Local artist channels Alex Colville to re-create frame for original painting in his style
Local artist Robert Lyon started noticing and admiring the work of Alex Colville as a kid leafing through art books. These days he’s paying very close attention to Colville’s style and technique, but not so much when it comes to painting. Instead, Lyon has been interested in how Colville created the frames that surround his paintings. Lyon was commissioned by the Owens Art Gallery to re-create a frame for a Colville painting that has been missing its artist-created frame since sometime in the 1980s.
Emily Falvey says the Owens originally borrowed Alex Colville’s painting Nude and Dummy from the New Brunswick Museum for an exhibition that opens October 29 called Room for One. “When it came from the museum, it was in a frame that was added later,” says Falvey. “People don’t often think about preserving the frame on a work, but when it’s made by the artist, it’s very important.”
When they saw the non-original frame, Falvey and Owens conservator Jane Tisdale wondered if they could replace it with a frame that replicated one Colville would have made himself. Tisdale thought of local artist Robert Lyon for the job. “She knew he was an artist and that he made his own frames,” says Falvey, “and she thought that was a really nice parallel.”… Continue
Calling all Duck Decoy Paint Portraits: time to migrate home
As the Owens Art Gallery gets ready to show a retrospective of Sackville-based artist John Murchie’s work in January, they are putting out a call for help. The gallery is hoping to round up and reunite Murchies’ series of nearly 100 works known as Duck Decoy Paint Portraits.
Murchie started the series in 1998, says Owens director/curator Emily Falvey. “I’m not sure if he’s finished it yet,” she says. “He’s still making them.”
Falvey is excited to be putting together the Murchie retrospective for January. “Not that many people have seen his work because he’s very quiet about it,” says Falvey. “We’re really excited to finally have this retrospective show because he’s been making art for 50 plus years. So it’s gonna be good.”
All Duck Decoy Paint Portraits are “more or less the same,” says Falvey, with the same bright yellow colour and sculptural duck decoy silhouettes made from dried paint. The works stand alone, but are also part of a larger series concept. “The idea was that he would make these paintings and sort of put them out into the world. And then, at a time in the future, he would try to bring them all back together as a sort of a way to complete the work,” says Falvey. “So we’re trying to do that, to see how many we can get back.”… Continue
Film Society opens another fall season Thursday with a Leonard Cohen biopic, ‘Hallelujah’
The story of a one-inch tall shell named Marcel. Documentaries exploring the musical lives of Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and the little-known women of electronic music. An animated feature inspired by the life of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, and a fiery love story told through archival footage shot by late volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Plus feature films telling stories of inter-dimensional ruptures, three thousand year old genies, and the fate of a factory in a small Spanish town (starring the likes of Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Michelle Yeoh, and Javier Bardem.)
It’s all packed into the new fall season of the Sackville Film Society, opening this Thursday at the Vogue Cinema in downtown Sackville.
The Sackville Film Society has been a stalwart of the local cultural scene for decades, even continuing to offer programming through difficult early pandemic years. CHMA called up director Thaddeus Holownia to ask what’s new:
After two years operating on a seasons pass system, the Society will be opening its box office for individual ticket sales, in addition to offering full season and six-pack passes.
“We’re cautiously going to reopen the box office, under guidance from people in the community saying that there are people who can’t afford a six pack” says Holownia. “And I’m sensitive to that.”
Holownia is still hoping for strong year in full membership sales, to put the Society on a solid footing.… Continue
First ever Sackville Busker Festival kicks off Thursday for an event-filled weekend
It’s an action-packed weekend coming up in Sackville.
The Live Bait New Works Festival launched Wednesday and runs until August 15, with plays, readings, a book launch, and a concert in collaboration with the newly revived Tantramar Blues Society. The Tantramar Heritage Trust and the Town of Sackville have put together a roster of activities to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Yorkshire Settlers in the region, promising to “explore the impacts, both good and bad” of the settlement. And to top it all off, there will be extra activity downtown as the first Sackville Busker Festival takes over Bridge Street between Main and Lorne, with performances starting Thursday evening and happening throughout the weekend.
Wendy Epworth is owner of Mel’s Tea Room and vice president of the downtown Sackville Business Improvement Area (BIA), which is spearheading the festival with some help from ACOA’s Rediscover Main Streets initiative. CHMA sat down with Epworth on Wednesday to hear more about the Buskers Festival and how it came to be.
Epworth says when word of funding for new events and festivals to help re-animate downtowns came down the line, she thought immediately of the Halifax International Buskers Festival. “It’s a great, longstanding festival, and I’ve enjoyed it,” says Epworth. So she reached out to see if something of a smaller scale could work in Sackville. “They sent me information about what a little festival would look like here,” says Epworth, and she put together a proposal for ACOA in the spring.… Continue
Miller and Lerch’s collaborative poem ‘Disharmonies’ launches letterpress edition tonight at Struts
Poets Marylin Lerch and Geordie Miller started a conversation about their work near the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it turned into a collaboration that is being celebrated tonight, at the launch of Disharmonies, a poem written by both Miller and Lerch and printed here in Sackville by Hardscrabble Press.
The gathering starts at 7pm at Struts Gallery, and will be outside, weather permitting.
CHMA caught up with Lerch and Miller in a shady backyard, with the howling Sackville winds in the background:
Here’s Miller and Lerch reading a selection from Disharmonies:
Lerch is a retired teacher who has been living and writing in Sackville for 26 years, and served as the town’s Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2018. Miller settled in the town in 2015, when he started teaching poetry at Mount Allison. He’s also chair of the board for Sappyfest.
Miller says the collaboration started with Lerch, a mentor, reaching out to find out what Miller was working on. “She asked, are you writing? And what are you writing? And I found I was writing these kind of weird, angry poems, which I guess wasn’t so strange in the fall of 2020,” recalls Miller. “So we started sharing the poems back and forth… and it started to gather some momentum and eventually became a book.”… Continue
Capturing the Waterfowl Park from dawn to dusk
Painter Angela Thibodeau has been been getting up early and working late this summer, in an effort to catch sunrise and sunset at the Sackville Waterfowl Park as much as possible. As this year’s artist-in-residence for the park, Thibodeau’s goal is to document and share the dawn and dusk colours and activity in the wetland.
CHMA spoke with Thibodeau this week to find out more about her summer residency:
As someone who often works from photographs, Thibodeau says she is frustrated by the limitation of her digital camera in capturing the tones and colours of the light-changing mornings and evenings. “It’s always trying to correct for the low light,” she says. “So I’ll just make sketches. They don’t look like finished paintings, but they help me get to know the colours of the sunrise and sunset.”
Then three days a week, Thibodeau sets up in her makeshift studio at the Sackville Visitor Information Centre and paints.
“I make finished paintings in watercolour and bit of pencil and pen, of all different scenes in the Waterfowl Park,” says Thibodeau. “And the sky always reflects the colours that I’ve seen the morning of or the night before. I’m trying to make a body of work where all of the paintings show the park at those times of day.”… Continue
‘It’s as if you’re not doing it… it’s happening’: An interview with celebrated musician Janet Hammock
Listen to the Tuesday, May 24, 2022 edition of Tantramar Report:
On at the Owens: student works from past and present, plus an impressive hanging of the historic founding collection
This weekend at the Owen’s Art Gallery viewers will have the chance to see new works by graduating fine arts students, and also a number of works created by faculty and students from the early years of the art department at the school. The latter collection features copies of the Owens Art Institute collection, which became the core collection of the new Owens Art Gallery in 1893.
“The Owens exists because a collection that was formed by the estate of John Owen moved from Saint John to Mount Allison in the late 19th century,” says gallery director Emily Falvey.
The collection of 388 pictures, 32 plaster casts, and a small library of art books is “one of the oldest of its kind in Canada,” says Falvey. “And it was used originally to teach students learning Fine Arts in the Mount Allison Ladies College.”
Owens preparator Roxie Ibbitson haș drawn from the collection to put together the Salon Hanging, which opens Saturday May 14 at the Owens.
“The Salon Hanging is basically floor to ceiling hanging of over 100 works from the core collection that Roxy [Ibbitson] does in the high wall gallery. So it’s quite impressive,” says Falvey. “It’s supported by another exhibition [School Effects] that has some historical documentation of the collection hanging in Saint John, but also paintings that students made from the works,” says Falvey.… Continue
MASCARADE explores social anxiety, and the role of chaos in our lives
Wednesday is opening night for Sackville’s only bilingual theatre company: Tintamarre. This year, the troupe has put together a production on the theme of social anxiety. The play, called MASCARADE, opens tonight in the Motyer-Fancy Theatre in Sackville.
CHMA visited the final rehearsal for MASCARADE on Tuesday night, and spoke with the play’s writer and director, and Tintamarre’s founder, Alex Fancy, to find out more:
MASCARADE begins at 7:30pm nightly through to Saturday. Tickets are $10 for community members, $5 for seniors, and free for students.
Reservations are available by emailing motyerfancytheatre@mta.ca.… Continue
RE:FLUX launches a “COVID-proof” festival of art and sound Monday
There’s “something for everyone” at this year’s RE:FLUX festival, says coordinator Catherine Arsenault. CHMA called up Arsenault to find out what’s on tap for the experimental art and sound festival based in Moncton, which launches online Monday.
After cancelling last year’s festival due to uncertainty around the COVID-19 shutdown, Arsenault says the idea this year was to make the festival, “as COVID-proof as possible.”
“Last year was interesting, because we made the call to cancel pretty much everything early on,” says Arsenault. “I was right about start buying plane tickets.”
“That was its own roller coaster,” says Arsenault. “There was a lot of questioning, like, why are you canceling it? It’ll be over in two weeks, or whatever.”
So for this year, they planned a shut-down proof festival, which means most of it takes place virtually, online.
As with many things in these pandemic years, there’s been a silver lining. This year’s roster of artists is quite possibly the biggest RE:FLUX has ever offered, says Arsenault.
“There’s close to probably 30 participating artists in different kinds of mediums, sound exploration and kind of a mix of visual arts and experimental music,” says Arsenault. “It’s huge. And it wouldn’t be possible to do it this way live.”
RE:FLUX is run by a “tiny team” of Arsenault and her partner, Annie France Noël. Together, they also run Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton.… Continue