Gallery Weekend is Over
Gallery weekend is over. You missed it.
But the glorious weather continues. This has been a September filled with perfect moments of honey coloured light, warm and caressing sunshine spreading long shadows across beautiful late afternoons, floral displays, sumptuous and extravagant, lingering on toward that perfect, pivot moment where they edge into autumnal decay and death. Everything more cherished and more precious, because we all know how quickly, and how soon, it will end.
Gallery Weekend took place from the 19th to the 22nd September.
Gallery Weekend is run by an organization known as the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC). It’s mandate is to develop the recognition and prosperity of the contemporary art market in Canada. Laudible!
Thanks to Gallery Weekend I was directed to some spaces unfamiliar to me: Franz Kafka, Zalucky Contemporary and many more, are all on the Gallery Weekend map.
Franz Kafka – Jennifer Carvalho – “Ghost”
The address for Franz Kafka is 1485 Dupont, but the entrance is on 300 Campbell, upstairs, down a long, slightly Kafkaesque hallway.
Jennifer Carvalho‘s exhibition, called Ghost, is somber, ethereal and strangely timely.
The gestures and expressions are so familiar from art history survey courses, maybe referencing Flemish painting from the 15th century, maybe Italian Rennaissance or possibly a combination of influences from these and other distant schools of art.
It must be the depictions of grief, particularly female grief, that makes the paintings so affecting. They are in low key colours, dull greys, rusting reds, dim blues and pale, watery flesh tones. Even the images of jewels are muted.
Are ghosts not reminders for the living as to who has been lost? Haunting dark corners to prove they once held court here, too. They remind us of their presence, with a shell of their past power.”
– Marlow Granados, from a handout at Jennifer Carvalho’s exhibition “Ghost”
I appreciated the stillness and meditative quality of this exhibition. The artist’s concerns are with images emerging from the past. It’s as if she is presenting a window into another set of priorities. With a fixed and sober gaze, we see the past and are invited to contemplate how it led to the present.
Zalucky Contemporary – Tyshan Wright – “Gumbe”
A little further west, on Dundas, in The Junction, is Zalucky Contemporary and an exhibition by Tyshan Wright.
Tyshan Wright is an artist who also probes the past. But in his case he locates his own ancestry and celebrates and explores those connections.
The artist is a descendant of the Maroons of Jamaica. Composed of African populations originally brought to the New World by the Spanish, most Maroon communities, in the smaller Caribbean Islands, disappeared by the early 1700s. But in Jamaica, the Maroons are, to this day, largely autonomous and separate from Jamaican society.
The story of how the gumbe, which is a drum, was created in Jamaican Maroon communities, and went on to became important in the music of Sierra Leone and other west African countries, is so interesting. One element of this story is the forced migration of more than 500 Jamaican Maroons to Halifax in 1796. Most did not stay. In fact, they moved back across the wide ocean to settle mainly in Freetown, and they brought their music with them.
Tyshan Wright uses materials from Jamaica, Nova Scotia and the African diaspora to construct these beautiful objects. He notes they function as “diasporic talismans,” providing spiritual sustenance to the Maroon people through their centuries of displacement.
You can watch a mash-up reel of gumbe music here:
It was a memorable afternoon.
annetteandquebec 