Exhibitions and Events
Stories of the Spirit: The films of Catherine Martin
In 1989, Catherine Martin became Nova Scotia's first Mi'kmaw filmmaker with her six-minute documentary Minqon Minqon, a profile of Maliseet artist Shirley Bear (filmed in collaboration with Kimberlee McTaggart). Today she has two feature-length films and many short films and docudramas to her name, as well as other works in progress. Through her singing, teaching, activism and work on various boards and task forces, Martin is an important advocate for aboriginal arts, education and language, and has been vital in establishing and nurturing a Mi'kmaq film culture in Nova Scotia.
No Man's Land: the Photographs of Lynne Cohen
For almost three decades, internationally renowned, award-winning photographer Lynne Cohen has been hunting down and photographing "found" interiors of astonishing variety, presenting us with a funny, perplexing and ultimately chilling vision of the world - a humanly engineered environment "where the boundaries between inside and outside, nature and culture, pleasure and pain, have been blurred, stripped of their original connotations.
Back to the Land: early 20th century landscapes in the permanent collection
The works in this exhibition were all in one way or another associated with the period in which Canadian landscape painting came of age: the first half of the 20th century, when the Canadian Group of Seven and associated artists brought the raw, rugged beauty of the landscape into national consciousness, separating it for ever from the more "refined" European-influenced visions of the land that preceded them. Paintings and drawings by A.Y. Jackson, A.J. Casson, J.E.H.
Black Body: Race, Resistance, Response
Curator Pamela Edmonds brought together the diverse works of six contemporary black artists around the issue of the racialized body. Works ranged from the elegant photographic nudes of Toronto-based Michael Chambers to Halifax-based Chrystal Clements' poignant icons of domesticity and community. African oral traditions and visual sensibilities were evident in Gomo George's assemblages, while formal pyramidal structures and grids reinforced Rebecca Fiske's investigations of "colourism".
My Home and Native Land: Bobby Nock videos
Cape Breton-based artist Bobby Nock offered an affectionately ironic take on local culture in this exhibition of five videos grouped under the title My Home and Native Land: The Red Bush in Waycobah Series. The colour red, the primacy of the Group of Seven in Canadian art history, indigenous Mi'kmaq and imported Scots-Gaelic traditions, and a tourist's vision of scenic Nova Scotia became intertwined and then unravelled in Nock's dead-pan videomaking style.
