MSVUArt: Exhibitions

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Prospect 18: Christiane Poulin. Echoes 13 Oct 2018 – 16 Dec 2018 Exhibitions in the Prospect series introduce artists in the early phases of their careers. A retired physician, Poulin recently graduated from NSCAD with a BFA in Textiles and the 2017 Starfish Student Art Award. She lives in Halifax. The woven structures of her site-oriented installation allude to Brutalist design integrated into a landscape.
Jane Kidd: Curious 23 Jun 2018 – 26 Aug 2018 Kidd is one of Canada’s preeminent artists working in textile. She lives in Salt Spring Island. The exhibition encompasses the tapestry series Curiosities, Wonderland, Land Sentence and Possession. In nightmarish visions of genetic modification, Curiosities depicts parts of various organisms spliced together to form alluring chimeras.
Material Remains 26 May 2018 – 30 Sep 2018 Drawn from the MSVU Collection, these works of art incorporate household textiles such as bedding, a tea towel, table linens and discarded clothing. The domestic references are embedded in works whose imagery also engages with gender politics and world events.
Home Economics 3 Sep 2016 – 6 Nov 2016 The exhibition presents over 100 hooked rugs from the TMC collection, including the work of contemporary artists Joanna Close, Nancy Edell, Hannah Epstein, Deanne Fitzpatrick, Heather Goodchild, Barbara Klunder and Yvonne Mullock as well as seldom-seen pieces by Emily Carr, Clarence Gagnon, Florence Ryder and Georges-Édouard Tremblay.
The Department of Prints and Drawings 11 Jun 2016 – 19 Aug 2016 How can a small university art gallery, itself a department, oversee a “Department of Prints and Drawings”? The provocative title of this exhibition is meant to prompt skepticism about the medium-based categories that still define large public collections, such as those at the National Gallery of Canada.
Weaving the existing. Giorgia Volpe 24 Mar 2016 – 29 May 2016 Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Giorgia Volpe has since 1998 lived in Quebec City, where she has taught drawing, printmaking and photogram at Meduse. This first survey of the artist’s career encompasses performance, action art, drawing, sculpture, photography, installations and video
Prospect 17: Joanna Close 13 Dec 2014 – 8 Mar 2015 This is the 17th of the Prospect exhibitions, which showcase the works of selected Nova Scotian artists during the early stages of their careers. Joanna Close presents a series of hooked rugs depicting buildings from a former family farm in New Brunswick, now given over to an industrial gravel quarry.
Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art 9 Oct 2014 – 30 Nov 2014 Today, there is an increasing permeability between the realms of “craft” and “art” occurring in step with an emphasis on “reskilling” and the handmade, as seen in contemporary art practice and in the widespread interest in all things handcrafted.
Big in Nova Scotia 23 Aug 2014 – 28 Sep 2014 MSVU Art Gallery was built in 1971. Its two-storey height was designed for the preeminent art of that era; expansive paintings on the scale of American “field” painting, and sculpture conceived in Minimalist terms as spatial theatre. Forty-three years later, Big in Nova Scotia responds to the moment of the Gallery’s beginning with a selection of large works from the MSVU collection.
Chromophilia 16 Mar 2013 – 21 May 2013 “Chromophilia” is a neologism meaning “love of colour.” The aesthetic priority given to colour is the quality shared by the recent acquisitions in this exhibition.
Soft: Works from the University Collection 12 May 2012 – 12 Aug 2012 The Art Gallery’s special mandate to collect textile-based art, due to the medium’s traditional association with women, is augmented in this selection by the inclusion of another material associated with domesticity—aluminum foil. All of the works have in common the tactile quality of softness.
Ursula Johnson, Artist-in-Residence 10 Jan 2012 – 17 Feb 2012 From 9 January through 17 February, Mi’kmaw artist Ursula Johnson will work in a studio space within the gallery, hosting basket-making workshops, open studio days and other events.
Dirt, Detritus and Vermin 21 May 2011 – 8 Aug 2011 The artists make use of the tools of fine craftsmanship, their ornamentation alluding to historical forms, but subvert tradition by applying it to degraded objects.
Beneath the Surface 23 Oct 2010 – 12 Dec 2010 The Nova Scotian artists Nancy Edell, Kim Morgan and Susan Wood share an interest in corporeal experience. In these works from the MSVU Collection, the artists present metaphors for the invisible, sometimes pathological processes at work within the body.
Kim Morgan: Range Light, Borden-Carleton, PEI, 2010 16 Oct 2010 – 21 Nov 2010 Kim Morgan’s new sculpture will be composed of latex casts of the exterior and interior of an abandoned lighthouse. With their parts held together by hand-sewn joins, the two casts are suspended as visually distinct units.
Losing it: Jarvis, Pagurek, Wensley 14 Aug 2010 – 5 Oct 2010 This witty and emotionally charged exhibition includes works by Kirtley Jarvis, Cheryl Pagurek, and Mary-Anne Wensley. Whether this art serves to provoke or assuage anxiety is an open question.
Danish Modern: Suzanne Swannie Textil 18 Oct 2008 – 23 Nov 2008 Suzanne Swannie is a Halifax-based designer and weaver who creates functional textiles, tapestries and large architectural installations for private and public environments. She also weaves pictorial tapestries and is known for unique fabric constructions such as the gallery installation Repassage.
ANTHEM: Perspectives on Home and Native Land 25 Aug 2008 – 5 Oct 2008 In this exhibition the following artists present their responses to forms of Canadian identity, nationhood and nationalism: KC Adams, Fastwurms, Cynthia Girard, Dana Inkster, Alisdair MacRae, Shirley Moorhouse and Eric Robertson.
Frances Dorsey Saigon 13 Oct 2007 – 25 Nov 2007 An associate professor at NSCAD University, Dorsey works in cloth as a way of engaging critically with painting and of bringing global themes within the scope of family life and domestic practices. Much of her work includes photo-derived images of war. In this context, her use of distressed, pieced-together, salvaged cloth–a pictorial version of the patchwork quilt–offers a pointed critique of the tradition of “history painting” in which large paintings on canvas glorify war.
For Example (Moodie, Thib, Walker) 23 Jun 2007 – 16 Sep 2007 This is the first in a series of four themed micro exhibitions commissioned from the New York-based Canadian artist Micah Lexier. The For Example exhibitions each incorporate works by three artists, housed in identical, separate vitrines.
Anna Torma: Needleworks 13 Jan 2007 – 18 Feb 2007 Anna Torma grew up on a farm in Hungary, where she learned the techniques of hand sewing and embroidery from her mother and grandmother. She enrolled at the Hungarian University of Applied Arts in Budapest in the late 1970s, at a time when censorship constricted many aspects of cultural expression.
Moral Fibre 29 Jun 2005 – 16 Nov 2005 Colette Whiten, Svava Juliusson, Nancy Edell, Frances Dorsey and Barbara Todd are linked by their use of textile-based media to express dissenting views.
Shifting Ground: Woven Works by Suzanne Swannie 23 Oct 2004 – 12 Dec 2004 For several years the Haligonian textile artist Suzanne Swannie has been weaving functional floor coverings for private and public environments.
Frances Dorsey: Rice Paddies / Vîet Nam 4 Aug 2004 – 8 Aug 2004 Rice Paddies / Vîet Nam is a textile work-in-progress by Frances Dorsey. It is being exhibited at MSVU Art Gallery as part of the "impromptu" series.
Work Work Work 27 Mar 2004 – 23 May 2004 Taken from the university collection, these works, which use materials such as plywood, acoustic tile, a tea towel and pantry equipment, invite comparison with hobby craft, housework, and puttering.
Hair in Hand 30 Oct 2003 – 14 Dec 2003 The works in this exhibition frame women’s bodily experiences in the context of handwork and hair–where hair appears both as an artist’s material and as the physical trace of its owner.
Beyond Words 28 Oct 2003 – 23 Nov 2003 The art in this exhibition encourages viewers to think of language as something more than a transparent medium of communication.
Visions & Other Phenomena 20 Jul 2002 – 8 Sep 2002 Visionary, scientific, and pseudo-documentary material offer disparate versions of truth in this selection of works from MSVU collection.
Janice Wright Cheney: Disorderly Creatures 2 Jan 2002 – 3 Mar 2002 Fredericton artist Janice Wright Cheney embroiders life-like insects on handkerchiefs, books and clothing; her method of presentation alternates "the cultural" with "the natural."
Kai Chan: Rainbow Lakes 2 Jan 2002 – 20 Feb 2002 A designer of jewellery, interiors, and theatre, Kai Chan also builds wall-mounted constructions of objects and fibre. Rainbow Lakes surveys his recent sculptural works, many of which assume the form of landscape elements.
Do Try This At Home 24 Apr 2001 – 17 Jun 2001 In this exhibition, most works have been assembled from scraps, discards and inexpensive household supplies by means of repetitive procedures such as knitting, filling, stuffing, stapling, and so on.
Gather Beneath the Banner Political & Religious Banners of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 1877-1932 3 Mar 2001 – 11 Apr 2001 The 21 embroidered and painted banners in this exhibition proclaim the conservative beliefs and radical activism of one of Canada's most successful women's organizations, the W.C.T.U.
e-textiles 13 Jan 2001 – 25 Feb 2001 This exhibition includes works as large as 14 feet square that have been jacquard-woven at the specially equipped Centre des textiles contemporains.
Joyce Wieland: A Vignette 8 Jan 2000 – 12 Mar 2000 At the turn of the millennium, while the flag waves over a disgruntled and divided nation, Joyce Wieland’s anti-patriarchal, femino-patriotic art makes a surprisingly fresh statement.
Confrontations Unquiet Images from the University Collection 5 Jun 1999 – 18 Jul 1999 The exhibition in the mezzanine gallery includes two further works: Margaret Clarke's "Mother Ireland" portrait Mary and Brigid (1917), and Bruce Johnson's mural-sized photo-mosaic Oka (1992).
Field Notes 13 Jun 1998 – 2 Aug 1998 Field Notes consists of pieced fabric constructions which combine stitched, dyed and painted cloth, in compositions that blend abstract formal qualities with references to rural Ontario landscape.
Margins of Memory / Trames de mémoire 14 Mar 1998 – 26 Apr 1998 Although sculpture predominated this exhibition organized around themes of memory and corporeality, even the two-dimensional works projected an assertive, spatial presence.
Letters from the Edge: Zapatista Embroideries (Window Box) 16 Oct 1997 – 14 Dec 1997 This selection of cloths embroidered by Maya women from Chiapas, Mexico, provoked strong viewer response.
Image Rites 5 Apr 1997 – 11 May 1997 This exhibition was composed of works by artists whose ritualized production processes and presentation strategies intensify the terms of viewer engagement.
Ann Newdigate: Ciphers from the Muniments Room 29 Mar 1996 – 26 May 1996 Newdigate’s digitized printout of a tapestry-woven shorthand letter brings textile media even further into the realm of textual practices.
Meta Textiles: Sewing the Second Skin 29 Mar 1996 – 26 May 1996 The artists in htis exhibition engaged the notion of "second skin" from disparate perspectives, though a spare, minimal sensibility linked their approaches to textile media.