Exhibitions and Events
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.
Artists in a Floating World: The Marion McCain Atlantic Art Exhibition 2000
Curator Tom Smart describes the purpose of Artists in a Floating World as exploring "strange worlds and allusive meanings in the work of a selection of artists living in Atlantic Canada." Taking Alex Colville's painting Embarkation and Christopher Pratt's painting Big Cigarette as starting points, Smart selected artworks whose pictorial composition suggests other worlds -- "floating worlds" in which the sea itself often plays a determining role. A condensed version of this exhibition was organized for a cross-Canada tour by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
Justin Augustine: Within Boundaries
Artist's Statement: My paintings depict images of young black persons transfixed in an otherworldly space. The figures occupy the foreground against what, at first glance, appears to be an ambiguous background. However, they are not realistic portraits of actual individuals. Rather, they are composites, placed in scenes which frame and dominate my childhood memories of my homeland, the Caribbean island of Dominica. By placing the figures against warm, lightly coloured and sharply contrasted architecture, further memories of a tropical climate are invoked.
William Eakin: Have a Nice Day
Have a Nice Day is a selection of William Eakin's photographs that explores contemporary society's obsession with UFOs, aliens, and extraterrestrial phenomena. Produced over a ten-year period, the photo-installation contains 30 large-scale images, representing several distinct bodies of work. These include Eakin's UFO sighting pictures, alien portraits, alien tableaux, and cryptic photo-collages. Eakin's photographs are factitious-- a subtle mix of fact and fiction-- that deconstructs the alien myth in search of the socio-cultural meanings of our obsession.
Richard Mueller: The Material of Thought
This exhibition presented an examination of the complex work of Halifax-based artist Richard Mueller over the past 12 years. The selection covered some of his most engaging and challenging works, dating from the time he shifted focus from largely abstract painting to the compelling and poetic imagery of fire and light and the materials of industrial steel and glass that continue to occupy him today.
