There are two birthday party pictures in wildly different art shows this month: Brandt Eisner’s sad clown and balloon installation Best Wishes in My Name is Yours at The Chase Gallery in Halifax and Heather Sayeau’s hot, floral painting Happy Birthday in The Garden at the Lunenburg School of the Arts.

Both shows have a lot of colour but their intentions couldn’t be further apart. My Name Is Yours, produced by Eisner/Feit, is a group show of work rooted in “the ways in which personal struggles and triumphs are shaped by and, in turn, shape the world around us.”

Sayeau’s The Garden is a journey into her masterful application of paint to express flowers – their subtle patterns, their soft,delicate quality and, of course, their beauty. Flowers couldn’t have a better champion than her.

Sayeau paints showy peonies, with tinges of interior yellows amid the snowy whites, expressive roses on small panels and masses of tiny pink cherry blossoms on a gold spray-painted background. She captures both the positive, life-affirming emotions that flowers bring to people – “A flower touches everyone’s heart,” Georgia O’Keeffe famously said – and their ephemeral beauty without pinning it all down in crisp or rigid detail. Her paintings are lyrical.

As tactile and visible as her paint application is, her work a “just-there” quality like Sara MacCulloch’s landscape paintings.

New to Sayeau’s work in the last two years is a spray-painted background. The Happy Birthday painting has a multi-coloured, spray-painted background with lovely little spatters. She then over-paints this vivid swirl of colour in outlines of flowers and leaves in brown paint. Her delicate though declarative use of line and her use of this distinctive brown recalls David Milne – thank you Gillian McCulloch for noticing this!

My Name is Yours is a show exploring personal experiences as they connect to a larger society in terms of religion, mental health, bullying, 2SLGBTQI+ repression and other social issues. “In a world where the personal is often deemed separate from the political, ‘My Name is Yours,’ challenges such notions, asserting that our individual stories are inherently intertwined with broader social realities,” according to the wall statement.

Ceramic artist Shauna MacLeod explores her own experiences with PTSD after a career as a paramedic and emergency medical dispatcher as well as a cancer scare in numerous, topped urns in raku and earthenware. The vessels hold her fears and worries and her coping mechanisms. The white cracked raku vessel, Gratitude, is about the value of horse therapy in her mental recovery. The lid is a wonderful horse head with a mane of flowing yellow horse hair. (The horse hair comes from horses at the FLAR Equine Experience horse therapy program in Hubley, N.S.)

MacLeod’s final pot, Benign, celebrates being cancer free. After she got the doctor’s call, she gathered elephant grass from a creek close to where she was staying in P.E.I. For Benign, she coils it around around large open pots hand-built from Nova Scotia clay. These earthenware vessels are lid-less; open and free and joyful, their materials solidly connecting MacLeod to the earth, to health and to her home.

Both Brandt Eisner and Philip Hare work from their perspective of being queer and having felt like outsiders, Hare in large, bold and colourful, textile panels of many squares each holding an identical oval mask and Eisner in a variety of playful but pointed sculptural installations with a broad range of meanings.

Hare’s three-panel Terrorist series defines terrorism as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims,” pointing to the use of power, money and religion to repress and kill people deemed unacceptable to mainstream society.

When people are masked, they feel free to do or say horrible things; just look at the comments sections on social media. In creating a multitude of anonymous masks, Hare sends a chill into viewers at the time seducing them with his colour and the impressive labour of hand-stitching felt.

He writes: “From a very young age we are taught that at the heart of all religions is love. As we grow older and wiser it becomes increasingly difficult to remember that. James Baldwin said, ‘Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.’”

Eisner’s birthday party artwork, Best Wishes, is – like most of work – clear and playful and visually striking but with a complexity of layered meaning.

The dominant image is of a clown – the carnival kind that people fear – and next to it is a nearly hidden toy gun and a Happy Birthday mylar balloon; on the floor sits a pile of colourful broken balloons.

I asked Eisner to speculate on his own intentions – “There’s certainly some irony. Possibly societies fear of aging. Adults often find clowns terrifying, and yet they book them for children’s events. The gun can speak to the fact that life could end at any moment. The broken balloons could allude to the fear and anxiety about the party being over. What will I no longer be able to do? Have I missed out on ‘living’?”

Eisner’s work incorporates pop culture, kitsch and trips to craft and thrift stores, and is often autobiographical from his perspective as a queer artist. However, he says, “my goal is to keep the work accessible to the viewer, so that they may bring their own history into their interpretation.”

Eisner takes a wry look at the church coffee hour with a cookie plate holding miniature white ceramic crosses and churches covered in candy sprinkles. Religion is served at church as ideology, as communion wafers and as yummy cookies at social time, which seems innocent and comforting but Eisner subverts that. The church’s exclusion of people who don’t fit a norm destroys innocence. Religion can eat people alive.

Eisner makes art out of artificial flowers that he paints in black for gothic, theatrical pieces and a riff on the Canadian flag; his “house of horrors” wall of 18 spray-painted and framed Halloween masks, titled Put On A Happy Face, is remarkable for its contrasts. The bubblegum colours and ornate white frames are at odds with the smashed-in horror and energy of the faces.

Curtis Botham, a 2017 NSCAD University graduate, brings vitality and expressive power to the ancient medium of charcoal drawing in large, unframed paper artworks depicting industrial activity and social problems including homelessness and isolation. His details, scale and masterful realism are amazing. His form of realism is mediated through his hand and heart and medium. Instead of a photographic realism there is a softness and a wonderful range of line and tone.

Two of Botham’s pieces connect powerfully to urban isolation with kids on a bus focussed on their phones and not each other, and a young woman alone and miserable, also on a bus, during a time of isolation due to COVID-19.

Also exhibiting in My Name is Yours are Monique Silver in delicate, colourful drawings of figures representing states of being, as well as The Hug Shirt printed in a nude female upper body that the wearer hugs; Terri Whetstone in pop-art, high-colour hooked mats with socially-pointed texts; Louise Pentz, now in Australia, in her emotionally moving and powerful Blanket Statements series about climate crisis; and Bob Morouney in drawings from his Carte de Visite Series, precise sometimes surreal drawings that have a whimsy but depict mood and human experience and suggest a narrative. (A Carte de Visite is the term for a calling card during the Victorian era.)

Morouney writes: “This carte de visite series began as a resource for facilitating one-to-one commuion. The images contain the story which needs sharing between two people: a picture of the topic (a love, a discord, a frustration, a fear, etc.) is placed between the two sides for intiation then kept on the table until the issue is closed.

“Grown far beyond 100 initial images, carte de visite has become a record of life’s experiences, of the multitudinous stories arising from inner states, accomplishments, and needs that ever change throughout life’s journey.”

My Names is Yours runs to Sept. 28; the gallery in the Public Archives is open 8.30 to 4:30 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 8.30 to 8 Wednesday and 10 to 3 on Saturday. (Parking anywhere on the Dal campus can be problematic these days.)

Sayeau’s The Garden runs to Oct. 14 at the Lunenburg School of the Arts, Montague Street. Sayeau is a long-time instructor at the school and now lives in Petite Riviere, though she is well-known in Halifax as a Fine and Media Arts at NSCAD University for 30 years. Gallery hours are Mondays to Fridays, 10 to 4,; also by chance or appointment.

Sayeau is also exhibiting with ceramic artist Joan Bruneau, of Nova Terra Cotta Pottery in Lunenburg, in the duo show Bloom, at Peer Gallery, 166 Lincoln St., Oct. 2 to 13, open Wednesday to Sunday, 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Together these artists celebrates the colour, shape and beauty of flowers. (If you’ve seen the poster for the upcoming Nova Scotia Potters Guild show Triumphs of Clay, at the Ice House Gallery in Tatamagouche, Nov. 2 to Dec. 15, the flower pot image is one of Bruneau’s pieces.

This Saturday, Oct. 28, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., is the Art Off the Map artist and gallery tour; the Teichert Gallery, 1723 Hollis St., is showing some of the artists work as part of the Art Off the Map Festival. For open studios and galleries go to: Halifax Art Map | Art Off The Map

• A Wonderful “Dream” You’ve Never Had Before
• Luckily, “Fish and Dicks” to be restaged: delightful, heartfelt comedy about Brier Island and more

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Art, artists, exhibition, exhibitions, painting