Exhibiting: March 2 - 31, 2019
Opening Reception: 6pm Friday, March 8th

Josh Winkler (Mahkato/Mankato, Minnesota); and Lindsay Dobbin (Kanien’kehá:ka /Acadian/Irish based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax) in collaboration with Elder Angie Joseph-Rear, Michelle Olson and Matthew Morgan (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens) and Sharon Maureen Vittrekwa (Tetlit Gwich’in citizen).

Curated by Michael McCormack.

INFO/FLOE is a project that brings together work from two methodologies of communicating with the land as archive; through listening and performance, and through synthetic reproduction of found objects. It considers the impermanence and malleability of information, language, experience and storytelling, through time-based, and print-based media. Josh Winkler, and Lindsay Dobbin have developed practices that deeply consider our relationships as stewards, protectors and active communicators with the natural environment.

This is the second iteration of this exhibition, involving a selection of works completed during the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture’s six-week Natural & Manufactured residency program in July/August of 2018. Winkler’s work emerged from a two-week hike through the Chilkoot Trail and further shorter hikes in and around Dawson City. Dobbin collaborated remotely from their home on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki (the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k or Mi’kmaq), with three Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in citizens – Elder Angie Joseph-Rear, Michelle Olson and Matthew Morgan – and one Tetlit Gwich’in citizen – Sharon Maureen Vittrekwa.

Involving participatory performance, sound, and installation, Dobbin’s work is ecocentric, using listening as wayfinding. Their work intends to deepen our relationship with the natural world, and bridge our relationships with the natural environment that have been fragmented and scattered through colonization and industrialization. Josh Winkler’s work involves in-depth research and consideration of materials that are found in the area of the Klondike, recorded and reproduced as manufactured objects. Winkler’s woodcut prints include detailed representations of the results of human interaction with the environment, and how it affects our physical relationship with the land.

Click here to see the exhibition essay by Michael McCormack. 

Hermes Gallery is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (the Mi’kmaq People). This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation for their continuous stewardship of this land, and for welcoming this project through it’s developing stages on their traditional territory, and to the staff and volunteers of the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, The Klondike Institute of Art & Culture, Parks Canada, and CFYT 106.9 FM for their support.

Josh K. Winkler is a Minnesota artist working primarily with traditional and contemporary print media. Since receiving his MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2010, Josh has been creating works on paper, running a small gallery, building a stone cabin, and exhibiting work nationally and internationally. He is currently an Associate Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minnesota. Winkler’s work stems from an interest in how humans manipulate and label the land. How time, politics, and social change alter the context of both natural and inhabited locations. By combining personal experience with historical investigation, Winkler builds layered landscape narratives to reflect on an uncomfortable disconnect between contemporary Americans and the history of the land. He utilizes a range of drawing, printmaking, and sculptural processes to facilitate these ideas.

joshkwinkler.com

Lindsay Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) – Acadian – Irish artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Born in and belonging to the Kennebecasis River Valley in New Brunswick, Dobbin has lived throughout the Maritimes as well as the Yukon Territory. Dobbin’s place-responsive practice includes music, media art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in and influenced by Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land.

lindsaydobbin.com

In Residence: February 2 - 24, 2019
Closing Reception: Friday, February 22nd at 6pm

Throughout the month of February, Hermes Gallery is hosting an artist residency with Frankie Macaulay. Macaulay will use the space to begin creating a new series of architectural paper constructions.

Viewers are welcome to visit during regular open hours and also invited to attend a closing reception at the end of the month on Friday, February 22nd starting at 6pm for a showcase of works in progress.

Frankie Macaulay is a visual artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Macaulay graduated with honours from NSCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Major in Photography.

Exhibiting: January 5 - 27, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, January 4 at 6pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, January 13th at 2pm

"Invention is the shaping spirit that re-forms fragments into new wholes"
- Jeanette Winterson from Art Objects - Imagination and Reality

Combined funding from Arts Nova Scotia in 2017 with a creation-production and a presentation grant specifically to install this project in the emergency communications hub at QE 2, enabled Arianne to claim, renovate and restyle the common function of medical materials, repurposing gloves and isolation gowns, tourniquets and sutures and in this arrangement for Hermes, complimented by pencil portraits of department personnel reproduced and toner transferred to hospital bed sheets. Pollet-Brannen gently, mindfully, elevates these new wholes into measures of time ordered into quiet containment fields arranged with caring attention, offering balanced, contemplative verses.

So there was every reason why these works should be temporarily removed from emergency medicine for presentation at Hermes, as a welcome compliment to her established profile, deciding together that this work would engage a wider appreciation of her most recent achievement. The pertinent stories carried into the gallery suggest Arianne has intentionally arranged reflective, counter balances in framed partitions, setting a sympathetic order to her working encounters.

- Dan O'Neill, curator

"Art does indeed matter, and will have its effect, especially for those working within the confines of an emergency department where tragedy, immediacy and urgency are part of the full operation of everyday life."
- Arianne Pollet-Brannen

Exhibiting: December 1 - 23, 2018
Artists’ Yak-Yak: Sunday, December 16th at 4pm with seasonal treats and eggnog

Featuring the work from Robert Bean, Barbara Berry. Thierry Delva, Peter Dykhuis, Eryn Foster, Sara Hartland-Rowe, Andrew Hunt, Chad Jagoe, Barbara Lounder, Frankie Macaulay, James MacSwain, Mathew Reichertz, Fionnuala Reynolds, Becky Welter-Nolan and Jessica Wiebe.

Exhibiting: November 3 - 25, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, November 2nd at 6pm

Exhibiting: October 6 - 28, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, October 5th at 6pm

Pushing It
Becky Welter-Nolan

Pushing It is a performative project by Becky Welter-Nolan featuring a roughly 200lb quilted soft-sculpture “boulder” entitled Rocky III, pushed uphill in true Sisyphean style. Testing the body and space through physical exertion, tension, and force, the work critiques labour and the narrative of success, navigating between endurance and
futility.

Revolution Revolution
Gillian Dykeman

Revolution Revolution is a new performance and video work by Gillian Dykeman that activates the latent radical potential of the human energy amassed through engaging fitness. Operating as a home stationary bike workout, Revolution Revolution delivers fitness instruction in tandem with revolutionary rhetoric.

Exhibiting: August 1 - 26
Closing Reception: Friday, August 24 from 4-6pm
Organized by René Boudreau, Hyla Silburt, Barbara Lounder and Peter Dykhuis

The artwork will also be on display for Park Days in Mulgrave Park on August 25 and 26.

From August 1-17, Summer Camp leaders from Mulgrave Park are using the HERMES space as a drop in destination during summer outings where their camper kids can map out where they have been, and make drawings of what they have seen and done. This will culminate in a public display and reception on Friday August 24, from 4-6 pm.

The Mulgrave Park Caring and Learning Centre was opened in 2007 by a group of concerned community members who wanted a place for people to go when they needed services and information they could not otherwise obtain. The Centre has grown to be a community hub that serves people, brings services and collaborations into the neighbourhood, and allows for children to develop through programming for parents. The Centre has a community garden, lots of social and cultural activities, and residents of all ages enjoy some great fun during the many annual celebrations. Please join us in celebrating the art made by children in the 2018 Summer Camp program.

Exhibiting: July 18 – 28, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 21, 2 - 4pm in Toronto, Ontario (401 Richmond Street West)

The Red Head Gallery in Toronto, Ontario, is pleased to present Magnetic Attraction: Modules and Components, an exhibition exchange with Hermes Gallery.

This exhibition features artwork that consists of modular components and serial objects that create single works of art or generate conversations between multiple pieces/units. At stake: how is the conceptual ‘whole’ of the installed work much larger than just the sum of its material parts?

Based in Toronto at the 401 Richmond Building, The Red Head Gallery is a professional artists’ collective comprised of seventeen members. The Red Head Gallery proposed an exchange exhibition with Hermes Gallery because the two collectives share member connections: Peter Dykhuis, Hermes member and co-director, was a member of Red Head for many years, and Leah Garnett is a current member of both collectives. In November 2017, Red Head members Jim Bourke, Jack Butler, Tonia Di Risio, Teri Donovan, Leah Garnett, Phillip Hare, Gillian Iles, Margie Kelk, Ian Mackay, Lois Schklar, Christina Sealey, Peggy Taylor Reid, Sally Thurlow, and Elaine Whittaker exhibited big / SMALL at Hermes Gallery.

For more information on The Red Head Gallery, please visit: redheadgallery.org

Opening Reception: Sunday, July 8 at 6pm
On View July 12 - 29, 2018
Artist Present 12 - 6pm, Thursday - Saturday, July 12 - 28 (except July 21)

Parsons' multifaceted interdisciplinary practice carries over into her writing where she employs a multi-genre approach to what she describes as Life Writing. During the residency, Parsons will be developing her manuscript: The Glass Is Half Full  - A story about the power we have as human beings to overcome our own suffering through connecting intimately with others.

“My goal has been to use pivotal times during my recovery to introduce gratitude as a kind of super power that we all possess. Early on in my recovery I was amazed by how small acts of kindness reshaped my perspective in profoundly impactful ways.”
– Angella Parsons

The public is invited to drop in to the gallery starting July 12th where she will be in residence on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays from 12-6pm to July 28. 

Opening Reception: Friday, 1 June 2018 at 6pm. 
Exhibiting: 2 - 24 June, 2018

Curated by Becky Welter-Nolan

In these paired solo exhibitions, emerging artists Kaashif Ghanie and Nicholas Rosin exhibit new bodies of work created during a nine-month artist residency at the Centre for Craft Nova Scotia. With different approaches both artists address issues affecting their daily lives, materializing their conflicts with a challenging society in vessel forms.

Adaption is Kaashif Ghanie’s latest body of ceramic vessels presenting an interpretation of the lived experience of Islamophobia. Ghanie magnifies traditional Islamic pottery forms and adapts their surfaces to embody the systemic discrimination against Muslims in Canada. Drawing on personal histories, these mutations and surface treatments contrast the themes of sacredness in Islam and the current sociopolitical climate impacting the Muslim community.

Kaashif (Kaas) Ghanie is a First-Generation Muslim Guyanese Canadian from London, ON based in Halifax, NS. His ceramic work engages viewers in the sociopolitical issues surrounding Muslim culture. After receiving a BFA from NSCAD University in 2015 he was an artist-in-residence in the Centre for Craft's airCRAFT program and summer residencies. He has exhibited his work at the Mary E. Black Gallery, the Craig Gallery, and the Anna Leonowens in Halifax, and has participated in Nocturne Art at Night and Antigonight festivals.

Intrigued by ironies in social norms and the impact of status anxiety in our modern world, Nicholas Rosin's practice reflects on society through a satirical lens. In Disposable Income, he questions our daily consumption and habits in a series of disposable vessels created in silver and brass. These anti-amulets illustrate the absurdity of our unconscious obsessions with these objects through Rosin's signature hand-engraved characters. With witty irony Rosin's language both critiques and empathizes with the subtle addictions many of us rely on to cope with the daily grind.

Nicholas (Nick) Rosin is an emerging metalsmith and engraver based in Halifax, NS. While earning his BFA in jewellery design and metalsmithing at NSCAD University (2015), Rosin studied hand-engraving abroad in Pforzheim, Germany, making it the primary focus of his work. Rosin has exhibited at the Mary E Black Gallery and Seeds Gallery in Halifax, and Ornamentum Gallery, NY. He is a current artist-in-residence, studio technician, course instructor, and gallery coordinator at the Centre for Craft Nova Scotia.

Closing Reception: Friday, 25 April 2018 at 6pm.
The artist will be present 12-6pm Saturdays and Sundays and by chance.

Sponsored by Becky Welter-Nolan

Behind Closed Doors is an artist residency and exhibition at Hermes Gallery by artist Erica Flake. Throughout the month of May, Hermes Gallery will be hosting an artist residency where Flake will be drawing, mapping, and creating three-dimensional photographs based on specific spaces in relation to her artistic practice.

Concurrently, Flake will exhibit a collection of urban exploration and relating food-based works from past photographic series including Sweet Tooth (2018), Crossing Over (2017), and Traces of Humanity Reprise (2015). A closing reception at the end of the month will showcase works in progress created throughout the residency.

Erica Flake is a visual artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Flake graduated from NSCAD university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a Major in Photography as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Major in Art History.

Closing reception Friday, April 27th @ 6pm
Macaulay will be at the gallery from 12 - 6pm Saturdays and Sundays and by chance.

How to Fold is an artist residency at Hermes Gallery by new member Frankie Macaulay.

Throughout the month of April, Hermes Gallery is hosting an artist residency where Macaulay will be focusing on sculptural developments and material explorations with paper.

Concurrently, Macaulay will exhibit a collection of photographic and sculptural works relating to nature and architecture including Uprooted (2017), Construction Paper (2016), Tree Versus (2015 - 2017), Paper Bark (2014) and Urban Paper (2014 - 2016).

A closing reception at the end of the month on Friday, April 27th starting at 6pm will showcase studies created during the residency.

Frankie Macaulay is a visual artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Macaulay graduated with honours from NSCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Major in Photography.

Friday 2 March, reception @ 6 PM

Sunday 11 March, discussion with the artists @ 2 PM

In drawings, images, words, and objects, Bean and Lounder present their observations of the natural history and the culture of walking in the Lake District of Cumbria, England. Being-in-the-Breathable is a multi-part collaboration considering air as our last Commons; where we breathe, gasp and expire together. In 2017, the artists presented Being-in-the-Breathable: An Annotated Walk at the Contexte Festival of Ephemeral Art in Sokolwsko, Poland. The current exhibition at Hermes is part 2 in this series, and brings together creative research, walking and art making undertaken by Bean and Lounder in the Lake District, intermittently since 1999.

Reception Friday 2 February @ 6 PM

Organized by Dan O'Neill

Every student I have ever worked with at NSCAD University is always moving toward embracing higher levels of studio independence often enrolling in Advanced, Studio and Independent studies in the later years of their visual art program. This choice is meant to test self-appointed challenges and to further develop their conceptual bearing, with multiple opportunities offered to every student to advance the space and time required to extend research, theory and practice, and to illuminate unlit recesses of production that encompass their highest aspirations to succeed. I believe that these areas of study are always focused on preparation for studio practice, post graduation.

Brent Garbett and I embarked on such a plan of action he wanted to embrace, when we agreed to an Independent study across the summer of 2016. Discussion was the mainstay of our week-to-week meetings, and I was also privileged enough to frequently observe him in action as we advanced the customary to and fro of our exchanges, both exploratory and beneficial. Garbett's devotion to his explorations, undertaken post graduation, certainly confirms his dedication and intent, and the results of his most recent accomplishments are here presented at HERMES for the benefit of the Halifax community.

Dan O'Neill

It's important for me to offer a responsive, personal experience for the viewer. Much of my work for painting is observationally based, a continuing record of capturing urban settings, those places I consider familiar territory with Halifax and Guelph being the most recent sources for this record keeping. Yet over the last two years, I've worked to break away from certain painting processes that I had previously developed, explored and extended, that I felt were beginning to become slightly restricted in being able to reveal the breadth of new approaches to examining familiar subject matter that I thought I could accomplish.

Drawing has been the activity that has best helped me address this challenge, allowing me to work more spontaneously and unconstrained. I use little preliminary planning and no form of external reference outside of memory and intuitive response. This activity allowed me to come into contact with understanding how to generate a more spontaneous and abstracted image, while also sustaining an uncomplicated approach, which I could now attend to in realizing the next stage for my painting. 

 So now I set about painting with renewed exuberance and an appreciation of having uncovered approaches and confidence with my practice of drawing and painting that now comfortably orbit and inform one another. These recent works then are the result of having made a step toward a more energized, less constrained and perhaps, a little more truthful agreement with myself to proceed.

Brent Garbett

Reception: Friday 5 January @ 6 PM

6 - 28 January

Saturday and Sunday, 12 - 6 PM

For this exhibition at Hermes, Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter take a sidestep from their public site specific installation to highlight new studio experiments. Working with improvised, handmade quilts, sound blankets, collected objects, video and sound the artists present various tests with these objects in an organized tableau.

SATURDAY + SUNDAY 12 – 6 PM

RECEPTION: FRIDAY 1 DECEMBER @ 6 PM

Featuring the work of:

Robert Bean

Barbara Berry

Peter Dykhuis

Leah Garnett

Sara Hartland-Rowe

Andrew Hunt

Adriana Kuiper

Barbara Lounder

Frankie Macaulay

Fionnuala Reynolds

Ryan Suter

4 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017

SATURDAY + SUNDAY 12 – 6 PM

RECEPTION: FRIDAY 3 NOVEMBER @ 6 PM

Based in Toronto at the 401 Richmond Building, The Red Head Gallery is a professional artists’ collective comprised of 17 members. Though primarily dedicated to exhibiting members’ works at The Red Head Gallery, the collective periodically creates a travelling group show to exhibit members’ work beyond the Greater Toronto Area, and to forge connections with other artist run collectives.

This show, big / SMALL, is such an endeavor. The Red Head Gallery proposed an exchange exhibition with HERMES Gallery because the two collectives share member connections: Peter Dykhuis, HERMES member and co-director, was a member of Red Head for many years, and Leah Garnett is a current member of both collectives. Furthermore, as a collective celebrating its 27th anniversary in 2017, Red Head was excited about working with a new collective.  Red Head is thankful for the opportunity to exhibit big / SMALL and to introduce its members to the Maritimes; and we greatly look forward to hosting a group exhibition of HERMES members in July 2018.

big / SMALL evolved from a physical constraint into a thematic framework. The collective needed to develop a show that could ship at minimal cost, a fact that restricted the weight and size of all 14 works in big / SMALL. Bound by a size limitation, each member used this condition to consider big / SMALL as a conceptual exploration. This “assignment” resulted in diverse solutions that reflect the collective’s range of practices and experiences.

big / SMALL includes works by: Jim Bourke, Jack Butler, Tonia Di Risio, Teri Donovan, Leah Garnett, Phillip Hare, Gillian Iles, Margie Kelk, Ian Mackay, Lois Schklar, Christina Sealey, Peggy Taylor Reid, Sally Thurlow, and Elaine Whittaker.

For more information on The Red Head Gallery, please visit our website: http://www.redheadgallery.org/

Opening Reception:Thursday 5 October @ 6 PM

HERMES is open to the public Saturday and Sunday 12 – 6 or by appointment.

Thierry Delva and Steven Holmes were MFA students together at NSCAD in 1992. In the years since, each has developed a career in the visual arts: Delva as a professor at NSCAD, and Holmes as a curator living and working in the US. 

25 is an exhibition that marks twenty five years of conversation and argument about art.  

Longstanding friendships between artists are not uncommon, of course: art history has many examples. These conversations can be a fundamental part of how one thinks about art and its meaning. In the case of Delva and Holmes, twenty five years of arguments have had a fundamental impact on the most basic aspects of how each sees himself: as art professionals as well as art makers.

The work in 25 is two things: it is an exhibition featuring each artist’s most recent work, and it is an exhibition of work that contains within it a quarter century of persistent and committed conversation.  In each case, 25 is offered without apology.

Delva will exhibit four bronze casts of artificial hips based on a mould taken from Delva’s own hip, the result of a prior surgical procedure.

Holmes will present photographs of contemporary burial grounds.

Chad Jagoe: New Works

Chad Jagoe is an artist, musician and woodworker living in the rolling hills of Earltown, Nova Scotia. Jagoe's paintings are abstract and sculptural in nature. They attempt to strike a balance between the technical manipulation of the wood and canvas supports, with a more playful, ‘hands-off’ approach to the application of paint.

Michael Fuller: 7 Photographs

Michael Fuller is a photographer and filmmaker based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His photographs and film work have been exhibited in Canada and the United States. This exhibit represents work from various projects over a period of fifteen years.

Reception @ 6 PM, Friday 11 August

Artist Talk @ 2 PM, Sunday 27 August

We are collectively wishing a fond farewell to Katie Belcher and Eryn Foster, members of the HERMES community, both bound for new adventures in Vancouver.

This exhibition speaks to ‘passages’ of all sorts within artists’ lives, for example: social and familial changes, professional shifts, new formal investigations or political redirections. 

Participants are:

Katie Belcher (window drawing installed on 20 August)

Barbara Berry

Peter Dykhuis

Eryn Foster

Sara Hartland-Rowe

Dan O'Neill

Mathew Reichertz + Sym Corrigan

Becky Welter-Nolan

Opening Reception: Friday, July 21: 5:30 - 7:30

Public hours:

Saturday, July 22: 12:00 - 3:00

Sunday, July 23: 1:00- 4:00

Saturday, July 29: 1:00 - 5:00

Sunday, July 30: 1:00- 5:00

Saturday, August 5: 1:00 - 5:00

Sunday, August 6: 1:00 - 5:00

Pools and Pride presents recent works by Ian Funke-McKay and Bree Hyland. Both artists share a studio in Halifax, and are focused on painting based projects. The exhibition will feature ceramics, hand-carved surfaces, collage, works on paper, and canvas.

Bree Hyland is a figurative painter located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hyland’s figures exist in a dream-like domain, invoking fragmented narratives with no obvious closure.Hyland is also the owner and creator of BARRE

www.barrestudio.ca

Ian Funke-McKay is based in Halifax. He is currently building specialized emblems, figurines, and displays that are combined for exhibition purposes. He works seasonally as a visual arts instructor at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts.

For more information about their work visit:

www.breehyland.com 

www.ianfunkemckay.com

1 – 5 PM DAILY

RECEPTION: FRIDAY 14 JULY, 7 PM

HERMES is pleased to host Cliff Eyland’s solo exhibition of 3” x 5” paintings, titled “The Queer Set,” along with a loose-leaf 12” x 18” set of boxed pages called “Opioid Wall Book.” 

States Eyland, “The ‘Queer Set’ is made up of paintings of invented imagery. I begin a figure painting without any reference to models or photography or memories. The result is often mysterious to me, as if a naked person I don’t know has just walked through my front door. I may or may not be queer, but some of my art is without doubt queer.”

“The ‘Opioid Wall Book’ consists of digital photographs made with several programs and apps that depict the often horrifying visions I had during a recent recovery from a double lung transplant, for which I was medicated with Hydromorphone, Percocet, Tramacet, Fentanyl and high doses of Prednisone.”

Eyland, a current resident of Winnipeg, is best known in Halifax for his paintings at the Halifax Central Library. His website address is www.cliffeyland.com.

Eyland will be in residence at HERMES. To arrange meetings please call 204 297-8421 or email cliff.eyland@gmail.com

OPEN: SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12:00 - 6:00 PM                                                   

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY JUNE 16 @ 5 PM

A group show of paintings and sketches by students in the NSCAD course "Abstraction and Landscape", instructed by Andrew Hunt. All work was completed on-site or derived from sketches made during outdoor excursions outside of Halifax in May and June 2017.


Emily Baron, Katelyn Bungay, Sylvia Calver, Krista Grunsky, Andrew Hunt, Katie Tasa, Nicole Williams & Ashley Wolodka

OPEN: SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12:00 - 6:00 PM                                                   

Closing Reception Saturday June 3rd @ 8 PM

Last Chants is a collection by a collective, loosely. The thread connecting these 9 artists is a shared studio hive on Agricola Street in Halifax. An established haunt of the city’s North End arts community, the Last Chance Studios have been quietly fostering, creating, rotating, anchoring and changing for the better part of a decade in the junked and dusty spaces above the Army Navy Surplus Store. This sampling of work by its current members speaks to this undetermined relation to space. What does it mean to ‘have space’? And how does that inflect a sense of ‘having place’?

Jacques Gaudet | Merle Harley | Sam Kinsley| Michael McCormack | Jesse Mitchell | Andrew Patterson | William Robinson | Lou Sheppard | Anna Taylor

Reception: Friday 7 April, 6:00 pm

Artists Talk: Saturday 22 April, 4:00 pm

Open: Saturday and Sunday 12:00 - 6:00 pm

In the exhibition entitled “Sacred Outlooks”, Barbara Berry and Ian McKinnon will show art inspired and motivated by their own personal spiritual paths and meditations.  Berry’s large scale painted, wooden constructions are based on the traditional Five Buddha Families. Each of the Buddha families embodies one of the five different aspects of enlightenment and is associated with a color, a time of day, a season and an element. McKinnon’s abstract paintings are in a theological sense icon-like; infused with the glowing colored light of stained glass, the viewers are invited to occupy the paradox of a thin and simultaneously deep space acted upon by both the created order and the Divine.

Barbara Berry was born in Denver Colorado. She earned a BFA at the Parsons School of Design in New York City and an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. After living in Boston for four years, she moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1989. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States. In addition to private collectors, her works have been purchased by the Nova Scotia Art Bank and the Canada Council Art Bank. In 2009 Berry received a Creation Grant from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture, for a project entitled “Vision/Ex’Voto”. From 2004 to 2013 she taught drawing, painting and printmaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works from her studio on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

Ian McKinnon is a Halifax based artist and educator. He has a BFA from NSCADU (1980) and a MFA from Concordia (1994.) A part-time faculty member, Ian has taught drawing at NSCADU in the Foundation Division since 2003. After course work at the Atlantic School of Theology (2005/6) Ian transferred to the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College (University of Toronto) where he completed a Master of Theology Studies (2011). His thesis, “Mutual Illumination and the Artist: Dispossession, Disinterested Love and Making Other” is an exploration of and argument for the necessity of theology and contemporary art entering a dialogue. From March 2014 to December 2016 Parish Ian was Parish Artist-in-Residence at St. Paul’s Anglican Church (Grand Parade, Halifax) where besides pursuing his own work in a studio provided by the church, he has also established an exhibition program within the church itself. His most recent cycle of paintings is titled “Fragments of Glory.” 

11 – 12 March, studio residency

18 – 19 March, studio residency, open to the public

27 March – 2 April, public exhibition

1 April, public talk @ 5 PM

1 April, reception @ 7 PM

Angela Henderson’s current project titled, New Work - secrets save me from dissolving - is an exploration of new material processes in cast concrete. Redirecting gestures and processes of Minimalism, the works visual context is formed by spatial investigations conducted within the gallery throughout the residency. secrets save me from dissolving has been conceived as a feminist gesture within the monumentalism of minimalist visual language.