Visual Arts News - Spring 2019: EXPANSE

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In Shannon Webb-Campbell's first issue as Editor of Visual Arts News, artists ask us to pay witness, and explore connections to territory—to land and responsibility. Woven throughout this issue are themes that speak to the expansiveness of community, re-telling and re-imagining relationships, and how art revisions dominate colonial attitudes and narratives.
#callresponse is a provocative exhibition that isn't merely a reaction to reconciliation, or a catalogue of resistance, it's an on-going project which represents the fullness, vitality, and abundance of powerful Indigenous artists. Kent Monkman challenges the founding narratives of Confederation through artistic subversion. Mi'kmaq artist Nelson White's work honours ancestral truths, kinship, and combats colonial attitudes of Newfoundland and Labrador. Ned Pratt both rebels against and also honours his artistic parents Christopher Pratt, and the late Mary Pratt, exploring presence and tension. Like Pratt, cover artist Kym Greeley's paintings illustrate a different side of Newfoundland and Labrador—showing how the relationship to the island changed when the government paved the Trans-Canada Highway. Visionary of Fogo Island Arts, Zita Cobb, asks "What does art have to do with the price of fish?" focusing on society's current crisis of belonging. Also exclusive to this issue of Visual Arts News is Mi'kmaq poet Michelle Sylliboy's "Ancient Messages"—fusing the written Mi'kmaq Komqwejwi'kasikl language and photography.