Past Exhibitions: 2004

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Les Enfants Terribles

15 October to 28 November
Opening: Friday, 15 October at 6:00 pm

Montreal-based artist Susan G. Scott’s narrative paintings and drawings in this exhibition use Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles as a point of departure. For over twenty years, Scott’s figurative paintings have examined the body language that acts as an unwritten text for social contracts, and her subjects’ often semi-conscious awareness of transgressing these contracts. For this exhibition, which is organized and circulated by the Galerie McClure / Centre des arts visuels in Montreal, Scott sketches figures directly on the wall in relation to previously painted canvases.

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Susan Scott
Girl with Tongue Out
detail from artist's sketchbook

at play (sculpture and drawings by Stephen Schofield)

15 October to 28 November
Opening: Friday, 15 October at 6:00 pm

Curated by Ian McKinnon, this exhibition presents a selection of Montreal-based artist Stephen Schofield’s sculptural works and drawings. Ambiguous, playful and often sensuously surreal, they deal with oppositions — now and then, inside and outside, presence and absence, innocence and knowledge, strength and vulnerability — in relation to the body as a sexual and aesthetic subjectivity. McKinnon’s informative catalogue essay examines four selected groupings of Schofield’s past and present studio production.

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Stephen Schofield
Anonima Fluffy 2003
ceramic
22.0 X 48.0 X 30.0 cm
photo: Paul Litherland

Paul Griffin: Signs

13 August to 3 October
Opening Reception 12 August at 8:00 pm

Large, spare, black and white images by New Brunswick-based photographer Paul Griffin centre on that ubiquitous symbol of urban commercialism: the advertising billboard. However, Griffin’s billboards and oddly-shaped signs are blank — either viewed from behind or lacking their usual advertising content, they become gesticulating silhouettes communicating in a strange post-industrial language. At first seeming empty and forlorn, these images hold our attention through their formal elegance and subtle poetic resonances. The accompanying catalogue features an essay by photographer and NSCAD professor Robert Bean. This exhibition is presented as part of “Photopolis” the Halifax-wide festival of photography taking place in September and October 2004.

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The Gallery is also one of three sites hosting the exhibition Future Perfect, curated by Robert Bean for the Centre for Art Tapes. Excerpts from Stan Denniston’s video installation Five Minutes of Geological Time will be on display in the Gallery’s Reading Room from 14 September to 2 October. This exhibition is also presented as part of PHOTOPOLIS II, the Halifax -wide festival of photography

Paul Griffin
Black Triangle
dye-coupler prints on aluminum
111.8 x 111.8

Godzilla vs. Skateboarders: Skateboarding as a
critique of social spaces

13 August to 3 October
Opening Reception 12 August at 8:00 pm

This intriguing exhibition examines “skateboarding as a means to critique architecture, social spaces and the values constituted by those spaces,” according to curator Anthony Kiendl. Mixed-media installations, drawings, models, photographs and video works by artists such as Mowry Baden, Aaron Carpenter, Fastwürms and Sandee Moore (to name a few) explore the culture and practice of skateboarding as a performing, critical art, one which “speaks its meanings... through urban actions.” The exhibition has been organized and circulated by the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina.

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Mowry Baden
Toy Amenity 1992
black and white photograph

Atlantica: the View from Away

13 May to 4 July
Opening: Wednesday, 12 May at 7:00pm

This exhibition features an unprecedented gathering of paintings by artists who came to the Atlantic region in the first half of the twentieth century to paint, and who were either significantly transformed by the experience or had significant influence on others. Works by well-known artists such as Lawren S. Harris, Marsden Hartley, A. Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Rockwell Kent, J. E. H. MacDonald and Stanley Royle are presented alongside works by those perhaps less familiar, such as George Pepper, Kathleen Daly, Elizabeth Nutt and Henry Rosenberg, who also came “from away” to paint in the Maritimes, and left their mark here. Paintings have been loaned from major collections across North America, including the Sobey Collection and the National Gallery of Canada. The fully-illustrated catalogue includes an essay by Jeffrey Spalding that reconsiders the significance of the work done in this place and period and its contribution to the development of Canadian art. This exhibition has been organized as the final major event in the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s 50th Anniversary program.

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Paul Bernhardt: The Alien Shore

13 May to 4 July
Opening: Wednesday, 12 May at 7:00pm

These unusual mixed-media paintings on steel by Halifax-based emerging artist Paul Bernhardt explore the tension between various oppositions: image and surface, beauty and toxicity, abstraction and figuration. Landscape references emerge from the the richly-worked steel surfaces, on which the artist has used abrasive tools, rusting and patinating agents, as well as oil, tar and enamel. Viewers are both attracted and repelled by the resultant works and their layered implications.

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les films d’Acadie

13 May to 4 July

In honour of this summer’s Congrès Mondial d’Acadie, a special selection of films by Acadian filmmakers such as Phil Comeau and Herménégilde Chiasson will be on continuous play at video stations in the Gallery.

Six Centuries of Printmaking

12 March to 2 May
Opening: Thursday, 11 March at 8:00 pm

Three related exhibitions explore a range of historic and contemporary printmaking preoccupations and techniques, and together include over 150 prints selected from the permanent collection of the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Among the woodcuts, etchings and engravings in Early Renaissance to Early Modern European Prints are works by Wolgemuth, Schongauer, Dürer, Piranesi, Goya, Corot, Manet, Daumier, Whistler and Kollwitz; the Richard and Jocelyn Raymond Canadian Graphic Art Collection specifically focuses on works by Canadian artists from the early 20th century known for their contributions to printmaking, including Buller, Holgate, Hutchinson, Phillips, Schaeffer, and Shelton, to name a few. The largest section, Modern and Contemporary Prints from North America includes lithographs and serigraphs by abstractionists such as Hurtubise, Motherwell, Riopelle, Tousignant and Town, figurative etchings by Scherman, Priest and Porter, and serigraphs by Maritime realists Colville, Pratt and Savage, as well as monoprints, stonecuts, and relief prints. A brochure with commentaries by Dan O’Neill and David Armstrong (artists who teach in the Printmaking Department at NSCAD University), as well as lectures, panels and other events, will accompany this fascinating “print extravaganza”.

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Stanley Royle
Cornfield Near Hartland, New Brunswick
c. 1941
oil on board
40.1 x 50.5
Gift of Ronald J. Hesler
Collection: Owens Art Gallery

Paul Bernhardt
Alien Shore #1 2003
tar, oil and enamel paints and
patinating agents on steel
99.1 x 121.9
Collection of the Artist

Rita Letendre
Romir 1979
serigraph on BFK Rives paper
48.4 x 68.5
Gift of Mr. Levitt, Toronto, 1993

Walter J. Phillips
Dugout n.d.
woodcut on paper, 9 x 13
Richard and Jocelyn Raymond Canadian Graphic Art Collection, 1991

Theodore Wan

16 January to 29 February
Opening: Thursday 15 January at 8:00 pm
Curator Christine Conley will be present to give a guided tour at the opening.

The Guest Curator of this exhibition, Ottawa-based art historian Dr. Christine Conley, comments “Theodore Wan’s reputation as an intriguing photo-conceptual artist was secured in the late 1970s by a remarkable series of medical photographs that played on the ambivalent status of the photograph as art object and illustration. These technically precise and accurate stagings of medical procedures, carried out at the Dalhousie Medical School and Dental School, doubled as a kind of self-portraiture, with Wan in the position of the patient... In the 1970s Wan opened a gallery in Vancouver called Main Exit, and developed a commercial practice that fed his fascination with performance, narcissistic spectacle, and exotic dancing—riding a fine line between art and everyday life. None of this latter activity was shown in the art world before Wan’s untimely death from cancer in 1987. This nationally touring exhibition is an opportunity to revisit a practice that resounds with contemporary artists’ interest in the visual regimes of science and medicine, and to see photographs, documents and videos from the archives of the Vancouver Art Gallery that have never been shown before.” The exhibition has been organized by the Dalhousie Art Gallery with artworks loaned from the Vancouver Art Gallery and major funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts. A parallel exhibition focusing on Wan memorabilia and offering a second computer station for exploring the archive will be at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD, from 6-17 January.

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Arthur Handy: New Work

16 January to 29 February
Opening: Thursday 15 January at 8:00 pm

This elegant, expressive group of thirteen drawings in oilbar on mylar is the latest manifestation of Arthur Handy’s decades-long, continuing engagement with the propositions of formal abstraction. Handy has pursued a diverse career as a visual artist, exploring the technical and aesthetic potential of ceramics, painting and sculpture. Artist-teacher Ron Shuebrook has written an illuminating catalogue essay that locates Handy’s career within the context of North American artistic preoccupations of the twentieth century, where abstract art, jazz, and formal criticality intersect. He writes, “Most recently [Handy] has chosen to reflect on drawing as the integration of critical thought, perceptual judgement, physical performance, and evocative materiality.” Curated by Susan Gibson Garvey, the exhibition is presented in the Scrymgeour Gallery. The artist will discuss his work in a public presentation on Thursday, 29 January at 8:00 pm.

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Theodore Wan
I did it...in just 10 minutes! 1976
silver gelatin prints and relief print on paper, 35.5 x 35.5
Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund

Arthur Handy
#6 '03
Oilbar on mylar, 4' x 4'
Collection of the artist