Most people, whether they realize it or not, have a relationship to architecture. We inhabit space and move through buildings, houses, apartments, and cities. Most people have a connection to art. The relationship between architecture and art is intrinsic, and the environment plays a significant role. Where we live affects how we live, and, in turn, shapes our creative sensibility and our artistic output. 

Monica Adair, co-founder of Acre Architects in New Brunswick, believes architecture is central to our everyday lives, and is in constant relation to community and the art world. She offers deeper insight into this connectivity and how it affects art on the East Coast in "Atlantic Art-chitecture."

Artists, writers, and architects often move to low-income parts of the city to sustain their lives and practice. Inevitably, building companies buy the affordable housing and gentrify the neighbourhood, forcing artists our of their studios and homes. "Relocation by 'Renoviction'," explores the decline of artist studios in Halifax's North End. 

In 1976, PEI saw The Ark, a world-renowned project illustrating the need to create more sustainable housing in the wake of the energy crisis, stressing our ecological impact on the environment. The exhibition "Living Lightly on the Earth: Building an Ark for Prince Edward Island, 1974-76," at Beaverbrook Art Gallery, is now more pertinent than ever before. 

How we live is just as important as where we live. Our lives are not renewable resources. Architecture and art teach us we are finite, and so is the land we live on and the air we breathe.

Whether it's a touch-based approach to interacting with the landscape, or using land as material, the connection to land as material is central to this issue of Visual Arts News.

Billy Gauthier's Saunituinnaulungitotluni / Byond Bone showcases his carving work in stone, whale baleen, caribou antler, and mammoth ivory in the Inuk artist and activist's first mig-career retrospective at The Rooms in St. John's. Gauthier's conection to the land is intrinsic to his work, and being gestures to this reciprocal relationship with the land as the artist honours the material. 

Saint John-based KC Wilcox's work speaks to environmental concerns, and urban nature sites specifically, and how they are part of our collective and community responsibility. Wilcox's work focuses the lost purpose of a material world (fallen trees, a broken bird wing, a loose brick), object production, and how this forges our relationship with materialistic desires. 

In Halifax-based Bart Vatour's "Facts About Quaking Aspen (for Graeme and Rita)," from his forthcoming collection The Truth About Facts, he writes of the trembling deciduous trees. Vatour's poetics speak to the internal and external relationship to art as materiality and meaning. 

It is through their intimacy with the land, material engagement with the tides, stone, whale bone, reconnection to territory, and their relationship to flora and fauna, the artists remind us that everything is connected; we are all made of land and water.

Design and art speak from the inside to the outside world. They are how we orient, re-orient and situate ourselves in a place and time. Art and design are the great communicators - a visual language - of who we are, how we live, and what we find meaning in.

Cover artist Jordan Bennett, who is Mi'kmaw from Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), illustrates the impact design has on art, and art has on design in his solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, fusing ancestral and contemporary art and design. 

The Museum of Longing and Failure, maintained by Chloe Lews and Andrew Taggart, lurs borders of art, design, and architecture as viewers are invited to meditate on shape, form, and how they relate to longing and failure. 

Montreal Based Costa Rican artist, Juan Ortiz-Apuy's Fountain Mist exhibition at the Owens Gallery surveys elements of design for a cutting and playful analysis of mass production.

In Shannon Webb-Campbell's first issue as Editor of Visual Arts News, artists ask us to pay witness, and explore connections to territory—to land and responsibility. Woven throughout this issue are themes that speak to the expansiveness of community, re-telling and re-imagining relationships, and how art revisions dominate colonial attitudes and narratives. 

#callresponse is a provocative exhibition that isn't merely a reaction to reconciliation, or a catalogue of resistance, it's an on-going project which represents the fullness, vitality, and abundance of powerful Indigenous artists. Kent Monkman challenges the founding narratives of Confederation through artistic subversion. Mi'kmaq artist Nelson White's work honours ancestral truths, kinship, and combats colonial attitudes of Newfoundland and Labrador. Ned Pratt both rebels against and also honours his artistic parents Christopher Pratt, and the late Mary Pratt, exploring presence and tension. Like Pratt, cover artist Kym Greeley's paintings illustrate a different side of Newfoundland and Labrador—showing how the relationship to the island changed when the government paved the Trans-Canada Highway. Visionary of Fogo Island Arts, Zita Cobb, asks "What does art have to do with the price of fish?" focusing on society's current crisis of belonging. Also exclusive to this issue of Visual Arts News is Mi'kmaq poet Michelle Sylliboy's "Ancient Messages"—fusing the written Mi'kmaq Komqwejwi'kasikl language and photography.

The artists in this issue inspire us to examine our relationships with nature and, in turn, to better know ourselves, to explore our own unknown lands. New Zealand artist Mark Harvey critiques traditional approaches to landscape painting in his public performances. Charlotte Wilson-Hammond invites us to tune into our connection to the landscape who refers to is as “a body” itself. For artists like Susan Wood, who passed away early this year, the natural world served as a source of self-recognition and discovery. In this issue we’re reminded of how the forces of nature shape our lives as well, of the things we shed and gain as we drift through life.

Visual Arts News is dedicated to visual art in Atlantic Canada; every issue includes engaging exhibition reviews, artist profiles and in-depth features on issues facing art professionals across the province. As one of the oldest publications in Atlantic Canada, it is a well-trusted source of information for readers with a passion for its thriving visual arts scene. Written in a clear and sophisticated style by some of the most talented arts writers, Visual Arts News reflects the diversity of from our geographic and cultural communities.

In this 40th Anniversary issue of Visual Arts News there is a focus on The New Nova Scotia, where young painters like Waka Okabayashi commune with flowers, connecting with them as though they’re sentient beings; Artists pick up where their parent’s generation left off, staging their utopian dreams for living together better on this planet on Cape Breton Island; Lou Sheppard transforms the spaces between words in a diagnostic text listing criteria for gender dysphoria into bursts of dance, recoding them as queer spaces; and Ursula Johnson’s work appears like a an ad-style intervention.

In this issue of Visual Arts News, a handful of our featured artists offer fresh alternatives to the static and monolithic conceptions of identity that still linger today. The only constant when it comes to identity formation is found in continuous fluctuating moments of self-creation.

In this issue of Visual Arts News many of our featured artists exhume relics from our histories, not merely as historians or archeologists, compensating for history’s tendency of telling only the victor’s stories; they’re alchemists, reanimating and transforming lost memories buried deep within forgotten landfills of our collective consciousness.

In this issue of Visual Arts News, many of our featured artists explore the impact and potential of the communication technology we use. Artists Jordan Bennett and Ursula Johnson use smartphones as a tool to revive the Mi’kmaq language. Others critique the impact of our communication tools. Photographer Lorraine Field argues that we’ve come to view death as a sort of obsolescence - a failure of our bodies to keep pace with a plugged-in world. And Marilou Lemmons and Richard Ighby take pervasive symbols of productivity and flip them on them on heads to expose the absurdity of our output-obsessed culture.

In this issue of Visual Arts News, many of our featured artists create works that mark attempts to navigate the shifting geopolitical contexts we find ourselves embedded in, exploring themes of order and chaos and the tenuous connections between the two states.

Spring 2020 - Architecture

Fall 2019 - Landscape Materiality

Summer 2019 - Art + Design

Spring 2019: EXPANSE

Fall 2018: UNKNOWN LANDS

Summer 2018 - HATCH - 40th Anniversary Issue

Spring 2018 - Identities in Flux

Fall 2017 Rebuild

Summer 2017 Codes + Symbols

Spring 2017 - Order and Chaos

Visual Arts News is dedicated to visual art in Atlantic Canada; every issue includes engaging exhibition reviews, artist profiles and in-depth features on issues facing art professionals across the province. As one of the oldest publications in Atlantic Canada, it is a well-trusted source of information for readers with a passion for its thriving visual arts scene. Written in a clear and sophisticated style by some of the most talented arts writers, Visual Arts News reflects the diversity of from our geographic and cultural communities.

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Visual Arts News - Spring 2020 - Architecture

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