Steve Higgins: All Things Considered: thoughts about cities and history, war and peace

Over the past 30 years, Steve Higgins, a Halifax resident for the last decade, has worked at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and the urban environment. This exhibition presents four aspects of the artist’s body of work, each highlighting a different mode of enquiry. In his current body of work, titled Urban, the viewer is invited to peer into four table-sized constructions which house miniature models of imagined cities as seen through Higgins’ lens of history and life in the modern age. The exhibition also presents two suites of works on paper that further reveal the artist’s conceptual process. The 1992/2009 intaglio etchings, 4 Plans, represent footprints of a school, a crematorium, a cemetery and a mobile home park that echo in two dimensions the explorations of the three dimensional table sculptures. The second suite, of 25 inkjet prints on paper titled War and Peace: Rivers of White, was generated from a paperback edition of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. In this project, Higgins drew lines down each page to follow the vertically aligned space between words on consecutive text lines, foregrounding the typesetting artifact known as ‘rivers of white’ and poetically illustrating the space ‘between the lines’ in this historical text. As with the Urban model series and 4 Plans, Higgins continues to explore his fascination with negative space in the definition of formal plans and constructions. The fourth component of the exhibition is a large-scale work drawn directly on the wall. The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage.