Fall 2025 Exhibitions at MSVU Art Gallery

Jude Abu Zaineh, i look to the skies. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jude Abu Zaineh: i look to the skies

September 6 – November 16, 2025
Reception: September 6, 1 – 3pm
Artist Talk and Tour: September 6, 1pm

In i look to the skies, Jude Abu Zaineh creates a sanctuary rooted in the specificity of Palestinian cultural traditions and open to the infinite expanses above. At its center is Maqlouba, a traditional dish that is always shared, an emblem of hospitality and community with great cultural and historical significance. Maqlouba anchors the work as a layered metaphor for diasporic life, where food becomes ritual, soft power, and cultural preservation, its ceremonial nature binding intimacy to sovereignty. Here, Maqlouba is an archive, a vessel for memory, and a catalyst for transformation. Abu Zaineh works across disciplines including bioart, video, sculpture, and textiles, layering methods and materials into an evolving constellation of meaning.

Within this contemplative space, patterns repeat across engraved architectural forms, textiles, glass, and wallpaper, enveloping the visitor in a language of visual rhythm and embrace. Archival videos throughout the installation, carry gestures, voices, and memories forward as acts of preservation within a landscape of erasure. Some of these patterns are cultivated in petri dishes from the remnants of Maqlouba, from foraged plants, soil, and other fragments of everyday life. In these contained microcosms, transformation, migration, and decay occur in parallel, creating a living metaphor for the shifting nature of culture and identity. The petri dish is both container and containment, a quiet stage for cycles of preservation and loss.

To look to the skies is to enact a gesture both intimate and universal: in prayer, in grief, screaming, in disbelief, in wonder. This pseudo-sanctuary invites contemplation while also confronting the realities of exile, migration, and displacement, holding space for both refuge and unraveling. This work is steeped in the tensions between comfort and disquiet, belonging and estrangement, sanctity and the secular. It carries the emotional weight of Palestinian life under colonial violence while reminding us that we all stand beneath the same celestial canopy. Abu Zaineh invites an encounter where the culturally personal and the planetary, the grounded and the infinite, exist in fragile contradictions.

About the Artist

Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working across art, food, science, and technology studies. Her work develops counter-archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, diaspora, and belonging, through de-colonial and feminist perspectives. She examines ideals of home and community influenced by her childhood and upbringing in Southwest Asia.

Abu Zaineh has received several awards including the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists, and was one of the first artists invited to participate in a collaborative residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto. She has presented her work widely, in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and throughout Europe.

Her work has been featured in VICE Arabia, on PBS and NPR, across CBC platforms, in Canadian Art and NEUES GLAS-NEW GLASS: art & architecture magazines, and on the cover of fuse, the Museum of Glass magazine.

Silas Wamsley, Lugares Bestiales (detail), 2025, oil on canvas, 183 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Prospect 20
Silas Wamsley: Ceaseless

September 6 – November 9, 2025
Reception: Saturday, September 6, 1 – 3pm
Artist Talk and Tour: September 20, 1pm

Silas Wamsley’s work is inspired by 15th century Italian Quattrocento painters whose work combines the ornamentation and iconography of Gothic era with the realism and emotional intensity of Renaissance art. Throughout this period, religious themes remained a central focus. While gilded haloes gave way to more visceral depictions of the spirit-made-flesh, the intent of such artworks—to aid worship, provide moral instruction, and glorify both Church and Empire—remained consistent.

Like these works, Wamsley’s paintings express a complex relationship between corporeal and extracorporeal notions of being. His compositionally dense canvasses depict human, and human-ish, beings in transitional states, spouting hooves and horns, vines, and thorns. Though rendered with naturalism, they hold unnatural postures as if they are suspended in time, unbounded by the laws of physics and gravity. They are adorned with ornate headwear, capes, and armor, and carry delicate, beautiful, and arcane objects with ceremonial reverence.

To be alive is to be constant contact with both the sacred and the profane.

Articulating a productive, and distinctly queer ambivalence toward distinctions between sacred and profane, body and spirit, real and symbolic, Wamsley’s work eschews the hierarchies, binaries, and fixed iconography that gave 15th century religious art its legibility. Instead, Wamsley explores how bodies, identities, and symbols are unfixed and impermanent, encouraging viewers to interpret his work (and by extension, the world) through the lens of their own embodied experience.

About the Artist

Silas Wamsley is a painter based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. His paintings are inspired by Quattrocento painters such as Carlo Crivelli and Cosmé Tura, illuminated manuscripts and surrealism. He explores themes of gender, sexuality, and spiritual practice and is informed by queer/trans studies of ecology. Through his paintings, Silas investigates new forms of embodiment, intimacy and ways of being with uncertainty.

About MSVU Art Gallery

MSVU Art Gallery (est. 1971) presents and interprets contemporary art, placing emphasis on women as cultural subjects and producers. MSVU Art Gallery promotes access to its exhibitions through publications, lectures, and educational programs. Recognizing that exhibition spaces are civic spaces, the Gallery is committed to normalizing accessible presentation practices. Admission is always free.

MSVU Art Gallery and Mount Saint Vincent University are situated on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral, unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Acknowledgements

MSVU Art Gallery thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, Halifax Regional Municipality, and Arts Nova Scotia for their support.

MSVU Art Gallery
166 Bedford Highway
Halifax, NS B3M 2J6
www.msvuart.ca
art.gallery@msvu.ca
902-457-6160

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Accessibility:
MSVU is partially accessible. For more information, Plan Your Visit on our website. Reach out to art.gallery@msvu.ca with any access requests, service needs, or inquiries.

Image Descriptions:
1. A closely-cropped, monochromatic photo-negative image of a human eye, rendered in shades of vivid sky blue.
2. A cropped detail of a figurative oil painting, depicting the head and shoulders of a nude white person, standing in front of an ornately patterned backdrop, reminiscent of Gothic church décor. Their eyes are closed, their head cast downward. On their hairless head, there is an ambiguous, bifurcated form that appears to be crafted from bones. From the back of this form, a radiant starscape emanates.