8 Canadian artists (exhibition).

Metro Hockey Centre, Halifax

Surely one of the shortest exhibitions ever, "8 Canadian Artists" took place in Halifax's Metro Centre Hockey arena for two hours on the afternoon of March 17. The exhibition included sculptors Thierry Delva, David Diviney, Greg Forrest, Erling Thor Valsson Klingenberg, Geoff Long, James Matthews and Cindy Yip, as well as work by exhibition organiser Kent Senecal, who described the show as an "attempt to give non-mainstream Canadian artwork public validity by bringing it into a legitimate Canadian headspace - the institution of hockey." But Senecal's statements seem, among other things, to be boisterous guff when we consider that two of the eight artists were not Canadian, all the artists in the exhibition are currently students or instructors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the only people outside of the local art community who saw the show were Metro Centre staff. What we are left with, however, is the memory of an arresting site-specific exhibition of sculptural works.

From the handwritten "exhibition inside" note stuck on the steel doors of the huge Metro Centre's back entrance, the exhibition operated in deliberate counterpoint to the scale of the site. Many of the artists used the scale of their pieces to position their work as commodities, marginal to the spectacular exhibition context; the rink, usually seen (by non-athletes) on TV or from a seat in the stands, felt unnaturally large when one stood on the ice itself. Kent Senecal's four-inch plastic glow-in-the-dark wolfman was surrounded by a thirty foot octagonal stanchion. With his fists in the air, this tiny junk store icon of primal rage accentuated the scale of the arena. Cindy Yip adopted a similar strategy, pitting a porcelain figurine of an old Chinese angler, the kind one might find in a Chinatown variety store, against the immensity of the ice. The little figure stood at the edge of a patch of kitchen linoleum - an installation that spun somewhere between identity art and current discourse around domesticity and the lived environment. As if on some prehistoric glacier, David Diviney's mounted coyote stood on its plaque, baying silently across the blue line with its unnaturally shiny plastic tongue and eyes - the displaced hunting trophy, creating an eerie atmosphere of simulation.

Several feet behind Diviney's coyote stood a perfect replica - minus strings and hardware - of AC/DC lead guitarist Angus Young's guitar. The ultimate arena rock band, AC/DC is a group that can be represented by a single icon in the way that Warhol (and Pop Art in general) can be represented by a Campbell's soup can. A shiny, beautifully useless piece of wood, Greg Forrest's guitar piece held its own in the arena with surprising authority, perhaps because it negotiated the exhibition's contextual shift with particular boldness and subtlety. With its silence, its matter-of-fact placement on a guitar stand and its aura of inverted power, it was a monument that resonated with its surroundings.