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List of Exhibitions
Annual Mount Community Show 2023
Mount Saint Vincent University students, staff, faculty, alumnae and their families are invited to display their creative work in this annual extravaganza. Entries include visual art, music, performance, poetry, craft,…
Documenting the Permanent Collection: work/s on view
In anticipation of Mount Saint Vincent University’s 150th anniversary, MSVU Art Gallery will be displaying and documenting works from the University’s permanent collection.
QUIET PARADE
As its name suggests, QUIET PARADE is a parade but also a platform to collectively create a vibrant, extravagant, sensory-friendly event that embraces access as a shared and interdependent practice.
Taskoch pipon kona kah nipa muskoseya, nepin pesim eti pimachihew | Like the winter snow kills the grass, the summer sun revives it
Taskoch pipon kona kah nipa muskoseya, nepin pesim eti pimachihew | Like the winter snow kills the grass, the summer sun revives it celebrates and centers Indigenous language revitalization and…
Annual Mount Community Show 2022
Mount Saint Vincent University students, staff, faculty, alumnae and their families are invited to display their creative work in this annual extravaganza. Entries include visual art, music, performance, poetry, craft, literature, basketry, and more.
50 Bits and Pieces: an MSVU Art Gallery Retrospective
2021 marks MSVU Art Gallery's 50th Anniversary. Culled from more than 700 exhibitions, 1000 workshops, and 800 objects in the collection, 50 Bits and Pieces presents 50 unique yet illustrative moments from MSVU Art Gallery’s past.
Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas: Fundy
In the summer of 2017, artists Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas adopted the personae of astronauts and set out to interpret the UNESCO-designated Fundy Biosphere.
Identity, Collaboration, Sustainability: an online, international festival of craft
The practices and work of international collaborating makers inform the program of this festival focused topics of identity, collaboration, sustainability, and more.
Tactics for Staying Home in Uncertain Times
Tactics brings together five emerging Black, Indigenous and racialized artists living across Canada whose works articulate ideas of displacement, domesticity, and the limits of belonging.
ESCAPE / The Great Indoors
Why should comfort imply tedium? ESCAPE / The Great Indoors brings together cozy, bright, and colourful explorations of domestic space by four emerging artists.
Paulette Phillips: The Quoddy Fold
The Quoddy Fold is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this one-hour film, Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea.
Interface
Thirty tapestry artists – 15 from Canada and 15 from England – have created small-format tapestries that reflect their personal interpretation of the word “interface”. The small scale of the…
Artist-led Public Programs
In March 2020, MSVU Art Gallery closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Gallery remained closed for the duration of 2020 and into 2021. To stay engaged…
Among All These Tundras ᐊᕙᑖᓂᑦ ᑕᒪᐃᓐᓂᑦ ᓄᓇᑐᐃᓐᓇᓂᑦ
Featuring contemporary art by Indigenous artists from around the circumpolar world, this exhibition expresses current Arctic concerns towards land, language, sovereignty and resurgence.
Jane Everett: Understory
Understory is an immersive mixed media installation that evokes the feeling of standing amongst the grand forests of the British Columbian interior.
Prospect 19: Megan Kyak-Monteith—Whale Hunt: I Think Everyone is Here
Exhibitions in the Prospect series introduce artists in the early phase of their careers. Megan Kyak-Monteith is a recent graduate of NSCAD from Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet), NU who lives and works in Halifax.
Heather Hart: Northern Oracle
Northern Oracle is an ambitious rooftop installation that emerges from the floor of the gallery, and is accompanied by a series of mixed media drawings.
Annual Mount Community Show 2019
Mount Saint Vincent University students, staff, faculty, alumnae and their families are invited to display their creative work in this annual extravaganza. Entries include visual art, music, performance, poetry, craft,…
Sunetra Ekanayake: Botanical Watercolours
In this exhibition of botanical watercolours, Dr. Ekanayake invites us to consider the precious and distinct nature of plant species found around the province and on the MSVU campus.
Letitia Fraser
This exhibition showcases a selection of works by Halifax painter and recent NSCAD graduate, Letitia Fraser. A proud descendant of North Preston, Letitia weaves faces from her life into textiles, both literal and figurative.
Africville: A Spirit that Lives On – A Reflection Project
In 1989, MSVU Art Gallery, in partnership with the Black Cultural Center for Nova Scotia and the Black Genealogical Society, collaborated on the exhibition Africville: A Spirit that Lives On.…
Carrie Allison: clearing
clearing brings together Displaced, Carrie Allison’s 2017 watercolour and ephemeral ink drawings, and her new series of beaded portraits of grass. Using landscape imagery, botanical studies and the symbolism of…
First You Dream: Celebrating 75 Years of the Nova Scotia Talent Trust
The Nova Scotia Talent Trust was founded in 1944 and has been awarding scholarships to visual artists since 1949. To celebrate the NSTT 75th Anniversary, First You Dream developed out…
Skawennati: Teiakwanahstahsontéhrha’ | We Extend the Rafters
Born in Kahnawa:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati creates Indigenous virtual environments addressing history, the future and change. Teiakwanahstahsontéhrha’ | We Extend the Rafters frames the machinima The Peacemaker Returns, a futuristic…
James R Shirley: Landscapes from the Soul
Landscapes from the Soul presents a selection of Jim Shirley’s monotypes and pinhole photographs from the collections of Mount Saint Vincent University and Dalhousie University. A writer and artist, Shirley moved…
Jenn E Norton: Slipstream
In an otherwise empty gallery space, six reflective panels positioned in an inward-facing ring create channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of…
Annual Mount Community Show 2018
Mount Saint Vincent University students, staff, faculty, alumnae and their families are invited to display their creative work in this annual extravaganza. Entries include visual art, video, music, performance, poetry,…
Prospect 18: Christiane Poulin. Echoes
Exhibitions in the Prospect series introduce artists in the early phases of their careers. A retired physician living in Halifax, Poulin recently graduated from NSCAD with a BFA in Textiles.…
Unpacking the Living Room
Living rooms are spaces we arrange and create around ourselves to support the comfort and well-being of family, to host friends and loved ones, to display precious and prized belongings,…
Jane Kidd: Curious
Kidd’s tapestries connect the repeated gestures of weaving with the repeated patterns defining humans’ historical relationship to nature and the world.
Material Remains
The works assembled in this exhibition express curiosity, skepticism and disorientation in the face of a world transformed by new technologies and consumption.
“it just brings me closer”: Reflections on Memorial Tattoos
This exhibition of photographs is part of a larger study on the meaning and purpose of commemorative tattoos.
Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving
Hupfield’s new two-channel video installation, The One Who Keeps On Giving, gathers around an object: an oil painting of a seascape by the artist’s late mother who painted it as a young woman and signed it as Peggy Miller.
Melanie Authier: Contrarieties and Counterpoints
The spatial effects of Melanie Authier’s abstract paintings show how artists can engage with the art of the past and transpose it into their own visual language.
Bodies in Translation: Age and Creativity
In keeping with the project’s focus on socially engaged creative work by artists who embody difference, the works in Bodies in Translation address various facets of aging, including age-related disability.
Ian Willms: We Shall See
In We Shall See Willms documents his father’s traumatic injuries and the details of daily hospital visits.
Brenda Francis Pelkey: A Retrospective
The exhibition includes nine bodies of work by the nationally recognized photographic artist Brenda Francis Pelkey, dating from 1988 through 2015. Pelkey lives in Windsor and has made major photographic series in Ontario, Saskatchewan and rural Nova Scotia, where she has resided in the past.
Tove Storch: Sculpture
Tove Storch’s first solo exhibition in North America follows a three-week production residency in the Art Gallery.
How Do I Look?
This selection of artists’ self-portraits from the Mount Saint Vincent University Collection addresses both the experience of being looked at by others, and that of returning the gaze. As a…
Walking With Our Sisters
Walking With Our Sisters is an art memorial that honours missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirited people through ceremony, community and reflection. It presents more than 1800 pairs of moccasin tops (vamps) made by contributing artists.
Home Economics
Highlighting how craft and commerce have been deeply entwined, Home Economics sheds light on two centuries of creation that embraces vernacular design and individual expression – vibrant evidence of Canada’s evolving cultural and economic landscape.
Kids these days
Kids these days presents video, photography, and graphic works that draw from the fields of anthropology, psychology and sociology, to examine youth and youth cultures in the Canadian context.
Robert Tombs: Index. Graphic Works 1985-2015
Operating within the tradition of the artist/typographer/designer, Robert Tombs' practice incorporates print, photography and site-specific installation. The body of graphic work presented in this exhibition represents Tombs’ collaborations with numerous artists, writers, artist-run centres, art galleries, academic presses and printers to create books and artist-related publications.
“We are continually exposed to the flashbulb of death”: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (1953-1996)
The exhibition comprises over 100 photographs taken by the legendary Beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, capturing his life, loves, and artistic community, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky and others of the Beat generation of writers, poets, and activists.
Bridget Moser: Is this thing on?
Toronto-based performance and video artist Bridget Moser employs strategies associated with experimental theatre, performance art, modern dance, and prop comedy. Moser writes and acts out fragmented texts, combining language with everyday materials, which are used as props, and audio excerpts pulled from popular culture.
An Intimate Distance
An Intimate Distance presents three multi-component works: Andrea Ward’s Hairstories, Glynis Humphrey’s Gorge and Suzanne Swannie’s Considering Two Small Forms, for Maja and Marta.
Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him. Passages to Abstraction. Geneviève Cadieux
This exhibition encompasses 27 years of production by Canadian artist Geneviève Cadieux, who works primarily with photography and its associated techniques.
Beautiful Illusions – Melanie Colosimo & Charley Young
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.
Prospect 17: Joanna Close
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.
Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art
The participating artists in Making Otherwise merge material and conceptual approaches of craft and art; Richard Boulet (Edmonton), Ursula Johnson (Eskasoni, NS), Marc Courtemanche (L’Ange-Gardien, QC), Paul Mathieu (Vancouver), Sarah Maloney (Halifax) and Janet Morton (Guelph).
Big in Nova Scotia
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…
Ron Shuebrook: Drawings
This exhibition acknowledges the centrality of drawing to Ron Shuebrook’s practice. Representing over 30 years of production by the artist, Drawings has much to teach viewers about process.
Voices in Longitude and Latitude: video installation by Marnina & Noam Gonick
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.
Terms of Engagement: Averns, feldman-kiss, Stimson
Terms of Engagement includes works by three “embedded” artists: Dick Averns (posted to the Middle East, 2009), nichola feldman-kiss (posted to Sudan, 2011) and Adrian Stimson (posted to Afghanistan, 2010). All of the artists work in lens-based media (photography and video) and sculpture.
Chromophilia
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.
Steve Higgins: Artist in Residence
For nearly four decades, Steve Higgins’ architecturally inspired sculpture and graphic work has evoked post-industrial dystopias. As though exposing the inner contradictions of a dysfunctional society, his elaborate drawings include spatially incompatible illusions in compositions that Higgins describes as “corrupted from within.”
Activist Ink
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…
Prospect 16: Declan O’Dowd
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.
Scott Conarroe: By Rail
Conarroe is well known for his social landscapes of familiar places, which evoke romantic pictorial traditions while participating in contemporary photography’s critical discourse.
Diane Landry: The Defibrillators
Over the past twenty years, Québec artist Diane Landry has produced a body of playful works inspired by the insignificant gestures and objects that make up our daily existence. Combining cultural and popular imagery, she takes pleasure in swinging between reality and an imaginary, poetic world on the edge of the absurd.
Diane Landry: The Defibrillators
Over the past twenty years, Québec artist Diane Landry has produced a body of playful works inspired by the insignificant gestures and objects that make up our daily existence. Combining cultural and popular imagery, she takes pleasure in swinging between reality and an imaginary, poetic world on the edge of the absurd.
Stock: Stack, Kyle Monchuk
Kyle Monchuk carves, slices and folds printed matter to sculpt three-dimensional cityscapes. His work serves as a metaphor for current practices in urban planning. For Stack he creates an architecturally inspired view of a contemporary cityscape.
David Dahms Impromtu Residency
During his residency, Dahms will be working on a sculpture and drawing installation under the mezzanine in the main gallery space of MSVU Art Gallery. David Dahms attended Mount Allison University, graduating with a BA in International Relations. Recently he returned to his native Nova Scotia and completed a BFA at NSCAD University, focusing on drawing and printmaking.
The Disaster Series by Cindy Stelmackowich
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.
Susan Feindel: See Below
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.
For Example (Butler, Clark Espinal, Gerken)
For Example (Butler, Clark Espinal, Gerken) is the third instalment in a series curated by Micah Lexier specially for the MSVU Art Gallery mezzanine space. In keeping with the idea of the sample, each installation includes works by three artists in three separate, identical vitrines, highlighting the potential for individuality within a context of uniformity.
Logotopia: The Library in Architecture, Art and the Imagination
Logotopia (from the Ancient Greek “logos”, meaning “word” and “topos”, meaning “place”) presents notable examples of library architecture, including Biblioteca Alexandria, Egypt (Snøhetta Architects); the Grande Bibliotheque, Montreal (Patkau Architects); the Hespeler Library, Cambridge (Alar Kongats Architects); and Library of a Poet, Japan (Shigeru Ban Architects).
Jason W.F. Fitzpatrick: Bite and Burn, encore
Bite and Burn, encore sums up the three-part project, Bite and Burn, which took place as follows: Central (Open Studio, Toronto, 2006); Pacific (Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, 2006); and Atlantic (STRUTS Gallery, Sackville, NB, 2007).
Annual Mount Community Show 2008
Mount Saint Vincent students, staff, faculty and alumnae are invited to enter examples of their creative work in the annual extravaganza.
Prospect 13: The Encounter by Suzanne Caines
This is the 13th of the Prospect exhibitions, which feature artists in the emergent stages of their careers. Suzanne Caines, a NSCAD graduate, returned to Halifax after receiving her MFA from Chelsea College, London.
Danish Modern: Suzanne Swannie Textil
Suzanne Swannie is a Halifax-based designer and weaver who creates functional textiles, tapestries and large architectural installations for private and public environments.
ANTHEM: Perspectives on Home and Native Land
In this exhibition the following artists present their responses to forms of Canadian identity, nationhood and nationalism: KC Adams, Fastwurms, Cynthia Girard, Dana Inkster, Alisdair MacRae, Shirley Moorhouse and Eric Robertson.
Donigan Cumming: Ex Votos
The internationally renowned, Montreal-based artist Donigan Cumming is known for his staged portraits of the aging, ill and socially assisted poor, in the form of photographs, videos and photographic collages.
Kyla Mallett: Marginalia
Vancouver-based artist Kyla Mallett borrows from the systematized aesthetics of 1960s conceptual art and applies pseudo-sociological sampling and archiving to reveal networks of communication within various social milieus.
Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven
An interest in everyday moments and time-filling activity is mixed in Mark’s work with deadpan humour and self-deprecatory purpose.
Chemistry
Local artists Dan O’Neill and George Steeves recently made substantial donations to the University Collection. To showcase the new acquisitions while exploring affinities between the respective bodies of work, Chemistry presents fine photographic prints by Steeves, hand-pulled lithographs by O’Neill, and figurative sculpture lent by the Newfoundland ceramicist Reed Weir.
For Example (Andrews, Goldman, Koenig)
In the second instalment of the For Example series, single works by three artists reveal stages of their respective production processes. Inspired by the idea of “The Thing Before The Thing”, the exhibition consists of preliminary drawings, animation cells, and contact sheets.
Art Metropole: The Top 100 Organized by the National Gallery of Canada
Art Metropole began in the 1970s as an informal agency of Torontonian and NSCAD-affiliated artists. It evolved into a unique Toronto artist-run centre, collecting and distributing alternative artworks that bypassed the art market with accessibly-priced artists’ “multiples” such as audio recordings, videos, bookworks and postcards.
Annual Mount Community Show 2007
Mount Saint Vincent students, staff, faculty and alumnae are invited to enter examples of their creative work in the annual extravaganza. Pick up your entry form in MSVU Library or Art Gallery.
For Example (Moodie, Thib, Walker)
This is the first in a series of four themed micro exhibitions commissioned from the New York-based Canadian artist Micah Lexier. The For Example exhibitions each incorporate works by three artists, housed in identical, separate vitrines
George Steeves
In addition to his mastery of historical techniques and his exquisite printing, the Haligonian photographer George Steeves is known for an iconography “shot through with grotesque sexuality, reverence for emotional pain, and chilly black humour.”
Prospect 11: Doug Taylor
Born in Sydney and now living in Halifax, CKDU broadcaster Doug Taylor attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a mature student, graduating in 1992. His source images are photographs of recreations such as country fairs, demolition derbies and Khyber Club performances
Annual Mount Community Show 2006
Mount Saint Vincent University students, staff, faculty and alumnae are invited to enter examples of their creative work in the annual extravaganza.
Connect the Dots
Connect the Dots brings together Mark’s mixed-media art with that of two other artists—Gerald Ferguson and Shaun Gough—whose careers intersect with hers
Pulse: Film & Painting After the Image
Pulse brings experimental film into dialogue with contemporary abstract painting by presenting the two art forms adjacent to one another in the same gallery space.
Micah Lexier: To Be Sorted
To Be Sorted includes three vitrine displays of objects from the collection of Micah Lexier, with each display accompanied by one of the artist’s works.
Roots & Shoots
This exhibition draws out tendencies that circulate among the artists of Halifax Regional Municipality and its environs, suggesting patterns of artistic affiliation as well as rifts.
Nancy Nisbet: Exchange 2006
Canadian artist Nancy Nisbet will be parking her 18-wheeler on the MSVU campus, within view of Bedford Highway, from June 19 to 22 as part of her Exchange 2006 tour, a freewheeling, free trade-resistant, frequency-jamming trek around the continent.
Through Alberta Eyes – The Photographs of Orest Semchishen
Orest Semchishen was born in Mundare, Alberta, the grandson of Ukranian immigrants. As a retired radiologist, he photographed disappearing Albertan localities such as Pendryl, Entrance and Plamondon.
Wall Painting by Stephen Fisher
In dialogue with landscape painting traditions and the current mediascape, Fisher appropriates place-related data, such as geological diagrams and weather maps, into vibrant, layered compositions.
Libby Hague and Yael Brotman – Open Images, Open Text
A chandelier motif, layered colour and an affinity for Japanese graphics–such as woodblock prints, manga (comics) and anime–link the works of Toronto-based artists Yael Brotman and Libby Hague.
Paperworks
In 2004, Eye Level Gallery commissioned Paperwork30– a limited edition of 25 boxed sets, each containing one original work by each of 20 Halifax-affiliated artists—to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. MSVU acquired one set for its permanent collection.
Glynis Humphrey: Breathing Under Water
Breathing Under Water is a multi-media installation by the Haligonian artist Glynis Humphrey. It provides an array of acoustic, tactile and visual stimuli, but contains no verbal components.
Michael Fernandes: Room of Fears and Fixing Room
Room of Fears is an installation consisting of one-sentence expressions of fear submitted by members of the public via e-mail and through “comments” boxes. In an adjacent space, Fixing Room displays items submitted to the gallery in response to an open call, for “things you never got round to fixing, things that are broken.” distributed around Halifax.
Alice Egan Hagen (1872-1972), Nova Scotian China Painter – Window Box Series
This exhibition presents china wares painted by Alice Egan Hagen around the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the items have been selected from the large collection she donated to the University in 1966.
Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping
Born in the Punjab and raised in England, Sarindar Dhaliwal now lives in Toronto. In Record Keeping, a jewel-hued archive of paintings and installations embedded with journal entries, folk tales, gossip and news, the artist draws upon a personal history of movement from her birthplace in India, to Britain and then to Canada.
Annual Mount Community Show 2004
From quilts to baking and from photographs to embroidery: practically anything made by Mount Saint Vincent students, staff, faculty and alumnae is eligible for entry in the annual creative extravaganza.
Shifting Ground: Woven Works by Suzanne Swannie
For several years the Haligonian textile artist Suzanne Swannie has been weaving functional floor coverings for private and public environments.
Godless at the Workbench
Canadian art historian Annie Gérin selected the Soviet journals, posters, photographs and film (1918-1939) from the holdings of the British collector David King. The exhibition offers a gripping study of tensions between religion and the modern state as played out in state-controlled mass media.
Tracking: Bombings, Wars & Genocide – a Six Months Journey from New York to China, Vietnam, Cambodia & Indonesia–by Denyse Thomasos
After the 9-11 bombing, artist Denyse Thomasos travelled to photograph jails and burial sites in Asian countries. Those photographs are the source images for this spectacular floor-to-ceiling composition painted directly on the gallery walls.
