Winter 2023 exhibitions

Winter 2023 exhibitions at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University.

John Murchie: À rebours
January 21–April 23, 2023
Curators: Emily Falvey and Felicity Tayler. John Murchie’s art explores the relationship between order and accident. By focusing on simple actions, such as drawing a line, applying paint, or selecting colours, he seeks chaos in constraint and humour in seriousness. Straight lines end up crooked, evenly applied layers of paint become strange formations, crossword puzzles reveal modernist abstractions. À rebours (Against the Grain) spans fifty years of Murchie’s artistic practice, which found its direction in the 1970s, when he was Director of the Library at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Each ending in a choice
January 27–April 23, 2023
Game night: March 10 at 7pm
David Clark, Ronnie Clarke, Elizabeth LaPensée, the Oshkii Giizhik Singers and Sharon M. Day, Amanda Low, Emily Short, Kara Stone. Curator: Rachel Thronton. Bringing together online works of interactive, non-linear storytelling, this exhibition explores how embodied experiences are created through sensory interactions. With each click, keystroke, swipe, or choice, you are taken deeper into webs of poetic hypertext, interactive narratives, and games. There is no winning or losing, and numerous endings are possible. Serving as a means to re-examine and expand our understanding of both the digital and physical world, these works create personal, intimate exchanges where we interact, touch, and converse with code.

Room for One
October 20, 2022–April 16, 2023
Elizabeth Cann, Alex Colville, Rhoda Colville, Christian McKiel, Andrea Mortson, Mary Pratt. Curator: Emily Falvey. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the enduring inequalities of invisible labour, which includes care and domestic work. Room for One explores this issue through a selection of art that centres relationships between artists, their friends and families, and domestic life in general. It explores modeling as an active form of creative expression, while also considering the many forms of unpaid emotional, creative, and domestic labour that both make works of art possible and stand in the way of their creation.

Visit our website for detailed information on all our programs.

We would like to acknowledge that the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, is located within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki, the unceded ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaq. Our relationship and our privilege to live on this territory was agreed upon in the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725 to 1752. Because of this treaty relationship, it is to be acknowledged that we are all Treaty People and have a responsibility to respect this territory.

The Owens Art Gallery acknowledges the generous support of all its funders, including Mount Allison University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the New Brunswick Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture, the Town of Sackville, and the Friends of the Owens Art Gallery.