Walking into the Treaty Space Gallery at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University on a bitter cold February morning I smell the lingering sage from the exhibition opening of Amalkewinu’k from the previous night. For the public portion of the opening, Michelle Peters sang a Mi’kmaq song, and curators Aaron Prosper and Mackenzie...
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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.
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The exhibition This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts centers around themes of autobiography, personal agency, and reciprocity. Featuring emerging and mid-career artists Andrew Quon, Miya Turnbull, Curtis Botham, Laura Kenney, Shauna MacLeod, Lux Gow-Habrich, and Monique Silver, it explicitly examines the connection between autobiographical art and socio-political issues. Guest-curated by Brandt Eisner, the curatorial premise asserts that the personal is inseparable from the political and that the human body and its memory hold a record of the body's interaction with the world at large. It is through this holistic recognition of our existence as social beings that we, as a collective, have the means to enact transformative change for the common good.
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“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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As a newcomer committed to uplifting Black artistic production, I long to connect with people whose experiences help situate my presence on this land. Instead, I often feel isolated in my desire to see more diverse audiences—until the opening of Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on September 21, 2024, in Halifax. At the opening, the gallery’s warmth struck me immediately: the sound of laughter and the beat of DJ DTS’s set created a palpable sense of belonging. For the first time since moving to Halifax from Toronto over a year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by my community, which transformed the event into a celebration of presence and belonging in a space so rarely welcoming of Black people.
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The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film.
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Mapping Black Resilience: Three Perspectives at Dalhousie Art Gallery, which ran from February 4 until May 4, 2025, is an exhibition in three acts, which independently, yet in tandem, reconsider archival material and its role in the documenting and redocumenting of Black identity. The exhibition explores personal and collective experiences as archival documentation of Black...
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Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy’s retrospective The Journey So Far, curated by Pamela Edmonds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (May 9 to August 11, 2024), spanned more than fifty years of work. The exhibition included paintings, collage, photography, music, print, mixed media, video, drums, and guitars and even a commissioned wall mural featuring a great horned...
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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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If the church is a display of God’s glory, Pitchpole is a display of conceptual art’s glory. Poetry by Erin Langille (acting as a psalm), Pitchpole (the hymn), jewellery by Shaya Ishaq (the relic), a sturdy set of speakers (the organ), and Ader (the saint). Does it matter that we don’t know the story of Ader and his ill-fated journey, or the many legends that have surrounded him since? Or is Ader's story simply Robinson’s invitation to work through whatever unfinished grief we hold in the cathedral of the contemporary art gallery?
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There Is No One Story of Black Girlhood is a powerful and unyielding exhibition of Rebecca Fisk’s series of self-portrait paintings. As an African Nova Scotian artist based in Mahone Bay, Fisk’s acrylic paintings reveal what may lurk beneath the dominant culture of Nova Scotia’s mask of politeness. Her work alludes to the sinister insincerity...
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