installation

Gillian Dykeman’s Art Activates Agency

“The only thing more powerful than the revolutionary imaginary is revolutionary action. The world can be better. Can be socially just. Can have full. Employment. Can create dignity for all.” The voice belongs to Gillian Dykeman, a Fredericton-based artist, educator, cultural worker, and, in this instance, fitness instructor quasi anti-capitalist comrade.

Read More

Rogue, Rebellious, Ill-behaved, Black

Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art

Poet and artist Sylvia D. Hamilton’s multimedia installation of images, objects, and sound is heard and carried throughout the powerful exhibition Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which inspired the title of the group show. The creation of this exhibit occurred within a specific...

Read More

All These In-betweens

Logan MacDonald on how to reclaim what has been lost

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.

Read More

Ketu’elmita’jik / They want to go home

Jordan Bennett

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...

Read More

You Are Not Here

Juan Ortiz-Apuy draws power through imitation

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

Neon Defiance

Stephanie Wu on Internet culture, self care and the role of allies today

"For a long time, the Internet felt like the safest space to have conversations about race, gender, sexuality and mental health, when the communities I was brought up in shamed these things."

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Words of resistance

Jordan Bennett, Ursula Johnson and the potency of language

Johnson and Bennett create a fitting metaphor for the original and ongoing white-washing of Indigenous language and culture in our society at large and artistic culture in Canada.

Read More
Paul Édouard Bourque

Echoes across time and space

L’Acadie Mythique retraces identity and culture

L’Acadie Mythique, a travelling exhibition that recently visited the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, is curated by Harlan Johnson and features nearly twenty different artists from across the Acadian diaspora.

Read More

Retracing the past

A conversation with Cathy Busby

Cathy Busby displays the artworks that the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s first director, Moncrieff Williamson, acquired half a century ago on a shoestring budget ahead of a royal visit from the Queen. Or at least, what was left of them.

Read More