Reviews

Kym Greeley’s Highway Sightlines

Greeley uses the car windshield as a frame, and the highway as a major compositional element in her paintings. Objects often cropped out of tourism brochures, such as road signs, guardrails and lane markings, become significant features. The aesthetic of the highway is reflected in her refined style. Like the graphics used on highway signs, each element is clear and readable. Layered together, however; they create intricate compositions and complex, open-ended narratives

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Kent Monkman’s Shimmering Resilience

Indigenous art challenges and overthrows colonial expectations. It combats shame. It pushes beyond prejudice, shimmers with resilience, and counteracts art history’s Eurocentric mythology. First Nations Cree artist and curator, Kent Monkman’s exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience responds to the Canada 150 celebrations through the subversive lens of his gender-fluid alter ego Miss...

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Re-discovering Indigenous Identities

The impact of the Identify Festival

To “identify” is to name something and render it visible, even if it may have been present all along. Organized by Eastern Edge Gallery, the Identify festival facilitates the gathering and sharing of traditional and contemporary artistic and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador including Mi’kmaq, Inuit, Innu, Southern Inuit of Nunatukavut...

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Don’t Listen to Me: Mark Harvey

on plants, toxic masculinity, + advice from grandmothers

I’ve descended into a dark room with a large video projection of what looks like a tropical jungle. The camera moves slowly and deliberately through rich vegetation while the narrator— New Zealand artist Mark Harvey—gently talks to you about Schrödinger’s Cat. Mark explains how plants absorb energy from other nearby plants, and the research suggesting this applies to people too. He talks about quantum entanglement. The whole thing is quite hypnotic. And sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room, is a small video monitor showing the artist wrestling with a young tree, yanking and pulling, trying to rip it out of the ground with his hands.

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Resource Extraction: Meagan Musseau

Exploring memory, language and our relationships to the landscape

“My response to the landscape is emotional,” says Meagan Musseau. “I observe and engage with the land and the social environment in which I live.”

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Portable Culture: Soheila Esfahani

  Billions are said to be in global circulation. In the United States alone, five hundred million are manufactured every year. They are everywhere, including inside and outside of our large retail shops. Their ubiquity and number, however, do not guarantee their visibility. Few of us look at, let alone think about the wooden shipping...

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WAKA OKABAYASHI: Beauty in Biophilia

Waka Okabayashi on human-plant relationships

“Something happens when you’re walking and you’re kind of selecting which plant you want ... Sometimes I’m just walking and I’m not even thinking of collecting plants, but I see a plant and its almost like our eyes meet.”

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Pattern Clash: Andrew Cairns

Creating spaces for projection + finding freedom in paint

“It can be powerful and provocative to bring decoration in. It’s unexpected and not always seen as high fine art."

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Lou Sheppard: Spaces Between

Exploring the undefinable + unspoken

Living and working in K’jiputuk (Halifax), Lou Sheppard uses performance and media installation to explore the rifts between human experience and our attempts to define our place in the world. Sheppard turns data sets, medical texts and geographic information into movements of drawn line, dance and music. Their work tugs and pulls at the structures...

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Steele + Tomczak collect strangers’ confessions

The Long Time collapses the distance between "us" and "others"

The works in The Long Time transmit the sense that you’re missing or meeting something, getting just a trace of what came before and what is coming next.

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The myth of home

Jerry Ropson’s powerful exploration of loss

Jerry Ropson’s to kiss a goat between the horns is a memorial to a cultural vernacular and way of life that has already left us—his grandfather's rural Newfoundland culture.

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The NSCAD Venice Connection

NSCAD has its fingerprints all over the Venice Biennale this year

Representation of NSCAD across multiple shows and national delegations underline the school’s place in the broader art world, as well as Atlantic Canada’s slow move away from the international art world’s periphery.

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