Acadian art captures more than life

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

Kings County Register

Memory, space and heritage are the focus of the newest exhibition at the Acadia Art Gallery, Wolfville.

The show features recent art work that reflects on the Grand Pre National Historic Site.

Curator Laurie Dalton says the collected art shows how the landscape continues to permeate the imagination of nine artists from across the Maritime provinces.

Wolfville resident Sherman Bleakney, the retired biology professor who studied how the Acadian farmers created the dyke system between what we call Grand Pre and North Grand Pre, contributed a piece of black shale from an outcropping at Horton Landing.

“This shale outcropping," he says, “was witness to the Acadians' excitement on arrival and their despondency at their forced departure.”

He incised the shale with three evocative images: Cape Blomidon, spade for cutting marsh-sod bricks and the church.

Two paintings by Father Maurice LeBlanc demonstrate his abiding feelings for the site. Father LeBlanc is often the priest who conducts mass at the park during Acadian Days. He says his visits as a child helped develop his affection for the place.

Annapolis Royal artist Wayne Boucher lent his abstract studies and sketches for Reveil, the grand painting now hanging in the lobby of the new visitors' centre at the historic park. His work "expresses the spirit, soul, and essence of Acadie in a narrative of past, present and future tenses."

Francois Gaudet, working again this year as an interpreter at the park, has three large works in the exhibition, exploring Acadian identity. Gaudet says the question of “homeland” for Acadians has to be viewed as a concept or phenomenon.

“It doesn't exist in a geographical form with set borders."

That is what makes this exhibition worth visiting. The nine artists have such diverse concepts and media to present.

The show came about through the collaboration of the Dalton at the Acadia Art Gallery and the Societe Promotion Grand-Pre. It will remain open until Sept. 5.

July 26, art making activities will go on from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. to celebrate both Acadian Days and Mudcreek Days in Wolfville.