Visual Art

There’s a sense of calm in Judy Blake’s Quiet Beauty. Perhaps it’s the mixture of the warm colours on her large pottery pieces that gives her work a deep sense of wonder and discovery. Blake cleverly uses shades of light and bright colours to contract with her neutral tones to create a soft aesthetic to […]

We’re Canadian and we’re proud. We have moose, hockey, mountains, double-doubles, the Peggys Cove Lighthouse—all those iconic (read: stereotypical) things that make your heart flutter a little when you think of our great nation. On Friday, a new art exhibit in Halifax will showcase some of that Canadian-ness, perhaps a little more artistically and a […]

This week the museum at Pier 21 will officially launch its exhibition Shaping Canada: Exploring Cultural Landscapes, which features contemporary and archival photography, oral histories, public programming and events throughout the show’s summer run. Last year staff met up with photographer Naomi Harris, a Torontonian based in New York, while Harris was travelling across the […]

If you’ve been on a bus, appeared on television or even casually passed Sara Hartland-Rowe in the streets, it’s possible your image is glossed over a canvas in her upcoming installation. The self-proclaimed people-watcher—who has an “abiding curiosity about people doing anything”—has put together two installations displaying three series of work at the Mount Saint […]

“I’ve been calling it a ‘love letter to Comic-Con,’” says the Museum of Natural History’s Jeffrey Gray. “It’s things you would usually find in a museum but squeezed into one weekend of fun.” Running in conjunction with the Out of This World costume exhibit, seen all over your Facebook feed—“There has never been this kind […]

It was more than four years ago when Denise Markonish, a curator at North Adams, Massachusetts’ gallery MASS MoCA, began to notice a funny thing. She kept finding that the artists who were piquing her interest turned out to be “secret Canadians”: artists whose work she found in various contexts and was intrigued by, who […]

When Alexandra McCurdy makes art, only a handful of every 20 attempts turn out properly. This isn’t because she is careless, or because she strives for absolute perfection. McCurdy struggles with making usable pieces because she—and only she, because her style of medium is truly unique—goes through the strenuous process of layering and weaving porcelain […]

Social networks and online media have a similar tendency to fly into rapid-fire frenzies over an announcement, drawing the attention of thousands of attentive audience members and few facts. Take last week’s mourning procession for Nocturne: Following a Metro article reporting that the city declined grant funding for the annual arts bonanza, Facebook and Twitter […]

Do you know about The Spot? The top-secret-sounding public arts space is actually much the opposite. It’s gathering place and creative nook tucked away in The Pavilion, and it’s wide open to anyone under 30 to make the most of. Here you can record music, draw, paint, sculpt, snap pictures or just sit and the […]

Agitate Educate Organise. This is the call to action that Emily Davidson has been spreading throughout the city. Posted on poles and boards, her stunning prints call on “Workingwomen, workingmen and artists” to gather at The Khyber on April 27. Though breathtakingly artful, it is as much a show of work as it is a […]

On October 5, 2011 Derrick R. Dixon bid farewell to his seven-day-old shiny new iPhone 4 after he accidentally dropped it into the toilet. Hours later the world bid farewell to the man behind his ill-fated device, Steve Jobs. And so began Dixon’s Planned Obsolescence, with a bronze cast of the departed phone, repackaged and […]