Community

Embed, Embody and Adorn (2019)

Socially Engaged Art: On Making with Others

There are many ways people are brought into the process of making art. Through my own art practice and experience with producing and participating in socially engaged art projects, I understand that collaboration, participation, and social engagement have the capacity to create transformative experiences and dynamic artwork.  Yet, I have felt the edges of collaboration...

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Installation view of the exhibition Daze Jefferies: stay here stay now stay (2024). Courtesy of The Rooms.

Daze Jefferies’s stay here stay how stay 

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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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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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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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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How We Build: On Craft and Blackness

With the purpose of illuminating ideas on intergenerational knowledge and craft sharing as a means of fostering solidarity and resistance within and between the various Black communities in Nova Scotia, this panel will engage in ideas on locating pleasure, joy, and celebration as a survival tool while navigating structural oppression.

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Keeping the Lights On: Will Gill, Pepa Chan and Mike Gough

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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Appearance

Public and participatory practices here, elsewhere and anywhere.

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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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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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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