Letter from Halifax (contemporary art exhibition).

February 1999

When the weather outside is frightful, Haligonians have been huddling indoors watching video. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia showed the National Gallery's touring Canadian video survey, "Fragile Electrons" (closed Feb. 7), including lots of work from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. The Centre for Art Tapes - having moved into new digs in the CBC Radio building - mounted an ambitious exhibition of new Halifax work in the Khyber Centre for the Arts. "Crossroads" (closed Jan. 30) included media installations (incorporating video/film, audio and computers) by David Clark, Marcia Connolly, Tonia Di Risio, Gabriel Doucet Donida, Alex Grunenfelder and the Skin Group (Bonnie Baker, John Hillis, David Middleton). The doyenne of NSCAD video art, Jan Peacock, currently has two video installations at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (to April 4): Reader by the Window (1993) and Book of Chairs (1997). The latter three-channel work features the coin-operated TV-armchairs that bored travellers find in bus terminals.

One of Halifax's senior video artists has three local exhibitions coming up. "David Askevold, Cultural Geographies" at the AGNS from February 20th to April 18th includes installations based on aerial photographs of small harbours. (Terry Graff and Petra Watson curated the show for Charlottetown's Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in 1995.) Askevold will also have a solo installation at the Khyber, May 31st to June 19th. At the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, curatorial assistant Robert Zingone pairs Askevold's video Don't Eat Crow with a photo-text installation by Saskatchewan's Ellen Moffat in "Fixations" (March 6 - April 11).

Younger artists are predominating at the Mount these days. The four curators of "Style Council" (Zingone, Ingrid Jenkner, Pamela Edmonds and myself) selected work by nine, mostly younger artists - Buseje Bailey, Rachel Beach, Sym Corrigan, Jan Crick, Emily Vey Duke, Rebecca Fisk, Greg Forrest, Monica Tap and Peter Walker. The show explored style as "an art packaging paradigm, a sign of social identity, a gendered construct or a badge of fashionability" (closed Feb. 7). A cross-Canada group show of younger artists, "Lunch Money," follows from March 31st to May 2nd, curated by Toronto's Gal Inc (Kim Fullerton and Cheryl Sourkes). Amanda Schoppel has a solo exhibition of sculptural objects made from looped rubber bands in the Mount's Prospect series (April 17 - May 30). Saint Mary's University Art Gallery's director/curator Gordon Laurin is also preparing a major group show of ten younger artists, called "Warrant" (June 4 - July 4).

In "Re-make/Re-model" at the AGNS, curator Peter Dykhuis features objects assembled, re-assembled and collaged from found objects and mis-assembled model kits (Feb. 13 - April 11). In Fredericton, the Beaverbrook's curator Curtis Collins devotes a full gallery to each of three artists in "A New Brunswick Trilogy" - Philip Iverson's "Boat," Francis Coutellier's "Cartes et symboles, memoire de lieux" and Sarah Maloney's "Corpus" (to April 14). The Beaverbrook also honours an important earlier New Brunswick artist in "Paragraphs in Paint: The Second World War Art of Pegi Nicol MacLeod" (to March 31).