Weaponizing Precarity

An Interview With RM Vaughan

We were saddened to learn of RM Vaughan’s passing in October 2020. He was an author, playwright and artist, and beloved member of the LGBTQ2S+ community. We are grateful for his legacy and his tireless contributions to the arts in Atlantic Canada and beyond. The following piece appeared in the Labour issue of Visual Arts...

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Melissa Tremblett’s Reprise

Tremblett’s Reprise is deeply personal, as it weaves text, photography, beadwork, natural found materials, and textiles to connective tissues of ancestry. This illustrates the artist reconnecting to lost histories and refining her relationship to her identity and Innu heritage. It’s both powerful and vulnerable.

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POC Resilience & Resistance Brings Magic to the World

Wren Tian-Morris

Wren Tian-Morris is a trans Chinese Canadian artist, facilitator, and organizer. Their creative practice is interdisciplinary and explores themes of pleasure, queerness, and the diaspora. Raised in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), they frequently consider leaving, but are finding themselves rooted in “the little nooks and crannies of the city,” which speaks to the transient nature of this...

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Unsettling Settler Possession

In being invited to contribute to this issue of Visual Arts News on the theme of Change, we decided to put forward a conversation about how important it is for settler cultural workers to embrace and embody not knowing, in order to let go of and mourn attachments to the status quo—a status quo built...

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TRANSCRIPT – Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaboration On Environmental Racism

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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Gut Feeling

Dalhousie Art Gallery. 17 January – 15 March, 2020

Gut Feeling showcases a roster of artists who, in Halifax, are nothing short of beloved. Even on a snowy night in a busy week of exhibition openings, Dalhousie Art Gallery was packed with friends and community members who are deeply devoted to the artists featured. Many artists have practices that intersect with their roles as...

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MEMORY OF ROADSIDE FLOWERS

Care and Kinship in the Work of Emily Critch

Emily Critch is a visual artist, curator, and writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry from Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk (Bay of Island, Newfoundland). Critch’s work was recently featured in Future Possible (2019) at The Rooms and her upcoming curatorial project mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew will be exhibiting in Corner Brook in 2020. Critch...

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Memorial Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora...

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Labour Before Labour

I expected to cross a number of hurdles during the fourteen weeks I spent hiding my pregnancy from the art world. For instance, I put little pieces of cut-up lime on the rim of tumblers of ginger ale at openings. I vomited in the Cineplex lobby seconds before re-applying my lipstick and introducing filmmakers at...

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Listening to Silence

"What Carries Us" at The Rooms

What does it mean to revisit the stories we’ve been told, the stories that purport to tell us who we are? And why might we do so in the first place? This is the premise that underpins What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based artist, curator, and...

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