Visual Arts Nova Scotia is pleased to officially announce the participants of this year’s Mentorship Program. After receiving some great applications, the program will be supporting four dedicated emerging Nova Scotian artists. Celine Gabrielle, Sarah Mosher, Trevor Novak, and Liam Ross have been individually paired with established artists and mentors Susan Tooke, Melissa Marr, Robin Metcalfe, and David Diviney.

EMERGING ARTISTS

Celine Gabrielle is a self-taught artist who has taken over 20 years to finally pursue her lifelong dream of being a professional artist. She loves very bright colours in big hunks and chunks. Beautifully layered light and shadows that come together to create something different yet recognizable. Zooming in on details. Alluring and intriguing, never boring. Always engaging. Right now, all of this comes out as oil paintings on large canvases; a style that is close-up and slightly abstract, but still incredibly crisp at the same time.

As an ’80s/’90s child, her style is greatly influenced by bold, in-your-face neon colours, big shoulder pads and the modern technology takeover, but it is also influenced by her baby boomer parents and also her grandparents. She’s inspired by pop culture, fashion, style, design, and architecture across many generations, as far back as the 1920s art deco and flapper girls, up to the 2000s with megastars like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.

She says she creates because it is fun, it challenges her and gives her great satisfaction. She says she wants the joy and pleasure she has making her paintings to go with them. Like coming home to a bouquet of wildflowers—an unexpected pop of joy.

Sarah Mosher is a community-minded artist with a vision for accessibility and a deep passion for textiles as fine art and fabric sculpture. Her studio practice embraces weaving, embroidery, sculpture and drawing. She has special interest in accessibility to visual art in Nova Scotia, especially for the visually impaired and blind. For Mosher, working with the visually impaired is a personal topic because she has had experience with her own visual impairment in childhood. Her work with the community in Pictou County, Nova Scotia has been covered by AMI, Accessible Media Inc. and local papers.

Trevor Novak creates sculptures as a roundabout way to work through emotions that he has difficulty expressing in other more practical ways. Rather than just doing or saying what is on his mind he tries to avoid all possible conflict in life by putting his frustrations, depression, and lack of emotional maturity through his hands and into his art.

The human body in various states of abstraction or “caricaturization” is a principal theme in Trevor’s work. He uses these goofy cartoonish representations of the human body to introduce heavier themes in a seemingly light hearted manner while poking fun at himself and others.

In his practice, the process of creating is the primary goal, as original intentions or meaning become lost in the act of making. He uses the experience of creation as a way to process the world outside and inside himself. Trevor lets his emotional state of mind guide his work to the point where he consciously feels like he has little agency in the direction it takes.

Trevor grew up in Toronto and now lives in Halifax. He received an Advanced Diploma in Ceramics from Sheridan College and a BFA in Ceramics at NSCAD University.

Liam Ross is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has given public talks at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Anna Leonowens Gallery, and received a BFA in Expanded Media from NSCAD University in 2020. His practice uses primarily digital media and sculpture to create compositions that investigate our relationships with deities, authority, and the utopian narrative of neoliberalism. His work often synthesizes contemporary pop culture, historic art styles, and religious symbologies to create dramatic visual narratives that imbue contentious subjects with theological significance. Ross aims to create work that interrogates the use of dogma, both religious and secular, as an apparatus of institutional violence and control.

MENTORS

Focusing on environmental issues, Susan Tooke has developed visual symbolism for life forms impacted by the elements and layered through time. While painting is the foundation of her studio work, she is also known for her work in media arts, including sound, video and animation.

Tooke’s work was selected as Beacon Projects both individually and with her collaborative team, Motion Activated (Susan Tooke, Lukas Pearse and Véronique MacKenzie ) for Halifax’s Nocturne 2015. Using projection mapping, images, live drawing and dance were projected onto the Halifax Grain Elevators. In 2016, her Beacon collaboration with Lukas Pearse and Daniel O’Neill, Wild at Heart, was projection mapped on City Hall. Once again, her work was featured at Nocturne 2017, with Depths of Sorrow, a multimedia work by Motion Activated.

A celebrated illustrator, her artwork for children’s literature has resulted in multiple awards including four Lillian Shepherd Memorial Awards for Excellence in Illustration and ten published books.

Susan Tooke received the prestigious Established Artist Recognition Award in 2015 in acknowledgement of her artistic contribution to the province of Nova Scotia.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University with further studies in the Master’s of Media Arts program at the New School in New York City. 

Melissa Marr is an artist and educator working primarily in printmaking, drawing and installation. Since 2010, she has been dedicated to the co-creation of Wonder’neath Art Society, a studio facility for practicing artists and the public to come together and make art in K’jipuktuk (Halifax). Wonder’neath supports artist leadership, advocacy, learning, and collaboration – and critically explores the role of community building through the arts.
Melissa holds a BFA from Mount Allison, and a Master in Education through Acadia. She works collaboratively in education settings and has participated in artist residencies throughout Nova Scotia. She has designed fine arts curricula for the province, content for CBC children’s television, and has taught part time at MSVU and NSCAD. Melissa has developed participatory works with both Heather Wilkinson (Minding, The Falls, and Barometer) and with Karen Stentaford (Shift, Gentle Factory) through their ongoing project The Factory.  Independently, Melissa continues to develop mixed media work to understand justice and learning.

Robin Metcalfe is a curator, writer, Queer activist and community historian of Acadian and Newfoundland heritage. Robin lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in Mikma’ki, where he has been Director/Curator of Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery since 2004. He was previously Curator of Contemporary Art at Museum London, and worked for many years as an independent curator, critic, writer, editor and broadcaster. His exhibitions include Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) with Mi’kmaw artist Ursula Johnson (touring 2014-2018), Camp Fires: The Queer Baroque of Léopold L Foulem, Paul Mathieu, Richard Milette (2014-15), and Queer Looking, Queer Acting: Lesbian and Gay Vernacular (1997 & 2014).

Robin has a particular interest in diasporic, post-colonial and Queer identities; in gender and the body; and in the liminal spaces between discourses, such as between visual arts and crafts. Since the mid 1970s, he has published journalism, cultural criticism, short fiction and poetry in over 65 periodicals and 15 anthologies. In 2000 he was awarded the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction for the book Studio Rally: Art & Craft of Nova Scotia (Goose Lane, 1999). He was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award in 2004.

David Diviney is the Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Prior to joining the AGNS in 2009, he worked as an independent curator and held positions at the Southern Albert Art Gallery and Eye Level Gallery.

His recent curatorial projects include A Sense of Site (2019), Jordan Bennett: Ketu’elmita’jik (2018), Close to the edge… The Work of Gerald Ferguson (2018), The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978 (2016), and Eleanor King: Dark Utopian (2015).

He was part of the curatorial team that developed Landmarks/Repères, a coast-to-coast-to-coast network of commissioned contemporary art projects staged in Canada’s national parks in 2017. He also co-curated the Bonavista Biennale 2019: FLOE, an exhibition situated in outport communities and historic sites along a 100-kilometer route in rural Newfoundland.

In addition to his background in the museum setting, he has taught courses at the Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University, and Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.