ART + DESIGN – Visual Arts News – Summer 2019

Jordan Bennett, Artist was known, Mi’kmaq, Nova Scotia, Chair Back Panel, Porcupine quill, birchbark, root, Private Collection. Photo: Steve Farmer.

COVER PROFILE: Jordan Bennett’s Ketu’elmita’jik/ They want to go home by Carrie Allison

ART + DESIGN

Design and art speak are how we orient, re-orient and situate ourselves in a place and time—who we are, how we live, and what we find meaning in. As art and design speak to imagination, the role of the artist is to speak to the realties, politics, and aspirations of our time.

Cover artist Jordan Bennett illustrates the impact design and art have on one another in Ketu’elmita’jik/ They want to go home, fusing ancestral and contemporary art and design. Logan MacDonald’s intersectional exhibition speaks to kinship through multidimensional identities. Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist surveys elements of design for a cutting and playful analysis of mass production.

The Museum of Longing and Failure, maintained by Chloe Lewis and Andrew Taggart (of Lewis and Taggart), blurs borders of art, design and architecture as viewers are invited to meditate on shape, form, and how they relate to longing and failure. Philippa Jones meditates on the ecology of grief through elements of art and design, while Poet Tanya Davis offers us a poem to contemplate connectedness, belonging, artistic practice, and why sometimes you have to move away to know who you really are.

Throughout this issue are themes of collaboration, generations, and home which represent and reflect this relationship between art and design.

Other Highlights include:

Review: D’Arcy Wilson’s The Memorialist by Kathleen Higgins
Q & A: Pleasure is Both Powerful & Holy with Carmel Farahbakhsh & Camae Ayewa by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Review: Letitia Fraser’s Mommay’s Patches by Erin Riehl
Feature: Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist: You Are Not Here by Geordie Miller
Poetry: Tanya Davis’ This Small Town
Review: The Hidden & Recovered Figures of Jen E. Norton’s Slipstream by Sally Wolchyn-Raab
Review: All These In-betweens, Logan MacDonald by Kate Lahey

Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Fountain Mist, stock photography, found objects and 3D models, IKEA BESTÅ series, spring clamps, Pre-Columbian objects, Bonsai tree, printed vinyl, paint. Photo: Roger Smith, 2019.

Check out our EXHIBITION LISTINGS to see what’s on now across the Atlantic region.

ABOUT VISUAL ARTS NEWS
Every issue of Visual Arts News includes engaging exhibition reviews, artist profiles and in-depth features on issues facing arts professionals across Atlantic Canada. As one of the oldest cultural publications in Canada, it is a well-trusted source of information for readers with a passion for its thriving visual arts scene.