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Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving 17 Mar 2018 – 20 May 2018 The title of the exhibition is also the title of a new video installation named after the translation of Hupfield’s mother’s Anishinaabe name. The video documents a performance by the artist and her siblings in Parry Sound, an event re-enacted with a smaller cast at each tour venue.
Tove Storch: Sculpture 25 Feb 2017 – 9 Apr 2017 The new work proposed by Storch engages with the gallery’s two-storey architecture, deploying a forest of narrow metal rods to span the distance between floor and ceiling with an effect similar to that of a drawing. It incorporates the formal paradox typical of Storch’s sculpture, wherein the physical concreteness of the elements belies the optical variability of their appearance.
Bridget Moser: Is this thing on? 3 Jun 2015 – 16 Aug 2015 Toronto-based performance and video artist Bridget Moser employs strategies associated with experimental theatre, performance art, modern dance, and prop comedy. Moser writes and acts out fragmented texts, combining language with everyday materials, which are used as props, and audio excerpts pulled from popular culture.
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.
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.
Terms of Engagement: Averns, feldman-kiss, Stimson 18 Jan 2014 – 9 Mar 2014 The Canadian Forces Artists Program was founded in 2001, as an opportunity for artists to address the complex relationships between culture and conflict. {I}Terms of Engagement{/I} includes works by three “embedded” artists: Dick Averns (posted to the Middle East, 2009), nichola feldman-kiss (posted to Sudan, 2011) and Adrian Stimson (posted to Afghanistan, 2010). All of the artists work in lens-based media (photography and video) and sculpture. Stimson, a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, incorporates traditional ceremonial materials, razor wire and painting in his installations
The Art Bank in the 21st Century 17 Aug 2013 – 10 Nov 2013 Founded in 1972, the Canada Council Art Bank purchases contemporary art and rents it to federal government offices. Among the aims of the Art Bank are the support of Canadian artists through purchases, broadening the audience for contemporary art, and representing the national visual imagination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Diane Landry: The Defibrillators 16 Jan 2010 – 14 Mar 2010 Over the past twenty years, Québec artist Diane Landry has produced a body of playful works inspired by the insignificant gestures and objects that make up our daily existence. Combining cultural and popular imagery, she takes pleasure in swinging between reality and an imaginary, poetic world on the edge of the absurd.
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.
For Example (Butler, Clark Espinal, Gerken) 14 Feb 2009 – 5 Apr 2009 For Example (Butler, Clark Espinal, Gerken) is the third instalment in a series curated by Micah Lexier specially for the MSVU Art Gallery mezzanine space. In keeping with the idea of the sample, each installation includes works by three artists in three separate, identical vitrines, highlighting the potential for individuality within a context of uniformity.
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.
Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven 5 Apr 2008 – 1 Jun 2008 An interest in everyday moments and time-filling activity is mixed in Mark’s work with deadpan humour and self-deprecatory purpose.
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.
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.
Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky 25 Aug 2007 – 30 Sep 2007 The collaborative Vancouver artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are specialists in transposition of everyday objects into curiously evacuated versions of themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Elspeth Pratt: Hang-ups 7 Aug 2004 – 17 Oct 2004 Elspeth Pratt is known for her inventive use of building supplies and her interest in leisure as it correlates with the built environment.
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.
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.
Lecture Notes 14 Jan 2004 – 29 Feb 2004 With works in various media by Michael Fernandes, Rainer Ganahl, Mike Hein, Suzy Lake, John Marriott, Lani Maestro and Adrian Piper, this exhibition has plenty to say about the giving and receiving of lectures.
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.
Blind Stairs 15 Mar 2003 – 4 May 2003 Including works dating from the early 1980s to the present, each artist in this exhibition incorporates traces of other persons (who may or may not be artists) in her production, thereby avoiding the tendency of solo retrospectives to separate artistic authorship from historical context.
Like a Candle (Window Box) 8 Feb 2003 – 27 Apr 2003 This exhibition features an edition of wax figures (with wicks) of Princess Diana, fabricated by Halifax artist Catherine Jones.
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.
Gambler 2 Nov 2002 – 14 Dec 2002 Colette Urban's interactive sculpture, Gambler, which consists of an 8 x 8-foot table heaped with pieces from second-hand puzzles, is set up to allow individuals and groups to play the game of puzzle.
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."
In Another Place, Part I Lily Markiewicz: Promise II 6 Jul 2002 – 18 Aug 2002 This work incorporates photographs on light-sensitive paper, recorded sound, and video installed in a dimly lit space ...with the unflinching eye of the goldfish observing our every movement.
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.
Queer Commodity 7 Mar 2002 – 28 Apr 2002 Hijacking and inverting the codes of "gay window advertising," this exhibition was composed of amusing counter-commodities and style-saturated posturings, installed as a slightly tawdry boutique.
Laurel Woodcock: Take Me I’m Yours 2 Mar 2002 – 14 Apr 2002 Sometimes described as "sentimental conceptualism," Woodcock's new media installations integrate technical effects with intellectual and emotional content.
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.
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.
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.
Fugit Hora: Rubbings from Puritan Gravestones (Window Box) 15 Nov 2000 – 25 Feb 2001 These rubbings were done in the 1970s by Dr. Nancy Chesworth (Mount Saint Vincent University Tourism & Hospitality Management), in Massachusetts graveyards.
Twisted 26 Apr 2000 – 25 Jun 2000 This exhibition included works by three Haligonians who deploy spirals from cosmological, mathematical and biological perspectives.
Skinjobs 13 Aug 1999 – 3 Oct 1999 Skinjobs included works in various media by Canadian artists who confront societal norms by means of grotesque, uncanny and monstrous distortions.
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
Lunch Money 31 Mar 1999 – 2 May 1999 To demonstrate how artmaking counteracts the effects of privation, the Toronto-based curators Kim Fullerton and Cheryl Sourkes made an exhibition of works by young artists from Vancouver, Saskatoon, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax.
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.
In Absentia 7 Mar 1998 – 17 May 1998 Composed of loans and works from the MSVU collection, this exhibition surveyed feminist approaches to autobiographical narrative.
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."
Comme les jours précédents, les géographies du transitoire 21 Sep 1996 – 3 Nov 1996 By accentuating MSVU Art Gallery's resemblance to a port shed, this installation by sisters Suzanne and Claire Paquet prompted viewers to experience it as scene rather than place.
After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen 11 Nov 1995 – 7 Jan 1996 This exhibition included more than 30 works completed since 1988 by leading "unofficial" Russian artists who, like their Western avant-garde counterparts, work in photographic, textile and performance-based media.
Contingent 19 Sep 1995 – 29 Oct 1995 This exhibition placed the work of two contemporary Canadian women in the context of American postminimal art making of the 1960s and ’70s.
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."