Funded Projects

A Handmade Assembly

Adriana Kuiper, Amanda Fauteux

This spring Struts Gallery in Sackville hosted an exciting new initiative “A Handmade Assembly”. This event acted as a forum dedicated to presentations, discussions, and workshops focusing on the current movement, and momentum surrounding the handmade and it’s connection to contemporary visual culture. With support from Culture Works MTA Fine Arts Professor Adriana Kuiper and collaborator Amanda Fauteux (MFA candidate Concordia University) were able to welcome Sarah Quinton, curator at the Textile Museum in Toronto, as keynote speaker. Quinton opened the 3 day event leading a roundtable discussion including four invited artists; Robyn Love, Ray Fenwick, Elizabeth Beleveau, and Janet Morton.

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Anime, overseas fandom and the nebulous world of international copyright

Tim Reiffenstein

Copyright and the media industries which rely on it are currently in the midst of a crisis precipitated by new forms of digital content distribution. This project investigates the phenomenon of anime fansubs - the distribution and consumption of Japanese anime that has been modified with amateur provided subtitles. While allowing fans in peripheral locations such as Atlantic Canada free access to Japanese content, fansubs are still very much illegal to produce and consume. However, our research has illuminated a continuum between convenience and authenticity along which fans consumption practices evolve. As their tastes become more sophisticated, fans develop an appreciation for the Japaneseness of anime and consequently demonstrate a greater willingness to pay for media. This finding bodes well for the social reproduction of both anime as an artform and the fan community on which it depends.

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The “Capitalism and Culture” Project

Leslie Kern

This project aims to understand how marginalized groups, at risk of displacement through gentrification, use artistic practices to generate and share alternative knowledges about everyday experiences, in order to resist mainstream narratives about “neighbourhood improvement.” In collaboration with Kim Jackson (York University), this project will document a locally-produced art show about “Capitalism and Culture” in the gentrifying Junction neighbourhood of Toronto. By analyzing the ways in which community members use art methodologies to speak back to the social, cultural and economic consequences of gentrification, we hope to find space for challenging urban injustices at the local scale.

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Paper Doll

Anne Koval (curator)

Paper Doll takes as its point of departure a little known archival collection of hand-made paper dolls and doll clothes by the poet Sylvia Plath. The exhibition provides a space for the interplay between the Plath material and the work of seven contemporary artists. Curated by Anne Koval the show includes an early short film by Cindy Sherman, a new immersive installation by Ed Pien, exquisite miniatures by Cybèle Young, large scale steel-cut dresses by Barb Hunt, the colourful embroideries of Anna Torma, an installation of cutouts by Jeannie Thib and the ephemeral paper doll chains of Lynne Yamamoto. Paper Doll will be on view at the Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, NB, from 16 September to 6 November 2011, and at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK, in the spring of 2012.

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Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada Project

Rosemary Polegato

The Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada Project created a prototype of an electronic case study which includes audio-visual information. This pilot project emerged from what I learned in the beginning stages of another project to write a series of case studies on arts and culture organizations in Atlantic Canada. During a classroom test of a case study on the Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada (ABTC), it became obvious that case studies situated in the arts and culture sector need the support of audio-visual information – movement, sound, colour, tone, and so on – not just textual information. Briefly, audio-visual material allows all students to experience what a specific arts and culture organization creates and produces, and to observe how information about their art and performances is communicated to agents and potential audience members. The result is that classroom interaction and inclusivity increases during the learning process.

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Tracing the Black Presence in Westmorland County, New Brunswick

Jennifer Harris

In the early 1960s, William Albert Trueman of Pointe de Bute recalled that Seventy-five years ago there were seven or eight Negro families in the district and a family in Fort Lawrence that I knew well. Census records demonstrate the presence of a black population in Sackvilleand Westmorland more generally as early as the 1820s, while earlier documents survive attesting to the presence of enslaved peoples in the region. This project aims to intervene in the existing historical narrative through the collection of data and archival material, as well as the documenting of material and geographic evidence from the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. In this way we invite viewers to think about residual black traces as well as unacknowledged presences in this county.

The Cumberland African Nova Scotian Association has kindly co-sponsored this proposal.

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An Intermedia, Intercultural Exploration of a Sacred Site in the Maritimes.

Marilyn Walker

As an anthropologist, I am interested in the physical and metaphysical properties of spaces and places in where ‘illumination’ occurs and which become, through time, sites of inspiration and creation. At such sites, the physical and metaphysical ‘meet’ and landscape becomes ‘enspirited’. This project looks at a site near Pugwash, Nova Scotia that was of spiritual significance to the Aboriginal People of the Maritimes. Through ceremony and ritual, the site is being re ‘membered’ as such. The site itself is an historical narrative, documenting the interaction of Aboriginal People with newcomers to the region (settlers, traders, missionaries); we extended the historical interaction and trajectory by collaboratively creating meaning to be experienced intraculturally.

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Chris Down

Recently, I have started developing a new body of work, "untitled", which uses photographs that I have produced of the New Brunswick coast as source material. This work began as a way of trying to understand a new environment and landscape as well as a new line of investigation in my practice generally. The first incarnation of the project took place at Cape Jourimain Nature Centre during the Eco-Arts Festival in September 2009. This piece was a site-specific installation on the panoramic windows of the interpretive centre, which overlook the Northumberland Strait. I intended the work to sit on the "horizon" of the vista presented by the architecture and at the same time call attention to the surface of the window and the way it functions to turn the landscape into an image. The drawing is made from adhesive vinyl and is based on an image of driftwood taken on the beach immediately below the window and is evocative of a whirlpool or hurricane. The project continues in book works which contain drawings from different sites such as Fundy National Park, Joggins, Nova Scotia and Five Islands, Nova Scotia.

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The Ova Aves Project

Thaddeus Holownia, Harry Thurston, Gay Hansen, Janine Rogers

The Ova Aves Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a scientist, a photographer, a poet and a literary critic that will be published in Quarc, which is a special issue of two collaborative literary journals, The New Quarterly and Arc. The interdisciplinary project revisits a 2003 publication by Thaddeus Holownia and Harry Thurston, the limited edition art book Ova Aves, which is a collection of Holownia’s photographs of eggs in the Mount Allison University biology collection, paired with original poems written by Thurston. In The Ova Aves Project will involve magazine reproductions of poem and photographs from the original book along with essays by Gay Hansen, biologist and curator of the Mount Allison collection of biology specimens and Janine Rogers, a literary critic. The Ova Aves Project creates an interpretative space that mixes science, art and literature.

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Marshland Radio Plumbing Project:  Electroacoustic and Oral History Aspect

Amanda Dawn Christie

The Marshland Radio Plumbing Project is an interdisciplinary project involving sculpture, photography, oral history, audio recording, electronics, performance, and site-specific interventions in the landscape related to geo-specific phenomena and folklore. This project focuses on a local phenomenon related to the Radio Canada International towers on the Tantramar marshes. Many Sackville residents report stories and rural-myths of household devices picking up and playing radio signals from the RCI towers. Older houses with copper piping sometimes catch the radio waves in the kitchen sink, as the copper piping acts as an antenna and the sink itself acts as a loud speaker. The theory and artistic exploration driving this project involves mass media and our personal relationship to invisible landscapes.

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