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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.
Unpacking the Living Room 8 Sep 2018 – 10 Nov 2018 Living rooms are spaces we arrange and create around ourselves to support the comfort and wellbeing of family, to host friends and loved ones, to display precious and prized belongings, and for leisure and relaxation. But living rooms are private spaces packed with emotions and history, as well as social and political investments. The kind of living room we create can reveal our background, our values, our social position, and our aspirations. Even the privilege of having a living room speaks volumes when so many people live in precarious situations, are without shelter, or have been displaced from their homes and traditional lands.
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.
Bodies in Translation: Age and Creativity 9 Sep 2017 – 12 Nov 2017 MSVU Art Gallery is collaborating with the SSHRC-funded project entitled Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life and the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging at MSVU
How Do I Look? 11 Feb 2017 – 9 Apr 2017 This selection of artists’ self-portraits from the Mount Saint Vincent University Collection addresses both the experience of being looked at by others, and that of returning the gaze. As a corollary to their engagement with practices of looking and appearing, these self-portraits also tackle the frameworks of race, gender and sexuality.
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.
An Intimate Distance 3 Jun 2015 – 16 Aug 2015 An Intimate Distance presents three multi-component works: Andrea Ward’s Hairstories, Glynis Humphrey’s Gorge and Suzanne Swannie’s Considering Two Small Forms, for Maja and Marta.
Beautiful Illusions Melanie Colosimo & Charley Young 10 Jan 2015 – 8 Mar 2015 Beautiful Illusions presents works in graphic media by two young Nova Scotian artists. Colosimo’s principal practice is drawing; Young favours drawing and indexical techniques, such as casting and monoprinting.
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.
Ron Shuebrook: Drawings 24 May 2014 – 10 Aug 2014 This exhibition acknowledges the centrality of drawing to Ron Shuebrook’s practice. Representing over 30 years of production by the artist
Beyond the Terminating Vista (Rebuild) 20 Apr 2013 – 28 Jul 2013 By transposing his charcoal drawings into a wooden structure, Steve Higgins will create a temporary sculpture on an ambitious scale rarely seen in Halifax.
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.
Steve Higgins: Artist in Residence 6 Mar 2013 – 19 Apr 2013 For nearly four decades, Steve Higgins’ architecturally inspired sculpture and graphic work has evoked post-industrial dystopias. As though exposing the inner contradictions of a dysfunctional society, his elaborate drawings include spatially incompatible illusions in compositions that Higgins describes as “corrupted from within.” The production residency at MSVU Art Gallery offers Higgins his first opportunity in 32 years to realize a room-sized, three-dimensional structure based on his charcoal drawings.
Activist Ink 12 Jan 2013 – 24 Feb 2013 Emily Davidson, Dan O'Neill and Ericka Walker are three Haligonian printmakers whose work revives the history of socially engaged printmaking.
Prospect 16: Declan O'Dowd 15 Dec 2012 – 3 Mar 2013 This is the sixteenth of the Prospect exhibitions, which introduce Nova Scotian artists in the early stages of their careers.
Prospect 15: Anne Macmillan 20 Oct 2012 – 9 Dec 2012 This is the 15th of the Prospect exhibitions, which expose for critical consideration the works of selected Nova Scotian artists during the early stages of their careers. In her creative process the young intermedia artist Anne Macmillan pits rule-following against chance to generate schematic forms.
Sara Hartland-Rowe: Look to the Living 26 May 2012 – 12 Aug 2012 Sara Hartland-Rowe’s figure paintings probe the psychological relationship that exists between model and painter. The shared anxiety of the subjects and their observer is reflected to the viewer in their facial expressions.
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.
Rubbish, Rubbish 8 Oct 2011 – 20 Nov 2011 The exhibition’s title struck its curator when he observed stacked cardboard boxes on a curb, each labelled Rubbish. First finding it humorously coincidental, Hancherow then realized that the deliberate arrangement of the stacked boxes had given them significance proportional to the worthlessness of their contents. In a similar fashion, each artist in this exhibition transforms the viewers’ perception of cardboard boxes as merely utilitarian and disposable.
Earth Skins: Three Decades of Drawing by Susan Wood 23 Aug 2011 – 2 Oct 2011 Atlantic Canadian audiences are probably most familiar with Wood’s recent, elegiac drawings of decaying flowers and dead birds. Her work of the past decade embodies the idea of finitude, reflecting on mortality.
Feed: A Video Installation by Tonia Di Risio 21 Aug 2011 – 2 Oct 2011 In 2006 the Haligonian artist DiRisio traveled to the Abruzzo, Italy. There she recorded her middle-aged female relatives preparing a variety of local dishes in their kitchens.
Lucky Rabbit: In an ancient garden 21 May 2011 – 8 Aug 2011 In an ancient garden evokes the experience of entering a cultivated garden. The multilevel installation of large ceramic pots allows viewers to perceive the vessels from various angles and heights.
Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 19 Mar 2011 – 8 May 2011 Organized around urban and regional centres of art production, this exhibition captures the exuberant ‘traffic‘ between them during the inaugural phase of conceptual art, one of the most transformative art movements of the late 20th century.
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.
Somewhere along the line 10 Oct 2009 – 22 Nov 2009 Amplifying the emphasis on process-oriented execution, the drawings in this exhibition depict motifs in transition: dissolving, connecting, fusing and forming.
Stock: Stack, Kyle Monchuk 2 Jul 2009 – 23 Sep 2009 Stack is the first in a series of exhibitions conceived especially for the MSVU Library vitrines. Participating artists are given access to over-stocked catalogues published by MSVU Art Gallery, as raw material for the creation of new work.
Susan Feindel: See Below 7 Mar 2009 – 17 May 2009 The Nova Scotian artist Susan Feindel is known for her adventurous, experimental approach to landscape painting and her espousal of environmental causes. This painting installation was inspired by her voyages on oceanographic research ships, during which the ocean floor is viewed from shipboard using sonar side-scan technology.
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.
Chemistry 29 Mar 2008 – 25 May 2008 Local artists Dan O’Neill and George Steeves recently made substantial donations to the University Collection. To showcase the new acquisitions while exploring affinities between the respective bodies of work, Chemistry presents fine photographic prints by Steeves, hand-pulled lithographs by O’Neill, and figurative sculpture lent by the Newfoundland ceramicist Reed Weir.
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.
Prospect 12: Dustin Wenzel 22 Sep 2007 – 9 Dec 2007 The Prospect series is designed to introduce artists in the early stages of their careers, in the form of a small solo exhibition with catalogue. The young sculptor Dustin Wenzel needs little introduction, having already made the news with the vandalization of his bronze bust of a white-tailed doe.
Elegies and Effigies (Material Remains) 23 Jun 2007 – 12 Aug 2007 This exhibition focuses on Nova Scotian artists who share a preoccupation with trace imagery, detritus and elegiac themes.
George Steeves 28 Feb 2007 – 10 Apr 2007 In addition to his mastery of historical techniques and his exquisite printing, the Haligonian photographer George Steeves is known for an iconography “shot through with grotesque sexuality, reverence for emotional pain, and chilly black humour.”
Prospect 11: Doug Taylor 15 Dec 2006 – 18 Feb 2007 Born in Sydney and now living in Halifax, CKDU broadcaster Doug Taylor attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a mature student, graduating in 1992. His source images are photographs of recreations such as country fairs, demolition derbies and Khyber Club performances
Pulse: Film & Painting After the Image 14 Oct 2006 – 26 Nov 2006 Pulse brings experimental film into dialogue with contemporary abstract painting by presenting the two art forms adjacent to one another in the same gallery space.
Roots & Shoots 15 Jul 2006 – 1 Oct 2006 This exhibition draws out tendencies that circulate among the artists of HRM and its environs, suggesting patterns of artistic affiliation as well as rifts.
Paperworks 8 Apr 2006 – 30 Jul 2006 In 2004, Eye Level Gallery commissioned Paperwork30– a limited edition of 25 boxed sets, each containing one original work by each of 20 Halifax-affiliated artists—to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. MSVU acquired one set for its permanent collection.
Glynis Humphrey: Breathing Under Water 21 Mar 2006 – 30 Apr 2006 Breathing Under Water is a multi-media installation by the Haligonian artist Glynis Humphrey. It provides an array of acoustic, tactile and visual stimuli, but contains no verbal components.
Michael Fernandes: Room of Fears and Fixing Room 18 Mar 2006 – 14 May 2006 Room of Fears is an installation consisting of one-sentence expressions of fear submitted by members of the public via e-mail and through “comments” boxes. In an adjacent space, Fixing Room displays items submitted to the gallery in response to an open call, for “things you never got round to fixing, things that are broken.” distributed around Halifax.
Alice Egan Hagen (1872-1972), Nova Scotian China Painter Window Box Series 15 Jan 2006 – 31 Jan 2006 This exhibition presents china wares painted by Alice Egan Hagen around the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the items have been selected from the large collection she donated to the University in 1966
Cathy Busby’s 24/7 at Work 8 Oct 2005 – 11 Dec 2005 Cathy Busby is a Halifax-based artist, curator and writer who studies communications practices in consumer and corporate environments.
Prospect 10: Harbour Photographs by Scott Conarroe 3 Sep 2005 – 16 Oct 2005 Harbour 2005 is a series of colour photographs depicting mixed-use sites along the Halifax waterfront. Printed from large-format negatives, Conarroe’s consistently high vantage point, distorted colour and luminous skies transform these nondescript scenes, which could never appear in precisely this fashion to the naked eye.
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.
Floating Worlds (Window Box) 28 May 2005 – 7 Aug 2005 Floating Worlds presents the works of two self-taught artists and former fisherman: Bernie Carpenter and Frank McKeough
Legend Drawings by Leonard Paul 6 May 2005 – 21 Aug 2005 The Nova Scotian artist Leonard Paul is known for his meticulously realistic nature and wildlife paintings. Since 2003, however, he has been engaged in a new project, a series of ink drawings illustrating the legend of the Mi’kmaq.
Free Sample 12 Mar 2005 – 24 Apr 2005 So who doesn’t like free samples? And what’s that got to do with art? Kelly Mark’s new exhibition, Free Sample, can help you figure that out.
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.
Peter Walker: Last Supper Dance 12 Jun 2004 – 27 Jun 2004 Nova Scotian artist Peter Walker is known for his mastery of trompe-l’oeil (fool-the-eye) illusionism and his skill with airbrush and stencil.
too small too big 29 May 2004 – 27 Jun 2004 This exhibition is composed of works on paper by Canadian artists who make strategic use of textured media such as makeup, paper collage, electrical tape, and human hair.
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.
Illuminations: Homemade 22 Oct 2003 – 30 Nov 2003 Haligonian Tonia Di Risio has been invited to contribute a Duratrans image derived from her existing series, Homemade.
Placing Spaces, Spacing Places Canadian Experimental Films & Videos since 1990 17 Jul 2003 – 31 Jul 2003 For this sequel of Changing Times, the video and experimental film series presented by MSVU Art Gallery in 2002, recent works by Kika Thorne, Paulette Phillips, Michael Snow, Manon Labreque, Nelson Henricks and other Canadian artists have been selected for their relevance to the politics and poetics of location.
Optical Illusions 25 Jan 2003 – 8 Mar 2003 Assembled by Curatorial Assistant Renato Vitic, the art in this exhibition points to the instability of memory by associating it with the optical illusion.
In Another Place, Part II Prospect 9: Lucie Chan 14 Sep 2002 – 27 Oct 2002 In the art of Lucie Chan, the implication of displacement and dispersal extends diasporic themes introduced in Lily Markiewicz’s installation. The freely suspended webs of imagery evoke a spatial metaphor on home as "elsewhere."
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.
Walter Ostrom: 120 Dessert Plates 18 May 2002 – 14 Jul 2002 These plates combine the artist's two passions — rhododendrons and gardening — while extending the tradition of botanical china decoration in a spectacular fashion.
The Devil’s Workshop 25 Apr 2002 – 23 Jun 2002 "The Devil finds work for idle hands," goes the saying, and this exhibition explores the implications of this proverb in the works of young artists.
What is Church? Rural Churches of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island 3 Nov 2001 – 16 Dec 2001 The convergence of multi-channel video with music and the scanned and digitally manipulated images in this exhibition suggests the psychedelic equivalent of a Baroque church interior.
Cape Breton Modern: June Leaf 1 Sep 2001 – 28 Oct 2001 The exhibition includes recent small sculpture, paintings and a drawing clustered around the suspended metal Figure on a Hoist.
Cape Breton Modern: Terrence Syverson 1 Sep 2001 – 14 Oct 2001 The monumental shaped paintings of the 1980s and ’90s are luminous, monochromatic fields, often pierced in the centre and bounded by built-up edges resembling torn flesh.
Charmaine 24 Jun 2001 – 22 Jul 2001 Charmaine Wheatley is known for teasingly erotic subject matter. The exhibition includes documentation of her Agricola Street storefront performance in 1997 (Halifax) and another Halifax-era piece, the bookwork Cambridge Suites.
Portraits: Unsettled Subjects 24 Jun 2001 – 22 Jul 2001 Realized in painting, photography, sculpture, print media and video, these mostly contemporary works, drawn from the MSVU collection and loans from various Canadian sources, deploy individual likenesses in the service of social critique.
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.
Flagmen of the Apocalypse New Sculpture by Peter Walker 24 Apr 2001 – 17 Jun 2001 The Flagmen, a series of freestanding welded and assembled sculptures (1998-2000), are Peter Walker's millennium project.
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.
Prospect 8: Rebecca Roberts Paintings 22 Oct 2000 – 17 Dec 2000 Working from photographs, Roberts makes small, lusciously executed paintings in which the nude female figure fills the pictorial field.
Susan Feindel: Figura 22 Oct 2000 – 9 Nov 2000 This show includes paintings and drawings produced since 1983, which re-enact nature's creativity rather than mimicking natural appearances.
Twisted 26 Apr 2000 – 25 Jun 2000 This exhibition included works by three Haligonians who deploy spirals from cosmological, mathematical and biological perspectives.
taboos, titillations & thrills 18 Mar 2000 – 25 Jun 2000 Together, by means of direct address and selective disclosure, these works reconfigured the gallery as a test site in the quest for intimacy.
Jim Shirley Returns The Art of James R. Shirley 19 Feb 2000 – 16 Apr 2000 This retrospective, Shirley’s first major exhibition since his MSVU solo in 1977, includes approximately 50 monotypes and works in other media dating from the Nova Scotia years to the present.
Prospect 7: Amanda Schoppel — Corporeal 17 Apr 1999 – 30 May 1999 For me the rubber band provides abundant possibilities, involving tension or potential tension, internal systems and the inevitable degradation or life span. — Amanda Schoppel
Fixations 6 Mar 1999 – 11 Apr 1999 Curatorial Assistant Robert Zingone curated this pairing of a video by David Askevold and a photo-text installation by Ellen Moffat.
Style Council 15 Jan 1999 – 7 Feb 1999 The term "style" has been displaced in the art lexicon by phrases such as "signifying practice." Yet distinctiveness, elegance, even perversity of expression continue to enjoy a lively currency in the art world.
Winter Gardens 9 Jan 1999 – 21 Feb 1999 The exhibition presented 30 of the colour photographs resulting from Charlotte Lindgren's Winter 1995-96 train journey, during which she photographed private and public gardens at each stop.
1,000,000 Grapes 24 Oct 1998 – 22 Nov 1998 Ferguson's work is composed of 100 square, stretched canvases stencilled in black with an irregular, dot-like motif (or 10,000 "grapes"), installed in a closely spaced grid.
Animal Magnetism 2 May 1998 – 7 Jun 1998 Animal Magnetism united the artist's interests as a draughtsman and producer of experimental audio and video to create this panoramic installation of 100 black and white television sets with over painted screens.
Imaginary Places 10 Jan 1998 – 1 Mar 1998 The exhibition, which included a series of brooches, earrings and pendants begun in 1992, emphasized the signifying potential of these objects in addition to their ornamental function.
Queer Looking, Queer Acting Lesbian and Gay Vernacular 11 Oct 1997 – 16 Nov 1997 An examination of Halifax's lesbian and gay cultural production, which has had a vernacular character arising from the activist project of liberation.
Prospect 5: Proximities 14 Jun 1997 – 27 Jul 1997 Halifax painter Alisa Snyder’s suite of paintings depicts marginal landscapes: the scrubby growth at the edges of woods and residential plots.
Extended Objects 29 Mar 1997 – 2 Jun 1997 this exhibition staged the residue of artists' performances — once-mobile objects that reveal themselves in the mind of the beholder as other than what they are known empirically to be.
Kim Dawn: Legitimizing Pink (Window Box) 31 Jan 1997 – 6 Apr 1997 Kim Dawn's installation in the library vitrines combined soft sculpture and make-up to produce an effect described as "visceral ... unspeaking yet threatening."
Paintings by Peter Walker 15 Nov 1996 – 5 Jan 1997 Provoking a decidedly mixed response, this exhibition surveyed three bodies of work completed by Peter Walker since 1993.
Barbara Albert: Armour and Ornament (Window Box) 25 Oct 1996 – 15 Dec 1996 Dawn Jaya organized a thematic statement around and exquisite chain-mail jacket made by Halifax artist Barbara Albert.
Prospect 4: Glynis Humphrey — Gorge 29 May 1996 – 7 Jul 1996 Including video and installation elements that implied the bodily presence of a monstrously large woman, Gorge filled the space with conflicting suggestions of guilty excess and sensual pleasure, connected with eating and sexual repression.
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.
Prospect 3: Mongrel Moods Video by Dorain Henderson 17 Feb 1996 – 24 Mar 1996 A 21-minute tape that confronts the intimate illusion of home video with a poetically controlled vision of family dissolution.
Necessity: 21 Years of Collecting at the Mount 17 Feb 1996 – 24 Mar 1996 A selection of works reflecting the varieties of necessity that have shaped MSVU Art Gallery's acquisition program and the cultural communities it represents.
Prospect 2: Kelly Mark Works 15 Jul 1995 – 3 Sep 1995 This exhibition recreated the utilitarian space of the artist’s live-in studio, suggesting references to work as task and the concept of "a work."
Alex Colville: Selected Drawings 15 Jul 1995 – 20 Aug 1995 The exhibition afforded insights into Alex Colville's process of planning his paintings, revealing uses of point-of-view and scenic blocking reminiscent of cinema.