Home/Land

MASSEY LECTURE RECEPTION/OPENING RECEPTION Thursday 17 October at 6 PM

The Gallery is pleased to host a public reception for author Lawrence Hill, who will be presenting the second of the 2013 CBC Massey Lectures, Blood, the Stuff of Life, in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium at 8 PM.

......................................................................................

These two exhibitions, presented in tandem with each other, explore the artists’ personal, psychological and geo-political relationships with the physical territory and socio-cultural spaces that, for varying durations of their lives, they have called ‘home’.

SYLVIA D. HAMILTON Excavation: A Site of Memory

In this installation that incorporates text, images (both still and moving), sound and found objects, Hamilton uses a personal and collective lens to frame her interrogation of the complex, linked concepts of memory, place and history in the African Nova Scotian community.

Excavation visualizes the tangible markings of the enslavement of African people in Nova Scotia, through archival newspaper ads juxtaposed with photographic images, imagined poetic narratives, and everyday physical material such as potatoes, ribbons and barrels. Parallel sections, Waters of the Diaspora and The Passage, combine text and visual images to evoke the symbolic role of water in the lives of African peoples.

Hamilton underscores her role in the community as filmmaker and cultural note-taker. As a storyteller, she embraces the concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora in which the installation itself becomes a temporal ‘site of memory’ where the real and the imagined co-exist.

WILMA NEEDHAM Souvenir

Needham was born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where, in her experience, the circus and the sublime are permanent partners. Questions of beauty, bravery, greed, power, and wonder shaped her consciousness from an early age; consequently, the extreme visual spectacle of the Falls has loomed large in her creative practice for many decades.

Included in Souvenir is Niagara: River of Fame, an offset print suite overlaid with screen-printed text that responds to the 1980s chemical pollution of the River from leaching industrial toxins at Love Canal. A more recent project, entitled BRINK, photographically captures the fascination and drama inherent in the power, movement and visual intensity at the turning point, the brink, of the cascade.

Central to the installation—and influenced by Needham’s stint as a student working for Ontario Ministry of Tourism—is a mapped representation of the Niagara River on the floor of the gallery. The public will be able to access a narrative tour about the Falls, the River and its territory, through a series of codes embedded in the map.