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 Schlar, 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.

OPENING RECEPTION: 6 PM FRIDAY 5 AUGUST

PUBLIC HOURS: SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12 – 6 PM OR BY APPOINTMENT

Woods to walls, and string includes a selection of drawings and sculptures that investigate connections between construction, landscape, and architecture. Working with images of her father’s construction sites, and with his left-over building materials, Garnett made the drawings and sculptures in Woods to walls, and string as components of a large installation that she will exhibit at the Owens Art Gallery and at the Confederation Centre in 2017.  That installation will transpose multiple “work” sites from Maine, New Brunswick, and Ireland into a single architectural landscape.

Opening reception: 6 PM Friday 17 June

Public hours: Saturday and Sunday 12 – 6 PM or by appointment

This two-person painting exhibition looks to the point in Early Modernism at which representation and abstraction parted ways. Clark’s round collage paintings draw from Dadaist collage in which chance encounters result in oblique meaning. Hartland-Rowe’s colour-suffused garden paintings are a search for the holistic flash of perception that happens before individual forms are recognised.

Both artists are interested in the viewer's perceptual experience. Clark's playful, language-based paintings ask the viewer to search for meaning within layered images and objects. Hartland-Rowe's work seeks to side-step language, intentionally breaking down the act of naming that tempers visual perception.

a 16mm film loop gallery installation as a part of the 10th annual

Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday 8 June at 5pm

On view during the festival, 9 to 12 June 2016, 2 to 6pm.
 

I try to capture my family’s outing in places I’ve called home, but the landmarks move and change and maybe we’re lost? The integrity of my memory is disintegrating even as my body responds to different settings in similar ways.

The Place Holder Series is inspired by dreams of mashed-up geographies and roots that seem to put themselves down everywhere I’ve lived. - Becka Barker

Becka Barker is an interdisciplinary/media artist and educator. Her studio practice investigates the interplay of language, visual information, and human movement through experimental film and animation. Her experimental film and media artwork has been exhibited in the Ottawa International Animation Festival, ExiS Seoul (winner 2007, Best International Film), Nocturne Art at Night, Images Festival, and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, as well as in many curated programs. Becka has been regular part-time faculty at NSCAD University since 2005, teaching in Intermedia, Film, Design, and Foundation programs.

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY January 29 / 6PM

HOURS: SATURDAY - SUNDAY 12 - 6 PM

Collage works by Tonia Di Risio, Cliff Eyland, Jessy Watson, Terri Whetstone and Camille Zakharia

Curated by Barbara Lounder

Collage, as an avant-garde art practice, has its origins in the turbulent times of the early twentieth century. This group exhibition features new works by artists who rework collage concepts and methods at this point in the early twenty-first century. 

Collage party Saturday February 6, 4-8 pm. BYO scissors, paper and glue. All welcome.

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY NOVEMBER 27 / 6PM

Hours: Saturday - Sunday 12 - 6 PM

On view will be a selection of work by HERMES artists.

Medium-sized works under $500.

Small works under $100.

Barbara Berry, Leah Garnett, Sara Hartland-Rowe, Barbara Lounder + Katherine Knight, Mathew Reichertz

Opening reception: Friday 7 August 6PM

Hours: Friday - Sunday 12 - 6