First You Dream: Celebrating 75 Years of
the Nova Scotia Talent Trust
To July 28
MSVU Gallery, 166 Bedford Highway
Opening reception Saturday, May 25, 2pm
A lthough she's known for two years, Lux Habrich says sometimes she still can't believe it.
At 27, Habrich is the youngest visual artist to be selected to exhibit at First You Dream: Celebrating 75 Years of the Nova Scotia Talent Trust. Originally created to fund Truro-born contralto Portia White in 1944, the Nova Scotia Talent Trust now provides scholarships to promising Nova Scotian artists across multiple disciplines.
"NSTT has had 75 years of this, so I assumed they'd have a whole bunch of artists exhibiting, not just 10. It's totally overwhelming," says Habrich.
A graduate of NSCAD, the artist's work focuses greatly on her own mixed identity, inherited trauma and cultural wisdom. Habrich says fellow exhibiting artist and former instructor Dan O'Neil has been "pivotal" for her career. "I was filled with a lot of doubt pursuing a creative [profession]. Dan is so honest," she says. "He was able to let me know what my practise was before I even knew."
Habrich will debut two installations at the exhibition—opening at the MSVU Art Gallery on May 25—one of which is a series of drawings from a first-year class with O'Neil from 2012. "I only showed them in school, they weren't featured anywhere else, and had kind of fallen to the side," she says. "And then I thought, 'You know what? I need to honour these.'"
The artist's other installation Borrowed Time, a hand-built sculpture of two feminine hands in offering, is a "reference to martyrdom… Lately I've been thinking a lot about femininity and sacrifice, general and emotional labour."
Habrich recently added an iridescent liquid coming out of the centre of the hands, to show "taking on labour, exhausting oneself." "Hands are our primary method of navigating the outside world," she says. "They're incredibly personal. Almost like a signature."
