There is no exclusive formula that dictates whether a person is a Newfoundland artist. There is no set milestone one must reach to attain such title. For me, it’s simple: does this artist have a lasting and respectful relationship with this place? Do they speak with the place rather than at the place? Do they want to be here?
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Seawater churns white as the beginning of a storm throws waves into the cove far below my feet. I can’t see anything in the foam at first. Then a green kitchen chair appears, perfectly still on a flat, rocky outcropping, as if someone has just pushed it away from a table. In a moment it’s...
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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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MacDonald tells me that “this work is sad. It is about contemporary mourning and historical mourning, but it is also a call to action and to empathy.” In these betweens there is also a generative tension that illuminates hope and possibility.
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When you first walk into the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition space holding Ketu’elmita’jik, created by Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) artist Jordan Bennett, the colours and designs flood your senses. They enter you like some otherworldly creation that has seeped into your brain and started playing music you can’t quite hear. This site-specific work fills the...
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Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising. The dream is at its eeriest in a...
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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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Visual Arts News magazine presents Michelle Sylliboy's Halifax launch of her new book of photography and Mi'kmaq (L'nuk) hieroglyphic poetry: Kiskajeyi - I Am Ready, in partnership with the Halifax Central Library and Rebel Mountain Press.
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Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.
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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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