Materials and Space: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions 2007 - 2010

Displayed in two sections, this exhibition presents a selection of contemporary works from the Gallery’s permanent collection that have been acquired since Peter Dykhuis was appointed Director/Curator in August, 2007. The works in the first section share an origin in the practice of process art combined with a post-conceptualist, utilitarian approach to materials. Ten are by Garry Neill Kennedy, former President of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and were donated to the Gallery by the artist in 2010. Four of these works are untitled pieces from 1975; the other six were debuted in Kennedy’s 1994 exhibition at Cold City Gallery in Toronto aptly titled “Six Pink Paintings”. All of these works foreground Kennedy’s rigorous studio practice – spanning more than 5 decades – wherein the considered and contemplative act of applying gesso, paint and graphite onto various substrates is the subject matter of the work. For instance, the four untitled pieces involve such production strategies as layering multiple coats of gesso on canvas until the weave of the canvas substrate is obliterated, or tracing each line of the warp in the woven canvas with individual graphite lines; in the “Six Pink Paintings” series, every flake in the surface layer of six squares of industrial chipboard is handpainted with fluorescent pink acrylic paint. The two other works in this section, donated by Ingrid Jenkner in 2009, also represent material transferences of paint and graphite onto support surfaces: Gerald Ferguson’s 1500 Grapes in stencilled acrylic enamel on canvas, and Kelly Mark’s Venus HB – a drawing made until the pencil was used up. The second part of the exhibition presents representational work that illustrates family histories of mapped places, portrays personal, domestic environments, or investigates formal connections to architectural spaces. Bryan Maycock’s drawings, paintings and sculptures map ancestral family neighbourhoods and locates the vocations of past relatives in urban England, while Marlene MacCallum’s photographs and bookworks explore various domestic environments with particular focus on her own context in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. A camera records the sun’s movements across the walls of multiple interior spaces in Charlotte Lindgren’s Swinging Silence series; architectural representations by Heather MacLeod and Carl Zimmerman play with our notions of photographic authenticity: Zimmerman’s image of a modeled building appears to represent a ‘real’ power station; MacLeod’s North Grand Pré Church, Nova Scotia makes us unsure of the ‘reality’ of what we are looking at.