Articles

10 items
Visites
I am happy to report that the exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) by Vancouver media artist Althea Thauberger, The State of the Situation, was the tonic I needed after months of staring at virtual art on my computer, pad, and cell phone. Normally, I am not a big fan of installation…
Dossiers
As I wrote this piece, I was in the sixth week of self-imposed house arrest because of COVID-19, as was most of the rest of Canada. These are dangerous times, as the world faces a deadly pandemic unlike any we have faced in our lifetimes. As an art writer, I find myself divorced from that which…
Visites
The title of the exhibition, Fairy Tails, is not a typo. Koval told me that it refers to the ambiguity between humans and animals, and even to animalism. One example is the talking Big Bad Wolf, with his tail sticking out of Grandmother’s nightgown. Fairy tales are all about role reversals. The…
Visites
The Marion McCain Exhibition of Atlantic Art was initiated in 1987 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery as a biennial survey of New Brunswick art, but in 1994 it morphed into a review of Atlantic Canadian Art. Beaverbrook Art Gallery director Tom Smart, also the curator of the current exhibition,…
Visites
Monet: The Late Years is currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, following a successful run at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, where I recently had the chance to see it. If I had to describe the exhibition in one word, it would be “ravishing.” To say that the paintings…
Visites
Leroux, who has written several books on architectural history, was engaged in research on the destruction of Saint John’s north end in the 1960s to make way for what turned out to be a mistaken attempt at urban development when he ran across some images taken during this period by MacEachern. He…
Visites
Shifting Ground is a survey of art produced by Indigenous Canadian artists currently at the Nova Scotia Gallery of Art in Halifax. Note that I say art by Indigenous artists and not Indigenous art. There is an important difference. I have a problem with limiting artists’ work by categorizing them by…
Visites
Labelling artists is frustrating at best. Lewis has been incorrectly called a primitive artist, but that is a term, now rarely used, by anthropologists to describe non-Western tribal art. More often she is labelled a folk artist – the term that the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia prefers. The term I…
Portraits
When I was asked to write a profile of artist Graeme Patterson, I said sure, that would not be a problem. I found him that same day at a BBQ at the artists run gallery Struts in Sackville and asked him if he would mind sitting down and talking to me about his life and art. We both live in…
Visites
Maritime painter William (Will) Forrestall is well known for his carefully crafted egg tempera still-lives, but he has other sides such as this that will come as a surprise to many. The term Kinetic Sculpture has been around for some time. Roughly speaking it is sculpture that moves or does…