Curator: David Diviney
With artists: Gerald Ferguson, Tom Forrestall, Alexander Graham, Mark Kasumovic, Les Levine, and Felicity Redgrave.
Inventions Gallery, Halifax’s first artist-run centre, was established in 1972 by a group of female artists. Two years later, the organization changed its name to Eye Level Gallery Society and opened its membership to include male artists too. The inaugural exhibition, entitled Peggy’s Cove Syndrome, invited gallery members and guest artists “who do not normally work in the seascape genre” to navigate the broader possibilities of the landscape tradition through a reexamination of one of Nova Scotia’s most iconic and well documented places. As the press release declared, the exhibition included “serigraphs to slides to a “stuffed” painting of Peggy’s Cove.” In the decades since this exercise, the lure of this site as subject and muse has endured through an equally wide range of responses by contemporary artists from here and beyond. These examples from the AGNS Permanent Collection follow suit, extending beyond direct representations of the historic village and its environs to consider Peggy’s Cove anew, once again, through an investigation of tourist economies, tragic events and notions of the sublime.
