Exhibitions and Events
Robert Wiens: Recent Sculpture
Four elegant and compelling sculptural elements -- a wide bowl and a log carved out of laminated wood, a circular pile of hundreds of wooden hands, and a copper foot suggesting a fragment of a huge monument -- make up this installation of Ontario sculptor Robert Wiens' recent work. Less sociopolitically specific than some of his earlier work, these pieces play with the historical convention of sculpture as monumental statuary, and include references to Wiens' own identity as a maker, and to his materials and processes.
Gerald Ferguson: Compositions 1989-1994
In her catalogue essay for this comprehensive survey of the last five years of Halifax artist Gerald Ferguson's work, guest curator Susan Gibson Garvey writes: "In his latest and perhaps most productive period...Ferguson has given himself permission to plunder the treasury of Western painting, manipulating imagery from sources as early as classical antiquity and as recent as commercial advertising.
Kathy Brown: Passages
Kathy Brown's watercolours and mixed media works distill over twenty years of sailing experiences along the coasts of Atlantic Canada. From the viewpoint of the navigator of a small boat, these works present sections of charts, lines and positions, vistas of sky and water, indications of weather. Although centred on ocean passages, the paintings may also have broader resonance, such as charting passages through life or coming to terms with adverse elements.
Early Views of British North America
Before photography, capturing images of the land was an important responsibility of artists. Early painters of the Canadian landscape ranged from independent professional artists, through topographers trained by the millitary, to interested amateurs. This exhibition includes over 40 works in watercolour, pastel, pencil and ink executed between 1804 and 1910 by professional and amateur artists active in "British North America", as it was then most often called.
Marine Images fron the Permanent Collection
From warships in Halifax Harbour to gondolas in Venice; from William Dashwood's racing yachts off the South coast of England to Arthur Lismer's minesweepers at work in the grey North Atlantic; from square-riggers elegantly engraved by the seventeenth-century master Claude Lorraine to a brave little dory almost swamped by unexpected wave in local artist John Neville's aquatint...this selection of paintings, prints and drawings presents a wide range of subjects and styles in marine imagery.
Melissa Day: Seascapes
In 1993, printmaker Melissa Day joined a scientific expedition to the Eastern Arctic to study the sea bed. Out of this experience came the sources for her multi-layered lithographs and etchings: sonar scans and ship's tracks, sole marks of icebergs, evidence of the slow accretion of sedimentary rocks under the sea. Sea comments "I am interested in the submerged seascape -- how it is shaped over time and how these processes relate to the processes within my own work."
Focus on Australia
The Gallery is pleased to present a special program on Australian art, with particular emphasis on Australian aboriginal works. Accompanying lectures are listed under Special Events, and details of the associated festival of film and television on Indigenous Australians, titles Cultural Focus, Cultural Futures, are listed overleaf.
(1) The Utopia Body Paint Collection
Marlene Creates: Landworks 1979 - 1991
This comprehensive survey begins with Creates' early landworks -- "brief interventions", in paper, stone and water, recorded in elegant photographs -- and proceeds through a selection of stone and wood installations and composite photographic works, to selections from her two major "memory map" works involving people in Labrador (1988) and Newfoundland (1989-91).
André Kertész: Selections from On Reading
Born in Hungary, the influential photographer André Kertész worked in Budapest and Paris until 1936, when he settled in the United States. Images of people reading, and of reading matter, fascinated him, and were ultimately gathered together for a publication titled On Reading (published in 1971). Toronto gallery owner Jane Corkin, who handles the Kertész estate, has selected an engaging group of original photographs from this series, dating from 1915 to 1970, for display at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (which is also arranging an Atlantic tour of this exhibition).
The 41st Annual Dalhousie Student, Staff, Faculty and Alumni Exhibition
This annual showcase of the artistic talent of the University community in paintings, graphic art, photographs, sculpture and crafts brings to a close the Gallery’s 40th anniversary celebrations. All members of the Dalhousie community are invited to enter. In view of the recent threat of closure and last-minute reprieve affecting all the fine arts programs on campus we suggest that contributors consider using the theme “survival” in their work. Artworks will be accepted at the Gallery from 7-18 November inclusive during regular gallery hours.
