Spirit Matters: Works Selected From the Permanent Collection

 Drawn from the rich resources of the Dalhousie Art Gallery's permanent collection, Spirit Matters foregrounds the issue of spiritual content in visual art. Including historical and contemporary works that range across continents and cultures -- Australian aboriginal burial poles, Renaissance woodcuts, Inuit sculpture, Chinese porcelain Buddhist figures, and drawings, prints and mixed media works by artists from Atlantic Canada -- this exhibition offers an opportunity to revisit the role of visual art in expressing and informing the life of the spirit. Some of the works relate to specific belief systems, while others have nothing at all to do with organized religion. However, all the works -- sometimes with humour, sometimes with reverence, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes quizzically -- touch on matters of faith, vision or spirituality. 

   The exhibition is not intented to be representative or inclusive with regard to varieties of religious experiences embodied in art. It is not about religious dogma. It simply presents those works of art in the Gallery's collection that seem to involve overt spiritual content. Admittedly, "spiritual content" is a vague term that can cover a gamut of contents from strict religious doctrine to New Age yearnings for the numinous, or from simple representations of deities to the transcendence associated with some forms of Modernist abstraction. "Spiritual" is usually taken to mean in some way important or satisfying to that part of human nature called the soul. Those who are not religiously engaged, or who dispute the concept of the soul, might equate spiritual satisfaction with emotional satisfaction. Spiritual hunger need not necessarily relate to things beyond this life.

Excerpt from exhibition catalogue written by Susan Gibson Garvey