Artist-in-Residence AGNS Yarmouth Anselm Kiefer - Art Gallery of ...

Up Home
written by Shauntay Grant, illustrated by Susan Tooke
April 18 - June 14th
North Preston is one of our country’s largest and most important
African Canadian communities. writer, musician, and broadcaster,
Shauntay Grant has written a rich and celebratory poem about
North Preston and her memories of growing Up Home. The book
is beautifully illustrated by artist Susan Tooke who modeled
Shauntay’s characters from people she met in the community. The
original (acrylic on Arches watercolour paper 140 lb. cold press)
paintings created for the book will be exhibited in the education
Gallery at AGNS from April to June and will then begin a
provincial tour with the Black Cultural Centre where they will
remain on view for the summer.
It is true that we do not know who we are until we know where
we came from. we should be encouraged to share our favourite
memories of our childhood days in our own communities. To this
end, and to complement the celebration of this important
publication, the Black Cultural Centre, the Nova Scotia Department
of education, and AGNS will partner in a series of writing and
art workshops for young people in the North Preston area and at the
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, around the notion of their own Up Home.
Please check our website www.artgalleryofnovascotia.ca for event
and programming details. �
Katherine Knight, Buoy, (detail), 2005
Forces of Nature
April 11- May 31, 2009
water in an art gallery is a dangerous thing and as the spring thaw
approached, a hard decision had to be made: as Nature couldn’t be
trusted to stay out of our Gallery spaces, the exhibition of historical
prints, paintings and decorative arts from the National Gallery,
Lord Dalhousie: Patron and Collector had to be postponed. well,
if Nature was going to be so present in the Art Gallery, it became
clear that it must be on display. In Forces of Nature, an exhibition
designed to be waterproof, four video works, drawn primarily from
the Gallery’s permanent collection, examine artists’ relationships to
the natural world.
David Askevold, Katherine Knight, emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby,
along with Kelly Richardson have created works of art that explore
mediation, danger, and seduction in both natural and constructed
land and seascapes.
David Askevold’s meditative projection, Latrajarg (The Cliff),
follows seagulls gliding in a wind current, and provides an exploration
of figure and ground. In this early video work Askevold
creates a contemplative work of art, delighting in the sea, light
and motion created by the birds against sea. In the same way,
Katherine Knight layers sound and video in a hypnotic nautical
portrait in her work Buoy. Beacons to sailors, the buoys of Knight’s
work call to us, their mournful cries almost swallowed by the
ever-present sound of the ocean. Knight photographed these
buoys in Caribou Harbour, near Pictou, NS, but as the three
channel video work bobs, dips and ebbs before your eyes, the
scene transcends place and makes a mariner of any viewer. emily
Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby delve the highs and lows of
human nature in their most recent work, Beauty Plus Pity. Their
exploration of innocence, good and evil and the human relationship
to the natural world is offered in compiled vignettes and
animated stories told through a varied cast, including hunters,
young children, and God. In Kelly Richardson’s Twilight avenger, an
eerie green glow engulfs a stag in a twinkling forest landscape…
or perhaps that glow is emanating from the stag. That constructed
tension is part of the compelling mystery of Richardson’s work.
Richardson has digitally manipulated this bucolic scene, adding
twilight, mist, the hoot of owls to trees and grass from different
forests. She blurs the real and the surreal, allowing an uneasy
vision of forest life.
Sarah fillmore
Chief Curator and Curator of exhibitions
ART GALLERY OF NOVA SCOTIA
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