The World in the Evening: works by Sara Hartland-Rowe and Mitchell Wiebe

While Halifax-based painters Sara Hartland-Rowe and Mitchell Wiebe have pursued distinctly different practices, they both work in narrative-figurative modes that draw upon historical painting traditions. Both have developed casts of characters that turn up in their works in different guises and in varied scenarios. Hartland-Rowe reconstitutes fragments of early renaissance frescos as 21st-century stories of "everypersons" set within a post-industrial landscape of commerce, conflict and pollution — and, occasionally, of beauty and redemption. The protagonists in Wiebe's large, expressive paintings are stuffed animals, whose antics oscillate between the charming and the alarming as they negotiate the often dark complexities of society now. The exhibition and catalogue received generous funding from the Nova Scotia Arts Council.