It’s a foggy Saturday night outside Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, and a small crowd has gathered for Vessna Perunovich’s performance, “I Hug the World and the World Hugs Me Back.” The artist is tethered to a lamppost by three long, thick bands of elastic—blood-red against her black dress and white blouse. She stands, her […]
Visual Art
Posted inArts + Music
Musical layers peeled back in Sometimes Always
The elevator doors to the third floor part, allowing multiple and intermingling sonic currents to rush down the length of the narrow corridor, flooding the carriage. Against the flow of machine and mouthed sounds, a visitor steps into a gap in the room; a breathing space to pause and get bearings before plunging into Sometimes […]
Posted inArts + Music
Secret agent at Eyelevel Gallery
The Confidante traces heavy black circles around her eyes with Halloween makeup, using the camcorder screen as a mirror. In six minutes the 22-year-old NSCAD student transitions from secret collector to secret keeper. When the transformation is complete, two thick, black lines obscure her eyes and mouth. Annik Gaudet’s first film, called Confidante, a feminine […]
Posted inArts + Music
Eyelevel Gallery turns back the calendar for anniversary show
At first glance, you’d hardly notice the change. As usual, the walls at Eyelevel are hung with interesting work—on this day it’s paintings by Mark Stebbins and Art Krauss. At the back of the gallery, the administrative staff works behind a large desk. Then you hear it. “Ka-chunk.” Gallery intern Chris Foster is busily typing […]
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AJA Silver: David Harper’s Wild things
Five bearskin rugs lie cushioned in layers of plastic bags, under a utility table in David Harper’s Almon Street studio. Only their heads are visible, stacked in a semi-circle chorus—count two tan, one brown, one white, one black. Their jaws are open and wet, shiny with vampirish fangs and pale pink tongues. What makes these […]
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Comics biz suits up for Free Comic Book Day
Calum Johnston opened Sackville Street’s Strange Adventures 17 years ago. Today it’s one of the most popular comic-book stores in Halifax. “I’ve always liked comics,” Johnston says, “and I like sharing them.” The economic downturn has flipped many businesses on their heads as they struggle to make ends meet. But as they get ready for […]
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Gut reaction
From afar, Mary-Anne Wensley’s installation, inescapable shelter glows peacefully and appears to be constructed of a thin parchment-like material. But, on further inspection, there’s a sense of the grotesque—the translucent material is actually dried pig intestine. “I struggle with the definitive ‘why’ that I work with this material,” Wensley says. “It’s almost like the material […]
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Art of living in the Khyber ICA
After seeing off a friend, Stephanie McNair walks across the freshly mopped, grey wooden floor to greet a new guest. The walls, including columns and moldings, have been dusted and painted a pristine white. High-ceilinged, the large, open space has no walls; no rooms, only the component parts of a small or studio apartment-based life […]
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Upstairs Bachelor party
Walking down Agricola on a cold January night, you might think the crowd of people and clouds of smoke behind the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty’s office is just those HCAP kids up to something again. But this crowd has come for the bachelor apartment above the office—home of the Upstairs Apartment Gallery, a monthly one-night […]
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Harbour solutions
Weird things floating in the waters of city harbours are hardly unusual, so, at first glance, photographs of Doug Guildford’s nets and other sculptural pieces bobbing in the water against the Toronto skyline might not look out of the ordinary. Guildford, a Halifax-raised artist who’s made Toronto his home for 30 years, still strongly feels […]
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Doctor Enns strips down comics
Captain America as war propaganda. Class divisions between Archie and Veronica. The secret gay life of Batman and Robin. This is a taste of the topics that are part of a new English course called Cartoons and Comics, in its third week at Dalhousie University. Some readings are taken right from the pages of Marvel, […]
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Jason Fitzpatrick’s skin city
Jason W.F. Fitzpatrick hopes to “stir things up a bit and challenge the way people think” at Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery this Saturday night, by deliberately making himself and others feel uncomfortable. Fitzpatrick talks excitedly of his plans to rig up a “floaty, kind of bouncy stage” out of pink insulation and gyprock, upon […]
