Owens Art Gallery Opening Reception

Friday, March 5th, 2010, 7:30 pm

The Owens Art Gallery is pleased to present Told Untold, an exhibition that is, at its heart, about stories. Through photography, painting, and film, the five artists that it brings together all make use of storytelling or the sharing of personal experience to shed light on often unconsidered and unexamined issues of identity and difference that relate to their lives as Queer Canadians. Their focuses are diverse; the work in the show spans from Thirza Cuthand’s musings on the complexities of her Aboriginal identity, to Travis McEwen’s voicing of the experience of awkwardness and isolation among adolescents who are a little different. It reaches to Shawna Dempsey’s and Lorri Millan’s examination of the role of the other in popular North American history by looking at the story of Calamity Jane, and to Larry Glawson’s subversion of his own artistic authorship by giving his photographic subjects control of their own representation.

In conjunction with Told Untold, through the support of Mount Allison’s Centre for Canadian Studies, Ivan E. Coyote, an award-winning writer and storyteller based in Vancouver, will perform an evening of storytelling at the Gallery. Praised by the Toronto Star for her “talent for sketching the bizarre in the everyday,” Ivan’s short autobiographical stories, which have been published in six collections to date, are strikingly honest, humorous, often poignant, and always engaging. Over the last seventeen years she has become a renowned performer and a favourite at music, poetry, spoken word, and writer’s festivals.

There will be an opening reception for Told Untold on Friday, 5 March at 7:30PM. Ivan E. Coyote will perform on 12 March at 7:30PM. Both events are free and open to the public. The exhibition will remain on view until 18 April.

For further information, contact Sara Williamson at (506) 364-2224, or sewilliamson@mta.ca