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.”