Get to the Anna Leonowens Gallery on Granville Street to catch a group exhibition from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design students. Knock Knock is a collective show of the work of all 23 students in the two-year Masters of Fine Arts program at NSCAD, and it’s on now until Dec 14 in all three galleries of the Anna.
This show, a survey of the artists and works being made within the two-year MFA program, happens around this time every year. Kate Walchuk is the exhibitions coordinator of the Anna Leonowens Gallery Systems and has helped with several MFA group shows over the years.
“A really exciting part that I look forward to is that, typically, every medium and every department is represented,” says Walchuk. “In the current show, there’s painting, sculpture, drawing, but then also video installation, audio, ceramics, textiles and jewelry. It runs the gamut of what NSCAD has to offer.”
Walchuk says that within the variety of works shown in Knock Knock, there’s “a big focus on the hand and things made by hand again, including video installations. There’s a level of craftsmanship that I’m seeing a return to.” She says that after a few years off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the campus was shut down, “people are appreciating being in the studio and doing things in real life.”
MFA students Nour El Sabeh, who has charcoal drawings in Knock Knock, and textile artist Liam MacAloney (watch for his hand-dyed, hand-knit vest) helped curate their peers’ creations by making decisions about what would go where across the three galleries within the Anna. They collaborated with the other 21 exhibiting MFA artists to plan and install the show. “The whole program is about that experiential opportunity of installing your own work,” says Walchuk, “of getting out of the studio and into the public eye, and being entirely tasked with mounting your own work.” The students had 26 hours to do the installation, from Sunday Dec 1 at 10am until the show’s opening reception Monday Dec 2 at 5:30pm.
“I think the work that you see in the MFA group show really speaks to the program’s rigour,” says Walchuk. “I’m looking at this amazing ceramic tree right now, and that is just blowing my mind.”
El Sabeh and MacAloney worked to coordinate the exhibition design of the group show and curate how to display works beside each other across the three gallery room spaces. “Not all the works were necessarily speaking to the same thing or coming from the same place, but they were in conversation with each other,” says MacAloney on deciding the show’s layout. “We tried to make it so that each gallery had things around it that it could converse with, but also a little bit of diversity in what it was around, or what it was facing to make sure that it was not all the same but still somehow coming together as a group.”
When El Sabeh and MacAloney volunteered to curate the show, they were tasked with coming up with a cue they could present to their peers that could be used to focus the show’s submissions, one that would be both open to interpretation and meaningful. They pitched three concepts to their classes as options, “hoping they would pick one,” says MacAloney. “They ended up picking all three: narratives, poems and patterns, as the words used to connect works or relate to each other in different ways, but also to act separately as a little bit of inspiration.”
That’s where the title, Knock Knock, came from, says MacAloney. It was the suggestion of another MFA student because it references a knocking on the door, for the concept of home; the set-up for a “knock knock joke,” for the concept of narrative; and a familiar and repetitive coupling of words, for the concept of pattern.
Now that the show is installed and works are paired with lighting and each other, El Sabeh says “it feels even more intimate in how things are flowing together.”
Says MacAloney on seeing the show’s finished installation: “There are things that we didn’t necessarily expect in terms of the conversation between pieces, like sculptures with shadows that merge and create something new between them and conversations between paintings that we weren’t necessarily expecting—new things are emerging that are extremely varied across different interactions between artists.”
Both El Sabeh and MacAloney say all the works are too good to choose a favourite from, but each mentions a space in the show they’re drawn to.
“For me, gallery three has two installations there that work with projection,” says MacAloney. “Those, to me, are exciting and effective because they use projection and sound in very different ways but are somehow able to still feel connected in that space.”
Says El Sabeh, “I like galleries two and three together as different spaces that are connected through hints in works, between a light box in one room and projections in the other that force a dramatic form of lighting in both rooms—even with mediums of wall paintings. I like that experience.”
The Anna Leonowens Gallery at 1891 Granville Street is wheelchair accessible by appointment and is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 11am-5pm and Saturdays from 12-4pm. Knock Knock is showing from Tuesday Dec 3 until Saturday Dec 14.
Your visit to Knock Knock can easily lead to taking in three art shows. The new location of the NSCAD Treaty Gallery Space is right next door to the Anna on the Granville Mall, and is currently showcasing Kindred & Kindred by NSCAD undergraduate artist Gabriel MacIean until Dec 13.
To complete the triangle, head to the Khyber Centre for the Arts around the corner at 1880 Hollis Street to see its current show, Shame(less), Shame(less), Shame(less) by artists Nina Acosta Bello and Verónica Gutiérrez, which is on now until Dec 14.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.