into a world shaped by movement. That sense of movement runs throughout It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 and Now, a nationally touring exhibition at the Dalhousie Art Gallery from January to April 2026.

Curated by scholar, artist, and educator Seika Boye, It’s About Time is an archival exhibition that showcases the rich dance histories of Canada’s Black population. Using findings from recorded historical events and new research, Boye explores the power of dance as a form of expression, resistance, sacrifice, and cultural identity. 

“To date, the history of dance within Canada’s Black population is significantly underdocumented,” writes Boye in their artist statement. “Without it, we miss out on so much joy, agency, peaceful gathering en masse, resistance, artistic brilliance, and individual expression. Without it, we are incomplete in our self-knowledge, and so, our potential.”

PREPARATION AS DANCE

The dulcet tones of artists past and present pull you through the door and straight into a space reminiscent of a young adult’s bedroom. 

Clothes pile up in a corner—T-shirts, jackets, skirts, and other fabrics—seemingly tossed aside in the aftermath of a fashion montage you might see in a ’90s rom-com. Some bear Black Panther insignia, others are African kente; some fabrics are soft and diaphanous, others are black and metallic.

Beside the pile of clothes is a crisp white vanity, ready to serve the room’s occupant. A long black do-rag sits on a mannequin head, gemstones sparkling like the stars on the night out the occupant is preparing for. A tower of varied speakers sits in the other corner, filling the space with feel-good music as they get ready. A disco ball spins above, seeding its light across the textured ceiling. 

The three mixed media installations by kay macdonald, titled in this room—at the beginning of the night/at the end of the world, transport viewers into an intimate space where preparation becomes a ritual and the bedroom becomes a liminal space of expression and safety. Here, the act of getting ready becomes a dance of “what it takes to show up, and to be seen,” macdonald writes. 

Over the course of the exhibition, macdonald will periodically activate the space with a live performance, transforming the installation from still life to living ceremony. 

BLACKNESS AS PERFORMANCE

Stepping out of that bedroom, your attention is immediately captured by a bright red curtain to the right. 

Thick, red theatre curtains with carefully—almost reverently—placed pleats frame a painting, like curtains drawing closed after a show. In the centre, a dark-skinned Black woman rests after a dance of some kind. She is visibly tired, eyes downcast as she leans against her dressing table. Her red dancing shoes stand out in a sea of black, browns, and navy backstage. 

By Preston Pavlis and titled when the jig is up, when the act is finished, when the curtain descends, the link between Blackness and performance in this piece feels unavoidable. The dancer’s red shoes are a reference to a 1948 British film The Red Shoes, where a ballerina must choose between her love for dance and her life beyond the stage.  

For me, a Black viewer, the red shoes in the painting symbolize a lack of choice. Just like the protagonist in the film couldn’t remove the shoes, Pavlis’s dancer cannot shed her Blackness. She is forced to perform every day on the stage we call life, eyes critiquing her every move. In the mirror behind her, the reflection stares at the viewer in an accusatory gaze, full of both helplessness and quiet rage. 

Beside the dancer, a bunch of dried flowers rest on the table—a testament to how she has been unable to care for them, and herself. Tenderness, rest, the soft aspects of her life come second to the performance she must put on for the world. The painting is a moment of vulnerability, and the stage becomes a space where “endings, pressure and self-belief must be continually negotiated,” writes Pavlis. 

CELEBRATION AS LIBERATION

As you venture deeper into the exhibition, a spread of black-and-white photographs lines the walls on either side of the room.

On the right side is Allen D. Crooks’s Lose yourself to dance,most of which was photographed during a fiftieth-anniversary family celebration and vow renewal at the East Preston Recreation Centre. The photos pull you into a room full of joy, laughter, and celebration. Glistening suits and well-worn floors set the scene, as family members—old and young, anonymous and identified—strut their stuff, skirts swaying with the music, arms raised in jubilation. 

On the left side, a series of photographs that catch your eye are the Grange Road Dances. The photos depict scenes from social dances, house parties, concerts, and recitals in 1950s Canada. The black-and-white photos do nothing to dull the liveliness of the party. 

In one of the photographs, a crowd of Black youth dance together, happily moving to the beat of musicians, while at the perimeter, a group of white attendees look on, seemingly out of place. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of unapologetic Black joy existing despite white discomfort. 

While both sides of the aisle depict different events, the theme is clear: Dance like no one’s watching. 

In a world where Blackness puts a target on your back, dance becomes a radical form of liberation. This was especially true in the 1950s, when social dances were one of the few sources for “positive images of Canada’s Black population,” the exhibition text explains.  

BLACK DANCE, DARK HISTORY

Moving through the gallery, it becomes clear that celebration is only one part of the story. Behind glass, objects from nineteenth-century minstrel shows sit uncomfortably still. A book on stage makeup is opened to instructions for racial caricature; beside it, a small tin of “Negro Black” face paint, with a detailed visual guide and colour palette to achieve the desired “ethnic complexions.”

A visitor’s voice cuts through the gallery: “People used to buy this?”

The answer, painfully, is yes.

These materials remind viewers that dance has also been used as a tool for ridicule and exclusion—a distortion of Black and racialized bodies designed to entertain through dehumanization. That this history exists alongside scenes of joy, ceremony, and resistance is not a contradiction but part of the exhibition’s insistence on telling the whole story. 

STILL BLACK, STILL DANCING

Just beyond this display, a small projection room offers another kind of history: short films and testimonials from dancers, neighbours, and students speaking about what dance has meant in their lives. 

As archival footage and interviews flicker across the screen, the exhibition feels less like recorded history and more like something alive—an immortal rhythm carried forward through memory.

I sink into the cushions, the tension I carried from earlier leaving my body, as I watch Ethel Bruneau merrily “hoofing” along to the beat. 

Indeed, it’s about time we had a show like this. 

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).

This exhibition has been seven years in the making. Maloney first started looking for interested collaborators back in 2018 and connected with Art Windsor-Essex, a gallery in Windsor, Ontario, and Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax. The two organizations took on a curatorial role, and with support from Canadian Heritage’s Museum Assistance program, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery also came on board as a venue. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, and everything stopped. 

Leadership at the galleries changed hands, but they were still excited about the potential of getting Maloney’s work into their spaces, so in October of 2023, Pleasure Ground finally opened. 

Pleasure Ground is not a retrospective but does include pieces from all stages of Maloney’s career. The earliest piece is from 1993, when she was pregnant with her first child, and the most recent is a group of three pieces from 2021. The works in the exhibition are all vastly different from each other in size, shape, and medium and yet surprisingly cohesive in theme.

Throughout Pleasure Ground, Maloney challenges colonialism and the sneaky ways it has crept into every corner of our lives. The titular sculpture, completed in 2019, consists of a group of roughly four- to six-inch-tall, bronze Northern pitcher plants, carnivorous plants often found in bogs in Maloney’s native Nova Scotia. The plants, divorced from their natural habitat and placed in a gallery, become less recognizable as flora, calling to mind instead something vaguely suggestive of genitalia. 

The extraction of native plants and their placement in an institution are ideas Maloney toys with in other works as well. She challenges the colonial practice of collecting exotic plants through embroidery in her series of three titled Collect-Arrange (2021). These large-scale pieces are of embroidered vases, all from the British Museum collection, filled with flowers based on historical botanical illustrations. In the frame, Maloney has sculpted native Nova Scotia flowers in plaster. This both explores the exploitation due to colonialism and challenges the notion of “women’s work.” 

In her artist statement, Maloney writes, “needlework historically was a way for wealthy women to pass the time, they too were part of a collection kept at home while men went off to explore. I am drawn to embroidery because its history, process, and materiality speak to both traditional and contemporary ideas of women’s work.”

It is very difficult to choose which works to highlight, as they are all incredibly intricate and vibrant, humming with symbolism and patriarchal dissent. I could highlight Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx (1998–1999), a collection of knitted organs that were created during Maloney’s second pregnancy, or Skin (2003–2012), a life-sized, beaded skin-suit that took nine years to complete. Then there’s her Reflection series (2010), which combines found furniture with bronze sculptures of orchids, their sexuality hidden behind a mirror image, and the most visually striking piece in the exhibition, Water Level (2012–2016), which reinterprets a pond landscape through a feminist lens by casting water lilies and lily pads in bronze and raising them up to eye level so you can walk through, raising questions of who is placed in view and why. 

One of the interesting things about a touring exhibition is seeing how the different gallery spaces interplay with the work. At the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Pleasure Ground is divided into two separate spaces. One is upstairs, with incredibly high ceilings, bright lights, and white gallery walls. The other, downstairs, is darker, with dark green walls and focused lighting. The exhibition spaces lend themselves to very different themes; the pieces in the basement room, whether intentionally or not, have more of a sexual overtone, highlighting the feminist elements of her work.

This decision, however, might lead viewers to miss some of Maloney’s work. The two rooms are separated by a staircase and a hallway, but there is no signage indicating that each space is just one part of a larger exhibition, or where to find the other half. This is more of an institutional critique than a curatorial one, but I could have easily left having only seen half of the show if I hadn’t decided to keep browsing the gallery.

Even if you accidentally only see half of Pleasure Ground (which you shouldn’t, now that you know it’s in two spaces), it would still be an intellectual and visual feast for your eyes. Pleasure Ground was exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex, then Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, and is at the Beaverbrook until October 12, 2025, when it will then head to the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown. 

Jericho Knopp is a writer and arts administrator based in Menahqesk (Saint John), New Brunswick, whose work explores narratives surrounding beauty, nostalgia, and mental illness. Her practice is primarily non-fiction based, but she also dabbles in poetry and prose. Her journalism has appeared in the CBC, CreatedHere, Visual Arts News, the Telegraph-Journal, and the Georgia Straight. Her narrative non-fiction has received support from artsnb and THIRD SHIFT festival, and her fiction has appeared in the FLOURISH Festival zine, and It’s Burning Off. She currently works as the programming director for ArtsLink NB.

In the fall of 2024, the Treaty Space Gallery, whose mandate is to highlight artwork that responds to the UN’s declaration of the Decade of Indigenous Languages, themes of cultural revitalization, and notions of treaty, relocated from NSCAD’s Port Campus to 1887 Granville Street, a former bridal shop. The new location is part NSCAD’s Fountain Campus, formerly the Victoria School of Art and Design, founded in 1887 by Anna Leonowens, Mrs. Jeremiah Kenny, and sisters Ella and Eliza Ritchey to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. With wood floors, white walls, and Roman pillars, the Treaty Space Gallery is a gathering space for Indigenous students and welcomes all treaty people who come together in community.

Amalkewinu’k (The Dancers), curated by Prosper and Pardy, which ran in Halifax from February 4 to 14, 2025, illustrates the evolution of Mi’kmaw regalia by inviting viewers into an exhibition space that features studio portraits of Mi’kmaw community members in regalia, black-and-white archival images, and three pieces of regalia–a beaded cap, a headdress, and a Mi’kmaw jacket. Amalkewinu’k opens at Acadia University in fall 2025 and runs throughout October in celebration of Mi’kmaq History Month. The exhibition will also open at StFX Art Gallery in fall 2026 as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the gallery. 

Amalkewinu’k is the vision of curators Prosper, an L’nu artist and health care professional from Eskasoni First Nation, and Pardy, a photojournalist and documentary photographer, and is a collaborative community project honouring the transformation of Mi’kmaw regalia.

Presenting distinctively Mi’kmaw regalia through portraiture is central to the exhibition. Keeping the focus solely on Mi’kmaw regalia challenges misconceptions and pan-Indigeneity, honours Mi’kmaw artistic heritage, and celebrates past and present community artists, including L’nu Ancestors Once Known, Mi’kmaw youth like Rory Meuse of Membertou First Nation, and Elders like renowned author and educator Dr. Marie Battiste of Potlotek First Nation. 

“The use of ‘L’nu Ancestor Once Known’ was quite intentional on our part and a bit of a critique of museum and art collections. I first saw this practice at the National Art Gallery, but I believe it might have its origins at the AGO,” says Prosper. “Basically, in many historical collections the Indigenous artist or persons represented consistently come up as ‘Unknown,’ but if a non-Indigenous person is connected to a piece—the photographer, collector, etc. —their name is known or stated.”

The intention behind the label goes deeper and opens a critique of colonial curatorial practices. As a form of Indigenous storytelling, these details are important as they offer insight into community connections, the artistic legacy of the regalia makers, and the important reciprocal relationships. It also allows for different ways to engage with the art maker and to understand who are the people being depicted in the photographs and who are their community connections. It also invites viewers to build a relationship with the L’nu Ancestor Once Known and opens up the possibility that their names may be recovered.

A wall of contemporary, full-colour portraits by Pardy features Mi’kmaw community members from the young to Elders and Matriarchs. Jacoby Battiste-Jadis of Eskasoni First Nation is wearing regalia made by his mother, Kate Jadis, and a feather cap made by Jennifer Denny with feathers gifted by his grandparents Marie Battiste and Sakej Henderson. Wyonna Bernard of Abegweit First Nation is wearing cuffs made by Mary-Jo Isaac, cap, skirt, cape, and leggings made by Ingrid Peters (gifted by Lisa Levi), and a pin by Mi’kmaw artist Melissa Peter-Paul, also from Abegweit First Nation. Michael R. Denny of Eskasoni First Nation is wearing a vest made by Melissa Peter-Paul, leggings made by Madonna Johnson, moccasins made by Nicole Travers, cuffs and aprons made by Mary Jo Isaac, a shirt made by Georgina Doucette, and a medallion created by Washonti:io Jacobs. Elders include Dr. Marie Battiste, who is wearing a jacket, skirt, and peaked cap made and beaded by Ingrid Brooks with alterations by Nina Kent; Karen Bernard, of We’koqmaq First Nation, a well-respected women’s peaked cap workshop facilitator, who is wearing a peaked cap she made herself; and Dr. Lorraine Whitman, of Glooscap First Nation, who is wearing a peaked cap passed down by Aunt Edith Peters, which was passed down to her by her grandmother (a Millbrook band member) and a beaded cape made by the wife of Noel Knockwood and is carrying baskets made by Frank Meuse.

In the didactic material for Amalkewinu’k’s, Dr. Roger Lewis, curator of Mi’kmaw Cultural Heritage at the Nova Scotia Museum, writes: “When looking at Mi’kmaw regalia, like other cultural belongings, keep in mind the ingenuity of the artists. In a changing and evolving world, they mastered the use of other materials in their art to a point where it remains distinctively Mi’kmaw. So, it therefore is more than a craft as it was often portrayed—especially with the Indian Affairs movement to market it as such. It evolves today, and that is seen in the work of contemporary artists. Things were and are made with thought and purpose.”

Lewis and Michelle Sylliboy, a multidisciplinary L’nu artist, are advisors to Prosper and Pardy, and they continue to work together on Amalkewinu’k, which is layered with stories and continues to evolve. As the storytelling aspect of the exhibition continues, the exhibition will likely be mounted in other gallery spaces in the future.

“The storytelling that came with how they presented their personal regalia was evident,” says Prosper. “Storytelling also came out in community member reactions to the historical images. The stories involved the regalia itself or things they were reminded of when talking about their regalia, and really everything in between.” 

Across from the contemporary colour portraits of Mi’kmaw community members, Amalkewinu’k also features a wall of black-and-white archival images from the Nova Scotia Museum. One of the photographs, “Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897),” features a group of prominent Mi’kmaw community members who attended the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Viewing the 1897 photograph in the former Victoria School of Art and Design feels like a full-circle experience, both marking, as they do, the same historic event.

One of the most striking images is a black-and-white portrait of Molly Musie from the mid-nineteenth century, taken in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, which is considered the earliest known portrait of a Mi’kmaw person depicted in a photographic process. While her birth and death dates are unknown, the didactic explains: “Molly Muise (the name was originally the French ‘Mius’ and is now spelled Meuse and Muse as well) is wearing a peaked cap with double-curve beadwork, a dark shirt, a short jacket with darker cuffs, over which she apparently has draped a second short jacket, its sleeves pulled inside, as a capelet. Her traditional dress with the large fold at the top is held up by suspenders with ornamental tabs. In her hands, she seems to be clutching a white handkerchief.”

From the first known black-and-white, archival image of a Mi’kmaw person to Pardy’s contemporary portraits of Mi’kmaw community members, Amalkewinu’k is a stunning exhibition connecting past, present and future generations of Mi’kmaw through regalia and culture.

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. 

I had to check Google Maps to locate the address for 13 Cedars, a new project space in rural Rowley, halfway between Saint John and St. Martins on Route 111. It was the second and final day of Behind Moving Eyelids, which featured wearable and sculptural works by Klausen, a Saint John jeweller with a dedicated following for her asymmetrical, nature-inspired, one-of-a-kind pieces. 

Her co-exhibitor, Lapeña, an artist working in printmaking and drawing, moved to the area a few years ago and co-founded 13 Cedars with her partner, Jay Isaac, a contemporary artist. She marvelled at how nearly everyone who came wore Klausen’s work, including me. On my left hand, I wear the bespoke silver wedding ring set on which she conspired with my husband. In my ears, I have a pair of wonky silver hearts I received as a birthday gift and have not removed in weeks.  

While local galleries have represented Klausen for decades, it was her first time exhibiting in a non-commercial setting. This gave the artist control over the installation and the opportunity to display her work on the wall in interesting shapes and configurations, including an installation of silver chains hung with pendants of handmade silver letters. 

Behind Moving Eyelids was also the first time Klausen showed alongside another artist. The pairing with Lapeña, who exhibited paintings, collages, drawings, and four fantastic silkscreens (she made them over the winter at Moncton’s Imago print studio), proved captivating. Their work resonated with intended connections from studio visits and an ongoing artistic dialogue, but also with serendipity, in symbols and motifs (cameos, cats, pearls) they arrived at independently. 

At a glance, there’s a risk of the show being taken merely as pretty or girly, which would be a huge miss. There’s a lot to unpack. 

The exhibition title Behind Moving Eyelids is from the late Saint John writer Gail Bonsall Kaye’s sole published poetry collection. Klausen had picked up a second-hand copy at an antiques shop and sent it to Isaac and Lapeña, who were at the time living in Toronto. Lapeña, like Klausen, was drawn to the old book as an object, with its beautifully illustrated cover. The poetic connections came later.

The artists’ shared interest in vintage objects informs their work. Lapeña repurposes images from antique women’s magazines, online archives, and found and personal items in her prints, paintings, and collages. For Behind Moving Eyelids, Klausen used sterling silver remnants from her studio, incorporating antique cameos, reclaimed coral, found beach stones, and vintage carved mother of pearl. 

This recycling speaks to the thrift of a time before fast fashion and disposable material culture, when nothing was wasted and the work of women consisted largely of making something from scraps: a quilt, a soup. There’s a strong sense of agency in the artists’ intentional reclamation of materials, images, and text. It reads as empowerment. 

Kaye’s 1973 poem “noon dream” is included in the exhibition notes. Some lines ring literally, such as the “heavy fronds of dark green ferns” in Klausen’s abstracted, organic forms and the Fundy landscape that is her first muse. Others are more of a vibe: the poem’s protagonist, dreaming in her green grotto, as in a fairy tale or myth, speaks of an ancientness Klausen’s work conveys. It is a temporal counterpoint to Lapeña’s more recent images from the capitalist age of advertising that commodifies beauty, fashion, and womanhood itself.

Jungian psychology is an influence in the deep blacks of Lapeña’s pristine prints. Oh, that midnight ink! You can disappear into it—and project onto it. The layering of the meticulous silkscreen process can be read as metaphorical, too, getting below the surface of things, abstracting, mystifying. Along with wearable art jewellery, Klausen presented several sculptural silver “spoonlets,” their cups the size of peas, perfect for a personal altar or as part of a private little rite.

Klausen says her Danish relatives often gift spoons for milestones such as birthdays or baptisms. And she explains that the expression “being born with a silver spoon in your mouth” originated during the bubonic plague, when the precious metal was believed to ward off the illness, projecting not only prosperity, but protection. With that, the work’s talismanic properties came into focus. Lapeña also depicts spoons in her work.

Some shows leave you gobsmacked at the gallery, then leave you. Others are a slower, sustained burn. Behind Moving Eyelids is the latter. The percolations began on the drive home, along the remote spruce-lined road. Weeks later, I’m still parsing its ideas about nature and industry, fashion and adornment, deep time and capitalism, beauty and power.  

You can find more content from the exhibition here.