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John Devlin’s dreams have come true. The Halifax artist’s sketches will be displayed at la Galerie Christian Berst in Paris, France until May 25th.

Devlin’s collection, titled Nova Cantabrigiensis, consists of some 300 sketches of his ideal utopian city. He says that if you spliced all the best parts of Nova Scotia and Cambridge University, the result would be Nova Cantabrigiensis.

Devlin went to Cambridge in 1979 to study theology and become a priest because he felt he had a calling. He had studied theology and architecture at T.U.N.S., arts and social sciences at Dalhousie and worked as a stock broker for two years but felt he was flailing in different directions. This was when he became interested in Christianity. He changed his religion to Catholicism and “flew off to Cambridge.”

While at Cambridge, Devlin immersed himself in his studies. Many of his days were spent reading books and essays in his room or at the library. He believes working too hard is what let him to have a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1980.

“I kinda snapped and flipped out I guess,” says Devlin. “I didn’t realize that was the end, the kibosh of my career as a student at Cambridge.” Devlin returned home to Halifax and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals until he was discharged in 1982. Later that year he began to write stories and eventually, he began to sketch.

Devlin sketched Nova Cantabrigiensis as a way to have Cambridge in his own backyard. All the best things about Cambridge without the pressure and the stress, he says.

Nova Cantabrigiensis is located in the middle of the Minas Basin not far from his parent’s summer home in Walton, on the Hants shore.

“I love it out there, but it’s so desolate, so lonely in a way, but it’s beautiful,” says Devlin.

Part of Devlin’s psychosis involved trying to find the essence of Cambridge. Though his search died a natural death as he gradually got better, the images that are currently being showcased at la Galerie Christian Berst in Paris are what have been left behind. Devlin says he feels his life can move forward in a more productive and happy way knowing that his art is being showcased.

La Galerie Christian Berst specializes exclusively in Art Brut, a form of art created by people who have suffered from mental illness and through art therapy found their way back to health. Devlin hopes his display in Paris can show people the silver lining behind mental illness.

“Just putting pen to paper and exorcising those demons, that sounds like an extreme way of putting it, but it helps immeasurably in calming the psyche,” says Devlin. He says art along with proper medication, exercise and diet is great therapy.

“By no stretch of the imagination is it a dead end to be mentally ill in Nova Scotia because there are great resources, great doctors and great people to help you get better, stay better, realize your potential and contribute to society,” says Devlin. He believes in the mental health care system in Nova Scotia.

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• Lizzy Hill
• Daniel Barrow's installation

"License and registration please."

A mountie with a hard beer gut is sauntering towards our car, pen and ticket book in hand. I can tell by the height of his fur beaver hat and purposeful stride that arguing this one is useless—I didn't even know they gave speeding tickets for $400. That's like... rent. This wasn't how we imagined starting our trip from Halifax to Massachusetts to catch MASS MoCA's largest exhibition of contemporary art, Oh, Canada (May 26-April 8). We haven't even left Halifax and group divisions are starting to rear their heads.

"Ah, it sucks we got a ticket," I tell our unhappy driver.

"Yeah, it sucks you got a ticket," echo other voices from the back seat, with the emphasis on the "you."

"It could have happened to anyone," I say—by which I mean it could have happened to me and I'll probably be next. "Don't worry—we'll all chip in."

"It couldn't have happened to anyone," mutters my little sister Sally, a fine arts student at Mount Allision University in New Brunswick, who religiously stays within 9% of the speed limit. I've just abducted my sister to come on this trip—her class just happened to be on a field trip to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and I pressured her into squeezing into a tiny little Ford Fiesta with us for the next 10 or so hours. Our group includes myself, exhibiting artist Mitchell Wiebe, local artist Aaron Weldon and the notorious dot com entrepreneur Anton E. Self who surprised us by jumping in at the last minute.

"You need to get out of Sackville. See some of these artists you're studying in school," I had said to Sally patronizingly. Perhaps I was projecting a bit—I needed to get out of Halifax and to see art by Canadian artists who I'd read about on the Internet, but whose work I haven't actually had the opportunity to lay eyes in real life. The fact that I have to travel to the US to see Canadian art is kind of weird, but a welcome change of scenery. And gauging by our outfits, it looks like we all need a vacation. Despite the fact that Massachusetts is not exactly warm in the spring, we're all dressed for California—we've got bare legs, sunglasses and gross pale Halifax toes peeking hopefully out of open-toed shoes.

Several hours and utterances of the word "recalculating" by Self's GPS robot—a British female voice we've deliriously started calling Fiona—later, we arrive at our destination, North Adams, Massachusetts, a former American mill town named, like the famous American beer, after the patriot Samuel Adams. Like many small American towns with a population of less than 14,000, North Adams was economically hit hard when abandoned by its industries in the 20th century, but unlike many small towns, an art gallery swept in to revitalize the economy. And in that part of the US, where the rich live like eccentric recluses in faux castles along the Hudson river, those words are not oxymorons.

MASS MoCA moved into the former site of an electrical research company in 1986, Sprague Electric, and since then, a smattering of restaurants and local businesses followed suit to feed tourists and art lovers from the nearby Williams College scene. It's hard to separate the Oh, Canada experience from the MASS MoCA experience itself. Situated on a sprawling complex of factory buildings and surrounded by a river that feels more like a castle moat, the gallery has transformed the eerily quiet town into a Neverland of sorts for artists.

The kind of Neverland where you find yourself sitting in a hotel hot tub with New Brunswick artist Graeme Patterson, Mitchell Wiebe and Aaron Weldon, as they make kooky noises into a tape recorder to prepare in a freestyle manner for the newest musical project that they'll perform at Toronto's Luminato Festival. The kind of Neverland that on the surface could resemble the Jersey shore—drunk girls in their undies drape themselves over broad chested men in the hot tub while shrieking. But instead of demanding pickles and other unmentionable things, the shrieking girl is shouting "The old masters! I fucking LOVE the old masters—I mean GOYA! Goya! How can you not love Goya?" And all the drunks are either art collectors or important curators.

And it was the kind of Neverland where you get kudos for being from the east coast. A man from "Upper Canada" in a suit comes up to you—as the east coast artists with you are engaged in an almost horizontal, thigh-destroying dance-off on the floor, while King Khan shouts that he doesn't know half the songs the crowd's requesting, as he gets mauled by little children with insistent musical requests whose parents are hippies who encourage that sort of thing in their five year old—and asks "You guys are from Atlantic Canada?" When you ask him how he knows, he says simply, "You guys always bring the party." A cliche statement of course, but in the moment it makes you feel incredibly proud to be Atlantic Canadian.

If you could say one thing of Oh Canada, the spirit of collaboration was in the air—the exhibition enabled creative connections to take shape in a haphazard organic way. These creative conversations weren't always intentional. In Daniel Barrow's dreamy exhibition, The Thief of Mirrors, while you pore over Barrow's surreal projections that tell the story of a bandit who steals from the rich, you can hear the strange mingling of pan flutes from Winnipeg artist Noam Gonick's nearby installation and heavy metal from Canadian expats Hadley + Maxwell's neighbouring video piece. Some have muttered that the show was too crowded, but as a viewer, I found the proximity of the works to one another dizzying and exhilarating.

Whether I was staring through holes in the walls at the fluorescent animal-human hybrids that leapt off of my friend Mitchell Wiebe's canvases or peering into the dollhouse-sized world Graeme Patterson created in his exhibition, The Mountain, entering the exhibition felt like stumbling through the looking glass; new worlds unfolded around ever turn, without chance for a breath or palate cleanse in between, leaving me feeling saturated in the best possible way.

As the party drew to a close, many were whispering in the hot tub about the fact that galleries across Canada are tentatively considering whether or not they're able and willing to cough up the funds to host this massive exhibition next year. As I find myself reminiscing about running through abandoned buildings with gallery interns and sitting on the porch of the artists' housing watching locals yell at their dogs as a gentle breeze rustles my notes, I get nostalgic pangs—I really hope the works do cross back into our borders. Canadians ought to have a chance to see the exhibition on their own soil, and to have the Oh, Canada experience, but of course a new exhibition would have to take on a drastically different character. Unless of course the local bartenders want to start free pouring, hotels want to turn a blind eye to drunk artists and journalists crashing over their fences into their pools and local restaurants want to start selling taco platters and pitchers of margaritas, which is of course all completely fine by me.

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As Laura Baker-Roberts prepares to hang her artwork for her show monotypes in Lost & Found (2383 Agricola Street), her shadowy, delicately beautiful prints are scattered on the floor of the vintage clothing store. Baker-Roberts explains these monotypes—made through a form of printmaking which uses only one sheet—are actually full of spiritual and cultural significance.

While Baker-Roberts begins to set up for the exhibit, she mentions multiple times that she is prone to get tongue-tied. “Don’t leave me,” she says to Kate Walchuk, the show curator, as Walchuk walks back to the counter.

After a careful explanation about the work though, the monotypes speak for her.

The collection of thirty prints, which Baker-Roberts’ created for a final project at NSCAD University, are meant as a starting point to get her audience thinking about issues like Canadian cultural identity, spiritual identity and colonization, something Baker-Roberts feels more comfortable articulating through her artwork.

Her influences combine of her upbringing practicing Hinduism as well as her family’s loyalist Fredericton, NB history. Baker-Roberts achieves this combination through her use of photographs of Fredericton residents in the 1990s as the foundation for her prints and using gold spraypaint in a few of the prints specifically to pay homage to “Indian spiritual deities”. “I cut up and used vintage doilies that I found. I felt weird using them because they’re overused but I also used seaweed and other found objects,” says Baker-Roberts, as she sits on the floor with the prints, spreading them out. She also uses clashing colour palettes and textures, to bring out specifics of her religious and cultural background.

Despite her embarrassment at using doilies, any uptight feeling you would associate with a doily is played down by her use of striking gold paint. In one monotype specifically they work together to symbolize a Hindu god.  “I wanted to approach colonialism from a spiritual point of view,” says Baker-Roberts. Even though the monotypes began as a school project, she says it grew into something else.

By bringing together the imagery of her colonial New Brunswick heritage with the imagery of her eastern religious upbringing, Baker-Roberts attempts to challenge ideas of what defines Canadian cultural identity. She shows how specifically for her, both her heritage and her religion work in conjunction to define her own identity, which she then actively expresses through her artwork.     

She says it’s a debate that she always has with her friends, and Baker-Roberts seems to be seeking an answer for these issues not only through her art, but through interacting with her audience.

monotypes runs to June 5.

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• Moore's "Collection of the Artist"

Steve Moore’s show If These Walls Could Talk is so personal to Moore, the audience doesn’t even need him there to explain his artwork. A series of postcard-sized quick sketches line the wall portraying different faces and bodies, all taken from Moore’s own experiences.

The cozy space of Parentheses Gallery (2180 Gottingen Street), where the exhibit is displayed, fits in perfectly with the intimate feeling of Moore’s work. The feeling is very autobiographical and the sketches act as a visual version of a diary.

The most striking painting, in the middle of the gallery, is the massive family portrait called “Collection of the Artist”. Moore depicts members of his family at different points in time (he is a small boy in the portrait himself and his mother is even younger then him), contrasts black and white figures with people depicted in colour.

Moore’s focus is on people and his sketches are imperfect—in a realistic way. He leaves faces unfinished and excessively shades to bring attention to specific features. Moore's paintings tend to jump out more than his sketches. Specifically, “Donkey” and “Doo”, as these more vibrant paintings balance out the series of sketches.