Even though it was outside the province in Moncton, one of my favourite exhibitions of the year has to be Sam Kinsley’s Drawing on Economy at Galerie Sans Nom. Her drawings on white expanses of paper create massive landscapes formed from seemingly countless individual marks. This countlessness is an illusion created by the process she uses to make self-portraits based on numbers that reflect her standing within economic systems. The number of marks is preset by the artist’s numerical value in dollars and cents. Mass, a humongous scroll of paper that undulated on and off the gallery floor, is perforated with pinpricks. Each prick represents a single cent of accumulated debt. Emulating the data cloud governing our lives, Kinsley’s drawings bring form to our numerical avatars. The cloisters of marks generate organic clusters – a swarm of insects, a grey cloud, an island in a white expanse. They create communities and give the viewer a sense of camaraderie in knowing that we are more than a sum of our parts. 
Howie Tsui, Musketball!, 2012, pinball machine, replica musket ball
An early highlight of the year arrived at the beginning of 2015 when a collection of macabre medical imagery filled Dalhousie Art Gallery. Curated by Cindy Stelmackowich, the group exhibition Anatomica mapped depictions of the body through numerous media by multiple artists from Garry Neill Kennedy’s conceptual paintings to the all-too-literal knitted sculptures of Sarah Maloney. In particular, the awe-inspiring intricacies of Lisa Nilsson and Howie Tsui were engrained in my mind for the year to follow. The beauty of her anatomical dissections built from quilled paper was detailed to stunningly beautiful extremes. He sunk in with a dark sense of humor and the skilled lines of his ink drawings on animal hide velum. Tsui also topped the show off with Musketball!, a pinball machine game based on injuries inflicted in the War of 1812.
Towering panels of quilted textiles lined the walls of Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Dorothy Caldwell’s remarkable Silent Ice / Deep Patience. Galaxies of tiny marks made of individual stitches and painted lines covered the cloth assembled from numerous panels of fabric, large and small. Her massive works are a culmination of detailed research in mapping natural dyes and pigments, and their relation to materials, stitching, and line work. This in-depth process is revealed fully to the viewer by an archive of specimens and recorded tests on small rectangles of material and paper. Caldwell offered us a macro and micro view into the achievements of her craft. Her archive provided all the knowledge needed to fully explore the universe of tiny moments stitched into the large panels.
Anna Taylor is an artist, crafter, and organizer sitting on the board of the Halifax Crafters Society. She is Akimblog’s Halifax correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @TaylorMadeGoods.
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2015 Critic's Picks
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