Past Exhibitions: 2003

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Exhibitions 2004
Exhibitions 2002
Exhibitions 2001

The 50th Annual Student, Staff, Faculty and Alumni Exhibition

28 November to 21 December
Opening reception: Thursday, 27 November 8 pm
Opening Remarks by Dalhousie University President Tom Traves

An unbroken tradition for 50 years! Our annual celebration of the creativity of students, staff, faculty and alumni of Dalhousie and King’s College, in painting, graphic art, photography, mixed media, video, sculpture and crafts welcomes your artwork for this exhibition, which makes no distinction between amateurs and professionals. Up to 3 entries per person will be accepted during regular Gallery hours, between 4 and 23 November. Pick up your entry form after mid-October at the Gallery’s front desk. Let’s make this the best ever community exhibition!

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Paul Doucette: Views of Dalhousie

28 November to 21 December
Opening reception: Thursday, 27 November 8 pm

This small exhibition of works by Nova Scotian photographer Paul Doucette has been selected as part of our 50th Anniversary celebratory programming. Doucette’s elegant black and white prints draw attention to architectural features of the Dalhousie campus that many of us pass by daily with hardly a glance. Through the subtle use of light, close-ups and cropping, Doucette creates formally beautiful images that encourage us to contemplate familiar views as if for the first time.

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SSFA 2002
presentation by
Dalhousie Theatre students

Search and Rescue

17 October to 16 November
Opening Reception: Thursday, 16 October at 8pm
Artist Presentations and Catalog Launch: Thursday, 13 November at 8pm

The phrase Search and Rescue conjures notions of salvage, of being adrift or temporarily lost, of effort in the face of unknown difficulties.

These installations, video and performance works by (mostly) recent graduates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design reflect an aesthetic attitude that rejects permanence and the heroic artistic gesture in favour of the immediate, provisional and personal. Most of the artists have claimed and altered the typically white, unadorned spaces of the gallery using materials and methods associated with movements such as Arte Povera and Fluxus - works may be constructed out of found objects, scraps of paper or fabric, or everyday items literally brought in from their homes. There is much gathering and sorting (of materials, ideas, personae); there is marking and carving of territory; there is also a certain yearning for the secret refuges and daydreams of childhood; and, in the construction of identities, histories, and relationships (fictional or true), there is both audacity and vulnerability. Artists include Tashia Friesen, Andréa Lalonde, Larissa Muzzy, Spencer Ramsay, Valerie Salez, and Grentak (Greg Reynolds and C.A. Swintak). Curated by the basement collective.

Read Sean Flinn's article in the Dalhousie Alumni Magazine.

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Valerie Salez
Passing Time, 2002
charcoal on vintage wallpaper

AbEx to PoMo (by way of Nova Scotia)

8 August to 5 October

In 1953, the year that the Dalhousie Art Gallery was officially named, Abstract Expressionism was in full swing throughout North America. 50 years later, despite perennial announcements of its demise, painting has demonstrated the capacity to reinvent itself again and again, and remains a force to be reckoned with in the protean world of Post-Modernism. This exhibition presents paintings, both figurative and abstract, produced by Canadian artists and acquired for the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection during the last 50 years. Works by artists of significance to this region, in particular to Nova Scotia, take their place alongside artists of national and international significance, among them paintings by Jack Bush, John Clark, Cliff Eyland, Gerald Ferguson, Carol Fraser, Alfred Pellan, William Perehudoff, Christopher Pratt, Susan Scott, Ron Shuebrook, Monica Tap.

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Arctic Visions
Inuit Art from the Permanent Collection

8 August to 5 October

Animal and human spirits frequently intermingle in the Inuit world view, where material appearance can dissolve and change in an instant into the manifestation of a spiritual being. The Gallery’s small but well-focused Inuit art collection of sculptures and prints has been acquired largely through gifts from Dalhousie alumni and friends. Notable among these works are a delightful greenstone bear by Pauta Saila (who is renowned for dancing bears), Towkee Maniapik’s Spirit, carved from a ale vertebra, Kenojouak’s striking stonecut print Blue Owl,and the rugged and monumental grey soapstone sculpture Mother and Child by John Kavik.

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TYE of Cape Dorset
Autumn Bird, 1969
stone cut print on paper, ed. 34/50
66.0 x 102.0
Purchase, 1970
Collection of the Dalhousie Art Gallery

Matter/Flesh/Spirit/Ground
An overview of the video work of Wendy Geller

8 August to 5 October
Opening 7 August 8:00 pm

Curator Jim McSwain writes that the late Wendy Geller's video work “encompasses a voice and structure that strips away the habits and politeness that shield us from the forces of nature, and the hierarchies of power that suffuse western society. In her humorous satire, her feminist sensibility revels in critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the role(s) of actresses within the Hollywood star system. However, Geller's voice finds its most multilayered synthesis in her series Stories for the Garden. In these pieces, her anxiety concerning the body is articulated through the dread and ecstasy of nature's consuming cycle of birth and death, as she constructs an allegorical journey that wins through to a fragile wisdom. These themes, sometimes raw, at times lyrical, connect the viewer to an artist whose creative energy sought to illuminate the human condition. "

This exhibition is organized by the Centre for Art Tapes in collaboration with Dalhousie Art Gallery; the catalogue includes an essay by Dr. Jayne Wark. (New Media Gallery)

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Wendy Geller
video still from Jill Skinner - Diary of a Star, 1985

GOYA
Los Proverbios: Marvels and Monsters

23 May to 6 July
opening reception: Thursday, 22 May, 8 pm.

The great, late-eighteenth-century Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes is famous for his court portraits and his monumental print series The Disasters of War. Less well-known, and created towards the end of the artist’s turbulent life, Los Proverbios is Goya’s most ambiguous series of etchings and aquatints, presenting the human condition as a series of “disparates” or follies. No-one escapes the artist’s ironic gaze — not the church, the gentry, the military, the poor — victim and victimizer alike are scrutinized in eighteen compelling vignettes. The bold, highly contrasting pictorial structure of these prints (often dark, massive figures looming in the foreground against minimal background information) echoes and intensifies Goya’s stark view of his subject-matter. Yet, despite their clarity of form and vision, these images are the most diffcult of all Goya’s works to interpret in a socio-political sense, and have prompted much discussion as to their intended meanings. The works have been loaned from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (gift of the Robert Tanenbaum Family Trust 1999). The texts accompanying the exhibition are in Spanish, French and English. (Scrymgeour Gallery)

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Dualities
Contemporary works from the Permanent Collection

23 May to 6 July
opening reception: Thursday, 22 May, 8 pm.

Double entendres, contradictions, twins, paradoxes, mirrorings — any instance of knowledge or expression can conjure a parallel or opposite: on the one hand this, on the other that. Without contrast, visual form loses much of its point and pleasure, and qualitative measurements lose their meaning. While religious or socio-political conflicts are seldom truly reconcilable, dialectical argument challenges our deep convictions and refines our thinking. The works in this exhibition represent dualities either in physical fact (they are actual pairs) or in their dialectical content — or both.

Curator Susan Gibson Garvey has selected sculpture, painting, prints, photography, fibre and mixed media works by Canadian artists Abraham Anghik, Ned Bear, Bruce Campbell, Lyn Carter, John Clark, Marlene Creates, Nancy Edell, Art Green, John Greer, Gerald Ferguson, Alex Livingston, Guy Montpetit, Richard Mueller, and Marina Stewart from the Gallery’s permanent collection. Often in a state of oscillation or tension, these works invite us to consider the idea of duality on many levels, from the purely visual to the social and political.

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Alex Livingston
Water and Land Paintings (Series 2)
2001-02 (detail)
acrylic on canvas
18 parts, 81.2 x 203.2 overall
Purchased with matching funds from the Canada Council for the Arts
Acquisition Assistance Program, 2003

Ned Bear
Sug-a-lug-bet (one who does not listen)
and Kisu-westu Won-nee-aah-kin (he who speaks from the head) 1997
Purchased with matching funds from the Canada Council for the Arts
Acquisition Assistance Program, 1999

Walk Ways

21 March to 11 May 2003

Curator Stuart Horodner wrote that the exhibition Walk Ways "brings together a selection of works by a diverse group of artists who have focused on the theme of walking, a purposeful or meandering activity that unites bodily and mental freedom. Walking in cities may be understood in sociopolitical terms, with references to tourism, commuting, surveillance or the Situationist dérive (a mode of attentive city walking). In the rural environment, the focus shifts to explorations of leisure, pilgrimage and interactions with nature..." Among the 17 internationally exhibiting artists in this exhibition were Hamish Fulton, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Mowray Baden, Francis Alÿs and Nancy Spero. The works reflected the artists' hybrid sensibilities, combining drawing, painting, photography, installation, video, performance and documentation. Informed by their own physical experience, as well as by rich examples from literature and art history, they focused on "the walk" as a means of commenting on human agency, politics, geography and history. This unusual touring exhibition was organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

and

Michael Fernandes
Performance and installations

In conjunction with the exhibition Walk Ways, the familiar but elusive Halifax artist Michael Fernandes presented two small installations, Hannah and Sinatra, and a live performance, Writing anywhere on anything, which was ongoing for the duration of the exhibition.

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The Prints of Betty Goodwin

17 January to 2 March 2003

Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, this exhibition surveyed the printmaking work of prominent Canadian artist Betty Goodwin, from her early figurative etchings and wood block prints, through her well-known iconic vest series, to her latest printmaking experiments. Throughout her career Goodwin has mixed traditional printing techniques and materials with a variety of unconventional methods, often combining several processes in one print. The resultant works include traces of embossed objects, transparent "x-rayed" garments, or notes with stamped text, collage and scraps of tape. The discarded objects that Goodwin uses (pop cans, bits of twine, various articles of clothing such as unpaired work gloves, shirts and hats) are transformed into provocative images of displacement and loss. In the accompanying fully-illustrated exhibition publication, curator Rosemarie Tovell traces Goodwin's formative influences and provides a valuable catalogue raisonné of her printmaking oeuvre.

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The Rise and Fall

an installation by Shelley Miller

24 January to 2 March 2003

Montreal-based artist Shelley Miller transformed the ceiling of the New Media Gallery using hand-carved aluminum cake pans. Reminiscent of traditional tin ceilings, this installation took on the appearance of an ornate vaulted ceiling more common to a Romanesque cathedral. For the last few years, Miller has been transforming everyday domestic materials (especially culinary items) into elegant and often monumental forms. Her installation also referenced home decorating trends where consumers substitute hand-crafted ornamental architectural fixtures with mass-produced imitations easily purchased at local home improvement stores. Miller presented a slide talk about her work at the opening reception for this exhibition.

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