From the tartan to the Canadian flag, Raven Davis’s latest project is taking time-honoured Canadian symbols and challenging their place. Through gallery pieces and public performances, the 2-Spirit Indigenous multidisciplinary artist is creating a critique of Canada’s 150 festivities, The De-Celebration of Canada. By highlighting everyday reminders of colonization–such as the noon cannon at the […]
New Art
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New Art 2017: Where I work: Emily Lawrence
Graduating from NSCAD this April, Emily Lawrence’s grad exhibition at Anna Leonowens Gallery, Hodgepodge, showed colourful soft sculptures creating a dreamscape that you might enter after a particularly indulgent buffet of party food, capped off with Ricola-flavoured cotton candy. A creator of “scrumptious and playful work,” Lawrence’s multi-sensory experiences are funny, fresh and endlessly charming. […]
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New Art 2017: Geneviève Brideau
Je vous emmène Opening Feb 10, 5:30pm, performance at 6pm. To Feb 21 NSCAD Port Loggia Gallery, 1107 Marginal Road “I am incredibly drawn to the way materials look,” says Montréal-born artist Geneviève Brideau, “also the way they function, how they facilitate the creation of spaces or certain activities such as sliding down smooth surfaces […]
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New Art 2017: Do you believe in magic?
Transparent Saturday, January 28, 6pm The Bridge, 5553 Bloomfield Street Kate MacDonald and Emma Paulson huddle outside a Starbucks. Sheltered from winter wind by a small alcove, they eagerly tell their story over speakerphone. They run The Magic Project, an organization dedicated to empowering Black and queer Canadians through art and photography (find them on […]
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New Art 2017: Camila Salcedo
For two hours a performance has been unfolding inside the Anna Leonowens Gallery. A figure rotating within a wooden framework, deftly turning turmeric-coloured thread into a hand knitted cocoon that finally enveloped its maker. The show, Present Ground, took place in December 2016. The performer, and co-curator of the show, was Venezuelan-Canadian artist Camila Salcedo. […]
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New Art 2017: Steven Zuo goes into the abstract
Surfaces and Subtleties Vicky Gallagher, Shelby Johnson and Steven Zuo Opening February 27 at 5:30pm To March 4 Anna Leonowens Gallery Tiandongding Zuo (you can call him Steven) doesn’t always know what art should be, but he knows what it isn’t. It’s not the rigourous, literal recreation of things—like painting bowls of fruit or posing […]
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How does your garden grow?
It takes decades for a tall tree to grow, but Laura Jean Forrester managed to put together a whole garden in just two months. When we spoke to Forrester for the New Art issue in January, the NSCAD grad had just moved back to Halifax from Lunenburg. She’d been set to create a new body […]
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New Art: Kyle Alden Martens
Kyle Alden Martens is standing in front of me in his studio, holding up a short sleeve turtleneck that’s covered in tiny pockets. Each pocket contains a miniature blue teddy bear—the kind you’d get from a coin-operated machine in an arcade when you were a kid. “I’m loosely referencing Operation, the game where you take […]
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New Art: Frankie Macaulay
“I like to go into nature and hike with my camera, and shoot nature as it is,” says photographer Frankie Macaulay (BFA 2015). “On the other end of the spectrum, I like to shoot urban environments and manipulate what we see through composite images and digital collage work, to create a fiction.” For the last […]
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New Art: Aylan Couchie
“In 2013, I realized that I loved sculpture and I started looking at my close relationship with my grandfather, who was a woodworker and welder. He was also a residential school survivor, and I started developing a narrative around that,” says Anishnaabe artist Aylan Couchie, from Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. “Around then, the […]
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New Art: Raghed Charabaty
“I left Lebanon being very distant from Arabic culture,” says 20-year-old filmmaker Raghed (Ray) Charabaty, who moved to Halifax from the mountains outside of Beirut to study film and art at NSCAD in 2012. “I wanted to focus on this new person I could be. “Until I realized that you need to go back to […]
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Our 2015 New Art issue is here
A small sampling of some fresh local art brains. FYI: Galleries are a great place to warm up and provide just enough inspiration to coast on until the spring. Click here for the full feature.