newfoundland

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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Listening to Silence

"What Carries Us" at The Rooms

What does it mean to revisit the stories we’ve been told, the stories that purport to tell us who we are? And why might we do so in the first place? This is the premise that underpins What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based artist, curator, and...

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Abbas Akhavan Explores Faith, Theatre & Architecture in script for an island on Fogo

In fall of 2019, multidisciplinary artist Abbas Akhavan hung two ten-foot wide theatre curtains from a twelve-foot scaffolding on the beach in the small community of Joe Batt’s Arm on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. The wind animated the velvet curtains, choreographing a dance between the undulating fabric and the waves in front of them, transforming the...

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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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Flowing Into Bonavista Biennale

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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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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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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Clay Rebellion

Michael Flaherty + the politics of making

"My interpretation of art history is that craft is conceptual art. Craft was a whole new field invented by certain artists as a reaction to the industrial revolution."

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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.

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Amery Sandford

Amery Sandford: Master of ceremonies

Exploring our complex relationship with Newfoundland identity

Amery Sandford draws upon the history of touristic paraphernalia, such as postcards and brochures from the early 20th Century that depicted North America as a pristine escape from the cultural and economic troubles of one’s homeland—a new frontier.

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