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
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 MoreRetracing 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
Physical Landscapes
Anatomica’s view on the interior
While exploring Anatomica, I experienced several moments of disorientation, unsure whether I was approaching a piece with stronger connections to an artists’ studio or a laboratory. Take the human spine curving from a steel frame in the gallery. From a distance, artist Sarah Maloney’s Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx looks like a replica meant to be...
Read MoreArt World Antidote
Folklore and Other Panics collapses stereotypes
Folklore And Other Panics addresses the impossibility of “alleviating anxiety around elitism” in the contemporary art world. And further, according to the exhibition’s pamphlet, “the works provide a constellation of ideas, responding in various ways to themes of absence and presence, community, the materials of storytelling, and the nature of authority.”
Read More
From the Archives: Shary Boyle’s voice in the dark
“When creating Music for Silence I was inspired by the idea of the Universal, the power and insignificance of the individual, and how that relates to the idea of ‘voice." —Shary Boyle
Read More
From the archives
Suspended Memory: Decoding Graeme Patterson
Enter into the imaginary world of Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel where memory, invention, and fantasy collide to provoke a multifaceted narrative of childhood friendship, rights of passage and adult isolation.
Read More
A measure of disorder: Seripop’s exploration of entropy
Though some mark 50th anniversaries with gold, Séripop’s The Face Stayed East, the Mouth Went West marks the 50th anniversary of Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre by opening with more striking elements. Interested in exploring entropy in bright colours and on a grand scale, Séripop—who are Montreal-based duo Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau—inject a measure of disorder into the...
Read More
A walk through Charlottetown’s Art in the Open 2014
The Scotiabank Nuit Blanche spectacle in Toronto with its more than 110 contemporary art projects gets most of the press, of course, but Charlottetown’s fourth annual Art in the Open—with more than 36 projects in six locations throughout PEI’s capital city—was an evening’s entertainment worth the travel. In 2013 I made the error of having...
Read More
Constructing home: Pam Hall’s “Housework(s)”
A house, whether it is built of bricks, stones, clay or paper, is always more than the materials that make it. In her recent exhibition Housework(s) (at The Rooms gallery in St. John’s.), Pam Hall explores the essence of the house and the core qualities that support its physical structure. Hall’s social engagement with the...
Read More
Q & A: Visual Arts News Featured Fall artist
A maker of stories and collector curious things, Jerry Ropson strings together tiny histories that explore the ties between people, place and identity. We feature Ropson's work in our fall issue of the magazine.
Read More
