Visual Art

In the summer of 1861, British-Canadian painter William Hind accompanied his explorer-brother Henry on an expedition, led by Innu guides, to the Labrador peninsula and produced a large body of work. More than 150 sketches, watercolours and paintings make up a current exhibition at Dalhousie Art Gallery, part of a citywide series of exhibitions, Creative […]

Critics in the country’s major cities always seem to be theorizing why smaller centres like Halifax and Winnipeg have thriving arts communities, despite a dearth of population and money. 
 “I don’t know the answer,” Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow says. So, who cares what Toronto big shots are saying? It’s this DIY ethos that characterizes […]

There are elements of David Askevold’s video and photographic work that make people uneasy. They evoke a sense of arriving during the aftermath of a crime, or an accident. You’re not sure what happened, but there’s residue. Take one of the cibachrome prints from Askevold’s well-known series, “The Pit:” ghostly figures linger in a backyard, […]

The typical image of an art collector tends to involve a suit, bags of money and a large flashy house to exhibit a collection. But many art enthusiasts, as well as artists, don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a single piece. These days, more and more artists are working to sell art to […]

Marlene MacCallum and David Morrish share more than exhibition space at Dalhousie Art Gallery. The married Corner Brook artists are experts in photogravure, an intaglio printmaking process, born in the 1800s, where images are etched into a copper plate then printed by hand. A form of photo-reproduction, the prints have amazingly rich, supple tones and […]

Looking at art is a kind of reading. An artwork may be an easy read, simply a piece of t-shirt wit and nothing more. Or a work with an easy first read may stand up to years of study. A work may be written (read: painted, cast, printed and so on) in a foreign or […]

Lucas Ridgeway is the bear-suited man you may have seen around town. OK, so he’s not literally running around dressed in fur, but if you’ve seen paintings of a little guy in a bear suit, you’ve seen some of Ridgeway’s work. The bear-suited man, as he calls it, is Ridgeway’s fuzzy mascot, a self-portrait of […]

On the drawing table, amid the inking brushes, pencils and sketches of zombies about to be diced to pieces by a machete-wielding young girl, is a pink and black Power Puff Girls pencil case. A self-proclaimed action/urban adventure geek, local comic artist Faith Erin Hicks isn’t much into typically girly things. But she says her […]

Metal lives, right here and right around the world. The music in all its forms, including death metal, spans the globe and links people through a powerful sense of community, a worldview and way of life. Toronto artist David Poolman understands this well. “I came to underground metal through the hardcore scene in the mid-’80s,” […]

Almost everyone knows of Lewis Car-roll and his fictional Alice. Most people have read (or seen) Alice’s hysterical and nonsensical adventures in the fantastical world of Wonderland, where rabbits carry pocket watches, caterpillars puff on hookahs and nibbling cake will make a person grow to nine feet tall. Less familiar are the real Alice Liddell, […]

At the opening reception for his solo show at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, internationally acclaimed, contemporary Atlantic Canadian ceramist Léopold Foulem stood in front of the puzzled crowd defending his ceramics as art. “Shouldn’t a teapot be able to hold tea?” asked a woman near the back. “Yeah, they do have a purpose. […]