Today@Dal

2 SEPTEMBER TO 27 NOVEMBER
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY 1 SEPTEMBER AT 7 PM

Stitched Stories: The Family Quilts

CURATED BY SHAUNTAY GRANT

As a descendant of Black Loyalists, Black Refugees, and Jamaican Maroons who came to Canada during the 18th and 19th centuries, Shauntay Grant’s love of language stretches back to her storytelling roots in Nova Scotia’s historic Black communities. This exhibition features a handful of quilts selected by Grant from the heritage holdings of her family, prominently those of her grandmother, the Reverend Alfreda Smith. Grant’s own creative response to the quilts—and equally, the stories they keep—will produce a new ‘poetic patchwork’ developing inside the Gallery over the course of the exhibition.

Grant served as the City of Halifax’s third Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. A multidisciplinary artist with professional degrees and training in creative writing, music, and theatre, she publishes, performs, and teaches in several literary genres. Her homegrown artistic practice embraces African Nova Scotian folk traditions as well as contemporary approaches to literature and performance.

Considering that these quilts were stitched together both ornamentally and functionally from scraps of fabric gleaned from garments and textiles to create essential coverings to protect bodies from Nova Scotia’s harsh and wintery climate, Grant explores how the politics of textiles speaks to her ancestry and her contemporary experience of the social and political fabric of Nova Scotia.

Grant currently teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University as a Lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

The Dress: Mayann Francis and the Call to Serve

CURATED BY MAYANN FRANCIS WITH PAIGE CONNELL, ANGELA GLANZMANN,
AND GARY MARKLE

Upon the advice of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on 20 June, 2006, Governor General Michaëlle Jean appointed Mayann Francis as Nova Scotia’s 31st Lieutenant Governor, a posting that she held until 12 April, 2012. Francis was the first African Nova Scotian, and only the second woman, to serve as Nova Scotia’s Lieutenant Governor.

Reflecting back on her years of service as the Queen’s representative to the Province, Francis underscores how the garments that she wore communicated her presence and the dignity of her office. To this end, rather than purchase off-the-rack garments, Francis often actively worked with Halifax-based designer Etalier Salwa to author the appropriate silhouette, fabric choices, hats, jewellery, and accessories, to set a stylish but respectful tone for the many formal events that she was scheduled to attend in her Vice Regal capacity.

This exhibition features a selection of Francis’ favourite garments that were hand made for annual events such as military balls, or for singular, high profile events such as her installation ceremony on 7 September, 2006, and most significantly, the Queen’s visit to Halifax in June, 2010. Francis’ personal stories interweave throughout the exhibition to highlight how the politics of fabrics and garments can also respectfully play with the politics of public events, regal positions, and pomp and circumstance.

Mayann Francis joined the Dalhousie Faculty of Management, School of Public Administration, in the fall of 2015 as its first Distinguished Public Service Fellow.

The Dalhousie Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Dartmouth Heritage Museum, Government House, and the Wolfville Historical Society.


“And yet we still remain, going around, and again,
in dominion’s plot...”

Lisa Hirmer: Dirt Piles, Landscape/Displacement

CURATED BY ANDREW HUNTER

For well over a century, the Canadian landscape has been an extensively manipulated one, dramatically transformed by industry, agriculture, and urban development, yet it continues to be read, and often labelled as, wilderness. Post-clearcut Algonquin Park, the managed forests of British Columbia and New Brunswick, the vast wheat fields of the Prairies, are all prime examples of irreversibly altered terrain layered over with a skewed narrative of nature, one that remains nailed to the wall in many exhibitions, runs through tourism promotions, and underscores populist political speech. This idea seems deeply imbedded in interpretations of the iconic landscapes of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, and their peers, descendants and followers. Unsullied terrain, a pristine untrammelled wilderness, a resilient pure nature, is believed to be still out there.

Central to this exhibition are selections from the on-going photographic series titled Dirt Piles by Guelph-based artist Lisa Hirmer. Her images capture the extracted earth of engineered building sites that loom on the fringes of new construction: heaps of exhumed soil, rock, and plant material which are left to be absorbed back into nature, and eventually become part of the ‘natural’ landscape. More than simply documenting a marginal aspect of the built environment, Hirmer’s subtle iconic framing of these fabricated features evokes the signature images of Group of Seven member Lawren S. Harris: his mountains, islands, and icebergs of the 1920-30s, paintings that project a cold, empty, unpeopled, and distant place that he believed was the real Canada, a place all true Canadians could identify with, although most would never go there.

Alongside Hirmer’s photographs, this curatorial project by Andrew Hunter, the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, presents reproductions of photographs taken by Lawren S. Harris during his trips to Canada’s Eastern Arctic, and a selection of works from Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection, including historical images of landscape and the built environment, as well as several stark, minimal process paintings by Gerald Ferguson. Seen together, these seemingly disparate representations question our notions of nature, wilderness, and the iconic North, and challenge the mythic narratives we adhere to of the enduring, unchanging landscape.