OBJECT HISTORIES: EYELEVEL PRINTED MATTER EXHIBITION
Curated by Sophia Dime
with Artist in Residence Krista Grunksy
December 2020
OBJECT HISTORIES is a decentralized exhibition of printed-matter and multiples taking place online and at three locations across Nova Scotia.
Curated by Sophia Dime
Featuring work by: Ada Denil, Alice MacLean, Amin Rehman, Arjun Lal, Brent Cleveland, Camila Salcedo, Clayton Windatt, David Clark, Elizabeth Whalley, Emily Davidson, Emma Allain, Emma Bass, Femme Art Review, Gabrielle Gallant, Jeanna Penn, Jennifer MacLatchy, Kiki Mufassa Mononoké, Krista Grunsky, Laurel Rennie, Liz Lore, Lou Shepphard, Michael Eddy, Phillip Hare, Rachel Anzalone, Rachel Reeve, Shelby Edwards, Sofia Alarcon, Terry Drahos, Undine Foulds
“Through OBJECT HISTORIES, participants are encouraged to consider these object histories and question how we interact with them. Object histories are particularly relevant in this day and age given the dramatic increase in and revitalization of used economies. This newfound interest in buying vintage is driven partially by environmental concern. The desire to repurpose and reuse stems from an urge to resist the endless cycle of mass production that is so damaging to our planet. There is also something compelling about an object that has had a past life, it speaks to a kind of a permanence and stability in a world that is so fixated on arbitrary progress and adaptation. Hannah Arendt writes, “Nowhere else [does the] thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art” (Brown 191). “
-Sophia Dime
In/Visible
by Charlotte Wilson-Hammond
October — December 2020
During the last fifty years, Charlotte Wilson-Hammond has used her body as a way of accessing the strength, sensuality, vulnerability, beauty, and now the fragility of the female form, all part of the eternal cycle of birth, growth, regeneration, and death.
In 2015, Charlotte began a new series of conté drawings and shadow photograph/print/drawings, once again using herself as the subject. In this work, Wilson-Hammond reflects on the fragility, vulnerability and yet the beauty and strength of this timeless human condition, noting that one of the most mystifying aspects of aging is that one’s presence is diminished within the general public, often to the point of invisibility.
Three years in creation, the exhibition consists of large (36 x 59 inch) drawings using photographs of Charlotte’s shadow in the landscape. After digital manipulation, the resulting images are printed on semi-transparent mylar at reduced saturation, then the entire surface is worked with coloured pencil. She thinks of Mylar as a skin, and connects its transparency to the quality of shadows.
The work connects a 50-year career of making art using the female body “as it relates to the landscape, and I view the land as a body as well, so they are connected in a very integral way,” says the artist.
Interior Migrations:
International Migrant Workers on Canadian Farmland
by Gu Xiong
July – September, 2019
This photographic installation by Gu Xiong came to us after being at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and reflects Gu’s friendships and connections to migrant workers in a way that will be familiar to our agricultural community, and which provides an extraordinary portrait of the workers who are vital to the success of Canada’s food producers.
We can’t imagine a better show to launch on Canada Day, as we explore where Canada comes from and where it is going, and who makes it work. Gu Xiong is a Chinese-Canadian Artist dedicated to migrant issues and global flows of culture, ideas, and identity. He was in residence at Ross Creek now, and was in attendance at the opening; this was his first exhibit in Nova Scotia, and we were so pleased to introduce him to our local and arts community.
The photographs in this exhibit were originally part of a major solo show designed for an opening in Gu’s hometown of Chongqing, which were rescued from destruction when the Chinese Cultural Police ordered the exhibit closed before it opened.
Ross Creek is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of Nova Scotia for their support of this program.
Kirkjufell Chromogenic print, by Ella Morton, 2010
Arrival
by Lindsay Dobbin
September — December 2019
July – September, 2019
Lindsay Dobbin presents an immersive installation of sound, poetry, and video, in this solo exhibition at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. ‘Hear water become land. And land become water. The animacy of continual transformation. My body a measure of depth. Tidal flow propelled by the impulse to move.’
Composed of works that span several years of Dobbin’s practice, centred in deep listening, the language of nature, and the Bay of Fundy. Viewers are invited to listen, from low to high tide, to a resonant wave cycle between the land and this unique body of water.
Lindsay Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Born in and belonging to the Kennebecasis River Valley, the traditional territory of the Wəlastəkwiyik, Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy, Dobbin has lived throughout Wabanaki as well as the Yukon in Kwanlin Dün territory.
Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice includes music, sound art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land and water.
This exhibit was supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Image: Body Sail (Performance, Bay of Fundy), Photo by Rob Cameron
