The Nova Scotian artist Susan Feindel is known for her adventurous, experimental approach to landscape painting and her espousal of environmental causes. This painting installation was inspired by her voyages on oceanographic research ships, during which the ocean floor is viewed from shipboard using sonar side-scan technology.
In her digital collages the Ottawa-based artist Cindy Stelmackowich merges two genres of hand-drawn graphics; the lithographs illustrating 19th-century anatomical atlases and those that enlivened 19th-century journals such as the Canadian Illustrated News. The atlases were used by surgeons, thus the internal anatomy of the cadavers is exposed.
In this grouping of recent acquisitions, the importance of colour is the quality shared by otherwise disparate works. “Chromophilia” means “love of colour.” The selection of works by Nova Scotian artists and artisans includes encaustic paintings by Peter Dykhuis, ceramics by Lucky Rabbit Pottery (Debra Kuzyk and Ray Mackie) and textiles by Suzanne Swannie.
Emily Davidson, Dan O’Neill and Ericka Walker are three Haligonian printmakers whose work revives the history of socially engaged printmaking.
Davidson has chosen the radical format of “agitprop” for her body of work. In the form of letterpress posters, pamphlets and other ephemera, Davidson’s militantly analogue printed matter advocates alternative forms of social organization in a future, post-capitalist era.
Ericka Walker, interests herself in the visual rhetoric of state propaganda, specifically patriotic American posters of the first and second world wars. Her traditional-looking, hand-drawn lithographs present nightmarishly altered farm and war machines alongside counter-intuitive slogans.
As one of the few “out” gay artists practicing in Halifax, Dan O’Neill’s lithographs range from the subversive to the outrageous. His elaborately collaged compositions appropriate popular imagery in the manner of queer activist movements of the 1980s and 90s—but with targets more numerous and various.
This is the sixteenth of the Prospect exhibitions, which introduce Nova Scotian artists in the early stages of their careers. Declan O’Dowd was educated as a photographer at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA, 2000) and lives in Dartmouth. His romantic landscape views were shot with a Mamiya medium format camera.
MSVU Art Gallery was built in 1971. Its two-storey height was designed for the preeminent art of that era; expansive paintings on the scale of American “field” painting, and sculpture conceived in Minimalist terms as spatial theatre.
Forty-three years later, Big in Nova Scotia responds to the moment of the Gallery’s beginning with a selection of large works from the MSVU collection. Seven of the nine participating artists received their art educations during the heyday of spatially ambitious artmaking. The works date from 1976 through 2012 and include painting, sculpture and textile-based art. The artists represented are Lynn Donoghue, Frances Dorsey, Gathie Falk, Steve Higgins, Svava Juliusson, Charlotte Lindgren, Rebecca Roberts, Ron Shuebrook and Peter Walker.
Voices in Longitude and Latitude is a video installation about the aspirations of teen-aged girls in four communities— Inuit in Kugluktuk, Nunavut; trans-gender in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Jewish in Toronto, Ontario; and Congolese, Rwandan, Ethiopian and Sudanese immigrants in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Beautiful Illusions presents works in graphic media by two young Nova Scotian artists. Colosimo’s principal practice is drawing; Young favours drawing and indexical techniques, such as casting and monoprinting.
Joanna Close presents a series of hooked rugs depicting buildings from a former family farm in New Brunswick, now given over to an industrial gravel quarry. These hand-dyed wool rugs commemorate maritime farming heritage. The imprecision of the hooking technique used to create the rugs mimics the dynamism of memory.
Like her predecessors in the Prospect series, Sarra McNie has constructed a version of herself — a persona — which then inhabits her work as subject matter.
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