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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The Most Important Thing

Art and the Rural Renewal of Fogo Island

Unlike standard economic development, Cobb illustrates an arts-and community-centered approach can only move at the “speed of human trust,” which means that it presents unique barriers. When Cobb and her brothers pitched their proposal to the provincial and federal governments for funding assistance, they heard back that the idea was “not normal, practical, reasonable, or rational.” Cobb said that this was the moment that concretized her faith in Shorefast, which was formed in 2006 and has been an overwhelming success since.

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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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Black Light, White Night

Nocturne 2018

This year was Nocturne’s tenth edition. A milestone for the organization, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

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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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Art Talks Gallery Tour

A free bus tour of K'jipuktuk/Halifax galleries featuring talks with indigenous artists and curators: Carrie Allison, Aiden Gillis, Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfeld & Wanda Nanibush. Followed by the launch of the Fall issue of Visual Arts News: UNKOWN LANDS.

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Landscape as Archive: Tracing Rivers + stories with Carrie Allison

CARRIE: Grass is so crazy! It’s like a sign of royalty—the fact that we still have it in our lives is very weird!

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Welcoming our new Editor: Shannon Webb-Campbell

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. Her forthcoming book, I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug, 2018) attempts to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of revisioning. Still No Word (Breakwater 2015) was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out In Print Award. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia, a BA from Dalhousie University, and is currently completing a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, and currently lives in Montréal.

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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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