Exhibitions and Events
Embedded Metaphor
An intimate, but usually mute, witness to our private lives and dreams, the bed is an emotionally fraught piece of furniture, the site of birth and death, pleasure and pain. From a pile of rags to an old mattress to embroidered white linen pillows, sculptural installations and photographic images in this exhibition all suggest the absent body, the "occupant" - homeless or wealthy, imprisoned, an invalid, a child...
Works by Members of the Group of Seven and Associates
The Sobey Art Foundation, founded by Frank H. Sobey and continued by his sons, Donald and David, has one of the finest collections of works by the Group of Seven and their associates. This engaging selection includes paintings dating from as early as 1913, well before the group's first exhibition (showing their early experiments in capturing the Canadian landscape with expressive brushwork and vibrant colour) to as late as 1949, when several members had moved toward abstraction. Interestingly, Arthur Lismer, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H.
Chrystal Clements: Home is Where the Heart is
Through simple and poetic mixed media works, Chrystal Clements recalls her own upbringing in a small black community in rural Nova Scotia and examines the traditional role of Mother within such communities. Ritualistic repeated images and sewn forms echo domestic acts, suggesting both weary routine and warm tradition. This exhibition is the 14th in our Front Alcove Series, designed to respond to more immediately to recent work by local (often emerging) artists.
Taking the Helm: Black Filmmakers from Three Continents
From Oscar Micheaux to Melvin Van Peebles this survey highlights films by Black Directors from Africa, Europe and North America. This series will include a lecture by Black filmmaker, critic and curator Cameron Bailey.
3 February - Body and Soul
Oscar Micheaux, USA, 1925, 82 minutes
Early British Moderns
Three films to complement the exhibition Sargent to Freud: a drama, a comedy and a documentary, all featuring early British Modern painters, real and imagined.
13 January - Carrington
Christopher Hampton, Britain, 1995, 122 minutes
Playwright Christopher Hampton catches the spirit of Bloomsbury in this film biography of the painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and her companion, the eccentric and gay Edwardian writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce).
January 20 - Ben Nicholson: Razor Edge
Sargent to Freud
This exhibition of over 50 paintings by such luminaries of British Modernism as Lucian Freud, Ivon Hitchens, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Stephen Lowry, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Christopher Wood, as well as early drawings by Barbara Hepworth, Augustus John, and Henry Moore, has been selected from the permanent collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery by Ian Lumsden, the gallery's Director.
Jan Peacock
Two major video installations by Halifax-based artist Jan Peacock - Reader by the Window (now in the collection of the National Gallery) and Book of Chairs - differ in form and presentation, yet both are concerned with physical and emotional distance, and with our relationships to each other and to remembered places. Images and sounds of travel - of arrivals and departures, of places both familiar and exotic - are the raw materials from which Peacock builds her complex layered enivronments, and in which she invites viewers to immerse themselves.
The 45th Annual Student, Staff, Faculty and Alumni Exhibition
Our annual celebration of the creativity of students, staff, faculty and alumni of Dalhousie, Daltech, and King’s College, in painting, graphic art, photography, mixed media, sculpture and crafts. We welcome your artwork for this exhibition, which makes no distinction between amateurs and professionals. Entries will be accepted during Gallery hours, from 14 November to 29 November. Pick up your entry from after mid-October at the Gallery’s front desk.
Nancy Edell: Bricàbra
These recent multi-panelled works Nova Scotia-based artist Nancy Edell are her most ambitious and complex to date, combining hooked mats, carved and incised wood panels, intricately painted and stained surfaces, and various cut out forms. They support a cast of mutating figures in visual dramas that are at once humorous, erotic and enigmatic. Women and girls are the main protagonists in these fragmented, dreamlike narratives, interacting with a bizarre range of characters: human, animal, and insect.
love affair: the book of joan
These paintings, poems and photographs by Jim Logan (a First Nations artist now living in Nova Scotia) deal with what he describes as a “Native love affair”. Curator Heather Smith (who organized this exhibition for the Moose Jaw Art Museum) comments “The work transcends a simple critique of the genre of Native ‘romance’ in pulp fiction…this is a human story, made rich with indecision and complicated by circumstance.” Logan’s paintings of Joan have a directness that resembles the simplified forms of posters.
