The Bar’s in the Kitchen at Laughing My Ears Off Gallery, Halifax

By Liam O’Brien

A new gallery in Halifax’s North End appeared as if from nowhere on Google Maps on the morning of July 12th. LMEO (aka Laughing My Ears Off) was pinned to an apartment on Nora Bernard Street with an image of an invitation poster in the description. The artists behind this curious temporary enterprise were the curatorial duo Lili Maud Dobell and Éric-Olivier Thériault, recent NSCAD graduates who cleared the contents of their living and dining room to show work from nine local femme artists with strong ties to Kjipuktuk/Halifax for only a weekend.

As I arrived early Saturday evening, I was surprised at the transformation in front of me: the well decorated home I knew from previous visits was now a white cube.  The exhibition’s title, The Bar’s in the Kitchen, proved literal – the bar was in the kitchen and Maud was setting up drinks. Stepping further into the apartment, I maneuvered around a wooden pallet dividing the dining area. An overhead light normally used to illuminate shared meals now spotlighted Charlie Perry’s leaning ceramic stack of fused heads, which towered beside Fanny Desroches’s photo-portrait Sunny Side Up, whose fried egg-covered subject looked right back at me.

I stepped gingerly around Maud’s Another Leaky Vessel, a drain pipe exuding a pastel turquoise goo that curved in on itself, to circulate the living room and view the wall-mounted works, including four of Jordan Johnson’s playful abstractions, Rielle Doucette’s enchanting daydream of a painting Flamingo Field, Chelsea MacDonald’s cyanotypes of everyday objects, and Charlie Perry’s distorted, figurative Grappes.

Seeing art against the backdrop of a home brought forth references to the domestic or emphasized traditional, quotidian craft. Caitlin Secondcost’s technical textile expertise was evident through her arresting quilt with its central black stalk topped with pink tendrils reaching skywards on a deep red background surrounded by a light blue frame. Her twin dolls, clad in matching red dresses and static, embroidered expressions crowned with real human hair (which reportedly belonged to a former colleague from a construction site), sat on a shelf observing gallery goers quietly from a corner.

Chelsea MacDonald’s Bimbo, a disarmingly twee plush monkey, which upon closer inspection was made from fabric printed with an image of Betty Boop and a cartoon cat, and the words “winking laughing whistling bashful BIMBO!”, hinted at the darker nature behind friendly inanimate companions.  Maud’s Let’s Build a Big One reimagined construction material by inserting a pastel-scrawled pastoral scene onto insulation board, erupting around the brand Soprema’s elephant logo.

Charvel Rappos’s livestreamed performance Rubber Maid in Lotto Land, a feverish parody of Zoom culture, was projected onto a door on the opening night. It unfolded amidst an endless, cacophonous matrix of corporate jargon, shifting screensavers, flickering numbers, and screen-mirroring glitches – an automated warm-up routine for the non-human interface that has become central to communication in the 2020s. Placed together with the more traditional works, this new media piece drew attention to the co-existence of times evident in the domestic space of today, where smart-home and communication technologies advance alongside desires for traditional ways of making and living.

Viewing art in close proximity to neighbours, kids, parents, and friends in a home-turned-gallery elicited a plethora of aesthetic experiences, scintillating conversations, and serendipitous run-ins rarely found under the white lights of Halifax’s commercial galleries. The curators of LMEO Gallery were inspired by Joan Jonas’s recent speech at NSCAD’s 2025 graduation where she urged artists to create their own exhibition possibilities in these times of precarity. Maud and Éric were doing so to find a solution to the eternal Catch-22 of the emerging artist: you need exhibition experience to get exhibitions, but can’t get experience without one. Many Halifax galleries have a waitlist of over two years and often prioritize “established artists” over up-and-comers. For anyone wondering where to show their art, now is as good a time as ever to work from home.

Liam O’Brien is an artist living in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He is currently studying architecture at Dalhousie University.