LAB 5.3: Multitasker Megan Dickie

Megan Dickie worked with the Art Gallery’s Collections Department to create Multitasker. She says “I had imagined that the employees performed orderly, precise tasks, walked around with white gloves all day and fantasized about their favourite object in the collection. I soon found out that working in the Collections Department was about working.” After interviewing…

Takao Tanabe

Experience land, sea and sky as painted by the internationally renowned Vancouver Island artist and Governor General award-winner Takao Tanabe. His expansive and gorgeous landscape paintings employ a sense of quiet atmosphere and formidable size to create an awe-inspiring vision of the West coast and Canadian country.

As a recipient of the Order of BC in…

The Discerning Eye

The George & Lola Kidd Collection, Part 2

Following the death of our good friend George P. Kidd last summer, we were informed that the Gallery would be a major beneficiary of his estate. In effect, George has left us the single most important bequest ? in number and quality of works of art ? in the history of our institution. Further, he…

Faces: Character & Wisdom in Shiwan Ceramic Sculpture

Even though the ceramics in this exhibition are from only a single collection, they present quite a wide range of subject matter, shapes, glazes and styles of China’s Shiwan art pottery.  
 
Shiwan ceramics play a significant role in understanding the culture of the Guangdong people (Cantonese) of south China.  To a large extent, this pottery…

The Sobey Award Touring Exhibition 2004

Scotiabank presents the Sobey Award Touring Exhibition 2004

The Gallery is extremely pleased to welcome works from Canada’s top emerging artists and finalists of the Sobey Art Foundation’s Sobey Art Award….

General Idea Editions

Organized and circulated by the Blackwood Gallery, this exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of General Idea’s editions to tour across Canada and internationally. Having come to international attention for their incisive interventions in the contemporary media environment, General Idea perfected the principle of inhabiting forms of media and contemporary culture and bending them to…

The Mr. Peanut Mayorality Campaign of 1974

One of the most persistent challenges for artists during the twentieth century has been to locate a fertile meeting ground between art and the everyday, where the artist can function as an artist uncompromised, and where the art is not so removed from our daily lives. Between 1969 and 1974, Vancouver artist Vincent Trasov assumed…

LAB 5.1: Graeme Patterson The Games Room

Halifax based artist Graeme Patterson creates a multimedia installation comprised of stop-animation and electronic sculpture for his exploration of pre-digital gaming culture. Originally from Saskatchewan, Patterson comments, “Within the last few months I have found myself in small towns and cities participating in activities such as bowling, ping-pong, and darts with family members and friends….

Tradition & Innovation

The Art of Meiji Japan

During the Edo or Tokugawa period (1615-1868), the shoguns closed Japan off from the rest of the world. When the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in 1853 with his famed ‘black ships? outfitted with their superior weaponry, he forced Japan to open its ports and the Japanese quickly realized how far behind the rest…