Exhibitions and Events
About Memory and Archive / Autour de la Mémoire et de l'Archive
Selected from the permanent collection of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal by curator of collections Josée Belisle, this fascinating and unusual exhibition featured painting, photography, film, mixed media and sculptural installations by nationally and internationally-known contemporary artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Melvin Charney, Thomas Corriveau, Angela Grauerholz, Claude Hamelin, Raymond Lavoie, Arnaud Maggs and Francine Savard.
An Invested Nature: Contemporary Photography in the Permanent Collection
Selected from recent acquisitions in the Gallery's permanent collection, this exhibition featured the photographic works of Marlene Creates, Lorraine Gilbert and Susan McEachern. Each artist, through her unique perspective and concerns, creates a space for reflection on the impact of human culture on the "natural" - and vice versa. Creates examines the histories and myths accrued to the land and water, while ordering a view of nature that reveals its form and design (and therefore beauty).
The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project
British Columbia-based artist Donald Lawrence combined his art-making skills and kayaking passions in this touring exhibition, which featured: a custom river kayak that has been converted into a floating darkroom, large-scale black and white photographs of the sea bed, and a Super-8 film "The Inter-tidal Photographer".
Some Canadian Landscapes/Made in China
Lorraine Field combined her interests in ceramics and photography in this exhibition of "interrupted landscapes" in which serene photographs of well-known Canadian sites (such as Banff, Niagara Falls, Cavendish Beach and Peggy's Cove), taken in the "off" season, were interspersed with images of the typical souvenirs (mostly made in China) that tourists purchase.
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.
David Clark: A is for Apple
Halifax-based film and media artist David Clark presented a new interactive digital installation, A is for Apple, that explored a "hermeneutics or cryptography of the apple", and created a labyrinthine network of images, anecdotes, associations and meanings (with surround sound). The work was simultaneously accessible in the New Media Gallery, and on the world wide web as an online interactive project, as well as in CD-ROM form as a part of the exhibition catalogue.
