Atlantic Canada in brief (exhibitions).

Fall 1997

We're here, we're Queer, we're coming to a gallery near you. The muted lesbian and gay presence within Atlantic visual arts becomes more vocal this fall. After Steve Reinke shows his fagboy magnum opus, "The Hundred Videos," at Halifax's eyelevelgallery, Gallery Connexion in Fredericton presents "VHS - Very Homo Show," a programme of Queer video selected by R. M. Vaughan (Oct.23-26). At the same time, the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick, exhibits "Corpus Hermeticum," printmaker Dan O'Neill's meditation on AIDS and other aspects of mortality (Sept.12-Oct.26) and I curate twenty-five years of Halifax activist Queer culture for the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, in "Queer Looking, Queer Acting: Lesbian and Gay Vernacular" (Oct.11-Nov.16).

The same galleries are engaging other issues of identity and representation this fall. Women artists consider the body at Gallery Connexion in "Re-Presenting Ourselves" (Nov.7-Dec.5), whose opening coincides with the conference of CRIAW, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. The Owens exhibits "ReViewing the Mosaic: Canadian Video Artists Speaking Through Race" (Sept.1-Oct.19), organized by the Mendel Art Gallery, while Mount Saint Vincent honours African-American artist Romare Bearden, whose career ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s civil rights movement, in "The Painted Sounds of Romare Bearden" (Aug.30-Sept.28).

Eliza Griffiths examines and subverts the dynamics of sexual voyeurism in "Peep: Beyond the Eye of the Beholder" (Sept.12-Oct.4) at Struts Gallery in Sackville, where Mark Laliberte's "Pillow Scenes" mixes audio with photography and installation (Oct.10-Nov.4). Struts and the Owens have chosen another Anne Murray lyric as the title of their second international symposium of performance art, "So High That I Could Almost See Eternity" (Nov.10-16). The first one was titled "You Put Me High (Upon a Pedastal)."

The Owens takes a critical look at landscape in "Before the Land, Behind the Camera," from the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (Oct.31-Dec.7). Photographs of landscape interventions are the focus of "Work, workers, works: Rearranging the Land," curated by Susan Gibson Garvey for the Dalhousie Art Gallery (Oct.9-Nov.23). Dalhousie shows "Hymn to the Sun: Jack Bush Early Works 1929-1956," complemented by a small selection of Bush's later works and recent abstractions by Cliff Eyland (Aug.23-Oct. 5). John Murchie at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, presents "Working Papers: Have a Good Time," his survey of contemporary Nova Scotia works on paper (Sept.13-Nov.16). The Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador presents works by Christopher Pratt on the theme of "The Boat" (Aug.29-Jan.4), while Saint Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in Antigonish features the dark, dreamlike realism of Edward Huner in "Between Expectation and Observation" (Oct.7-31). The University College of Cape Breton in Sydney and Halifax's Khyber Centre for the Arts both move to new facilities this fall.