Letter from Halifax.

May 1998

If I haven't written for a while, it's not for lack of news but because things have been so breathlessly busy. We're having our own Cultural Revolution in Halifax. The Long March toward a provincial arts council finally bore fruit about a year ago and people are adjusting to the novelty of having a second source of arm's-length public funding. Then last fall we had the campaign of the big posters.

The Dalhousie Art Gallery led the charge with giant bills for a travelling retrospective of early Jack Bush paintings from the Art Gallery of Algoma. I was reminded of exhibition posters I'd seen last summer all over Venice - which is perhaps what inspired Dalhousie curator Sue Gibson Garvey to plaster hers on hoardings throughout the downtown. A show that I curated at Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, "Carl Zimmerman: Lost Hamilton Landmarks," produced one of the more elegant posters of the season, which has lingered on a lot of office walls. The most provocative intervention in the urban visual field was a poster from the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia that was art in its own right. Stephen Clayton Ellwood's reversible poster for the group exhibition "Working Papers" featured a celestial starscape on one side and on the other an original text piece with rows of enigmatic phrases that could be strung together, wallpaper fashion, in nearly infinite combinations. "Working Papers" was the first exhibition at the AGNS to show the distinctive hand of associate curator John Murchie. The range of works on paper was too diffuse and eclectic for some tastes, but I enjoyed his selection of recent NSCAD grads like Ellwood, Lucy Pullen, Charmaine Wheatley and Mitch Wiebe.

For the first time that I can remember, the local cultural scene feels hectic. During a nutrition break between Monday press conferences, I heard Marie Palmer (recently returned from Babylonian captivity in Ottawa to coordinate the provincial election strategy of the Nova Scotia Cultural Network) comment to Megan Williams of Canadian Heritage that things seemed awfully busy just now. "Marie," said Megan, "you've been away too long. It's always like this." As I write, the national curatorial community is in town for "Contested Practices: A Symposium on Contemporary Curating." The three-day symposium, organized by the Independent Curators Group with support from the Atlantic Provinces Art Gallery Association, is a movable feast, with sessions at five different local galleries. Other than Vancouver, I can't think of another community in Canada where relations among local curators, both institutional and independent, are as collegial. Symposium visitors can see "Marcel Duchamp: Dustballs & Readymades, etc..." at the AGNS (to Apr 19) and "Trames de Memoire," curated by Renee Baert, at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (to Apr 26). Saint Mary's is showing new work by local sculptors Thierry Delva, Dennis Gill and John Greer, in "Manifest" (to 29 Mar), while Susan Gibson Garvey's "Theatrum Mundi: The 1997 Marion McCain Atlantic Art Exhibition," from the Beaverbrook Museum in Fredericton, is at Dalhousie until May 10. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as the Chairman would say; let a thousand schools of thought contend.