RESEARCH and DEVELOPMENT

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 a Jane Zdansky exhibition of oils and watercolours

RESEARCH and DEVELOPMENT

opens July 30th

meet the artist, Friday August 2nd, 10am -1pm

Landscape, 2010, 12" X 12", oil on wood

My work is a response to reality rather than an imitative picture of reality. Whether my inspiration is a forest, a person or a vase of flowers, my approach is always to create a portrait of my subject that evokes an emotional tone through aesthetic mean.

All art speaks directly to our emotions. As a visual artist I employ the formal elements of line, colour, mass, composition, visual rhythm, etc. to communicate feeling in painting, sculpture or other visual media. The work is informed by every experience in my life. For me, working in the studio is not removed from life but an extension of it, it is a stew of memories, desires and a place where I can process the hurly-burly of contemporary experience and create a therapeutic haven producing work that fills a need for contemplation.

Jane Zdansky, B.Sc., B.F.A., has been painting since she was a child and has been exhibiting work since 1999. Her work can be viewed at www.janezdansky.com.

Friday Market 10am to 1pm – AND COME SEE THE ART!!!

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Friday 10am to 1pm – Main & Station Market – Fresh Produce -Handmade Lotions – Vintage Photos- Chocolate- Honey – Cookies- Books & More
Come see us tomorrow at 168 Main Street, Parrsboro…. browse the books, the pottery and the art, and get yourself some wonderful treats and good things to eat…
  • Trisha & Jamie will be here with fresh vegetables from Goodlake Farm.  Be sure to ask about their CSA baskets and check out their website…http://www.goodlakefarm.com/
  • Margie will be here with assorted honey, handmade beeswax candles and wonderful assortment of natural handmade lotions
  • You can also find books, ceramics, sculpture, assorted chocolate, spreadable cheese (from the Dutchman), and a variety of specialty food products
And be sure to go up to the second floor to see the exhibit and meet visiting artist Fiona Annis…more info below…
Exhibits by artists Fiona Annis & Alexis Williams on the 2nd Floor at Main & Station, 168 Main Street, Parrsboro
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Celestial Measures

Fiona Annis

 

What is it that you contain?
The dead, time, light patterns of millennia, the expanding universe opening in your gut.

Rebellious light, imperfect blacks and other process-based aberrations are the foundation of this cycle of work that explores the physical and chemical properties of light and time. By focusing on the attributes particular to the photographic medium, Celestial Measures gives a material life to the intangible. In this way, this cycle of work explores an alchemical territory by means of documenting various degrees of the transformation of matter.

Fiona Annis is a Montréal-based visual artist and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice emphasizes the use of scores and time-based media. In 2008 she completed a master’s degree at the Glasgow School of Art and she is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD at Concordia University. Fiona has exhibited in national and international contexts including: The AC Institute (New York City), The Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal) Goldsmith’s University (London), LowSalt Gallery (Glasgow), and The Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). Her work has been published in BlackFlash Magazine, Front: Contemporary Art & Ideas, Les Fleurs du Mal, and Imagining Science, winner of the New York Book Show Award. Her most recent cycle of work, The After-Image (Swan Songs), is a romantic conceptual rendering of the slippage between fact and fiction within a documentary framework. Fiona is currently exploring the alchemic potential of antiquated photographic processes, a trajectory that was put into motion in the context of an artist residency at The Center for Alternative Photography in New York City.

www.fionaannis.co.uk

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Entrance (Drain Spotting)
Alexis Williams
 Entrance is a series of graphite rubbings of conduit covers reorganized into geometric patterns.  The project evolved from the juxtaposition of gravestone decorations and man hole covers to point out their similarities as markers between above and below and as thresholds between the known and the unknown. The work has been refined into reproductions of manhole, drain and conduit covers remixed into geometric patterns resembling monumental mandalas.  The collection’s title refers to both a place of entry and the induction of a trance. The work is designed to simultaneously act as a doorway through which things are revealed to consciousness and as a dissociative that will calm the unconscious mind. While staying in Parrsboro Alexis will begin creating new rubbings of the manhole and drain covers of Nova Scotia.
Alexis Williams  (A.K.A Ember Erebus) is a Canadian artist working mainly in video and print. She has a love for biology and frequently uses natural materials like butterfly wings, mushroom spores, cast-off snake skins and spider web Silk in her artwork. As an amateur mycologist, wild mushrooms often take center stage both as material and subject of her work. Foraging and collecting are fundamental practices that lead her deep into the Canadian wilderness in search for new ideas, shapes and colors. A common theme in her work is the comparison of sampling and remixing cultural material to the collection and representation of natural material. In both cases of appropriation, the aesthetic and conceptual qualities of pre-existing elements are used to compose a new work that comments on the original.   Alexis is fascinated by the natural world and is devoted to sharing her discoveries and creations to inspire others to indulge in their own interests in nature.

Writing Workshops with Ian Ferrier

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b_IanSelfPortraitDo you have a story to tell? Perhaps your own? Looking for a reason to visit beautiful Nova Scotia? Then do not miss this opportunity to meet and learn from Ian Ferrier, one of the core writer/performers in the North American performance literature scene. Despite a hectic schedule of performance, collaboration and event organization that has him ever on the move, Ferrier will be offering two very different writing courses this summer in the coastal town of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia known for the world’s highest tides and described by National Geographic magazine as “the prettiest place to watch the Bay of Fundy tides sweep in and out.”

The first, Writing the Story of Your Life, is a 3-day workshop (July 26-28) which will use a very open mind to help each participant choose the best way to bring writing into his or her life—from journals to offhand storytelling to serious works of poetry or prose. It is open to anyone who wants to engage writing as a tool for discovering the meaning and excitement in life. To find out more and to register, CLICK HERE.

The second, The Voice of the Writer, is a 5-day workshop (July 29 -August 2) intended for writers who want to develop the range, beauty and breadth of their own voice.  It sees print as the typescript for an unruly talker who breaks out of the page and announces her or his discoveries to the world.  It examines how even the most sophisticated writers in the language are grounded in voice, even if it is only a voice heard in the mind.  It is open to writers of poetry and prose as well as spoken word artists, to anyone looking at how to use a tool that still rules in the literature of the 21st century. To find out more and to register, CLICK HERE.

Ian Ferrier’s work is well-known across Canada, New York and Europe. Rooted in poetry, his live performances are a haunting blend of acoustic guitar, choir; whispered voice, and the trancelike music of a band called Pharmakon MTL. His signature is the quiet, compelling voice at the centre of every piece.
His first CD/book, Exploding Head Man, received national acclaim. Rooted in the spellbound winters of his childhood, it took a passionate look at love, sex and death against a background of the falling snow; representing the best of three years of collaborations with musicians from Montreal and New York.

What is this Place? features two collaborations with the trance/improv band Pharmakon MTL, two solo works, and nine collaborations between Ferrier and a starstudded list of top Quebec musicians, including Jean Derome, Normand Guilbealt, Pierre Tanguay, Sam Shalabi, André Asselin, Bryan Highbloom, Kathy Kennedy and Gordon Krieger.  Recently his work featured on Australia’s Going Down Slow CD and literature anthology, in Canadian Theatre Review and in the Review of the Americas special issue on Canadian Literature. Stories of his can be found in Telling Stories and the anthology You and Your Bright Ideas (both Vehicule Press). Impure-Reinventing the Word is a book from Conundrum Press that documents the literary scene of which he is a part, and you can find his poems and music in the Short Fuse anthology from Rattapallax Press and the Poetry Nation anthology from Vehicule.
Ian Ferrier also co-founded the Mile End Poets’ Festival, the online performance review litlive.ca, and the poetry/music label Wired on Words which won public radio’s Standard Broadcasting Award in its first year. To Call Out in the Night, his most recent CD with Pharmakon MTL, can be heard at at CBC Music. He resides in Montreal, where he hosts the city’s monthly Words & Music literature series, and remains on the board of the Quebec Writers’ Federation as their past president. Ferrier’s work in the spoken word community was recognized at the 2011 Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, where he received a national poetry award called the Golden Beret.
Want to know more? Check out these links about Ian Ferrier and what he does…