Creative Minds: David Clark & Robin Metcalfe Discuss Séamus Gallagher: OH BABY
Thursday, March 20, 2025 | 7pm
Join us for us for an in-depth look at the art and practice of artist Seamus Gallagher, led by guests David Clarke and Robin Metcalfe, as they discuss their experiences working with Séamus and each of their respective fields in relation to the works on view.
About Creative Minds:
The Creative Minds series hosts community leaders and creatives to respond to current events, exhibitions on view, or artworks in the Gallery. Through conversation, music, poetry, or movement, these events aim to provoke new ideas, explore the unexpected and create more understanding for everyone involved.
About the Presenters:David Clark, MFA in Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1989. Clark is a media artist, visual artist, filmmaker, and radio producer. He teaches Expanded Media at NSCAD University in Halifax. David Clark graduated with a BFA from NSCAD in 1985. He also attended the Whitney Museum Program, 1989-1990, The Canadian Film Centre’s Interactive Arts and Entertainment Programme, 2005-2006, and New York University’s ITP Summer Camp, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020. He has done residencies in Berlin, Norway, Belfast, Banff, Vancouver, Quebec City, and Florida. He has given invited lectures at Cambridge University, Université Paris 8, University of Wrocław, Poland, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, The University of Utah, the L.I.S.A. (Leaders in Software and Art) Salon, New York City, MICA in Balitmore, Sundance Film Festival, The Banff Centre, Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, and The Kitchen in New York.
He has worked on SSHRC-funded research projects including: Sign After the X (with Marina Roy, UBC, 2008), (Re)Exhibiting the Canadian Films of Expo 67 (with Janine Marchessault & Monika Kim Gagnon, 2013), Explorations in Anonymous History (with Michael Darroch (University of Windsor) & Janine Marchessault (York University, 2017), and Archive/Counter-Archive (SSHRC Partnership Grant (York/Ryerson, 2018).
Robin Metcalfe is a writer and cultural activist living in Nova Scotia, Canada, within Mi'kma'ki, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq (L'nu). Of Acadian and Newfoundland ancestry, his poetry, journalism, art criticism and short fiction have been published in over 65 periodicals and 15 anthologies, and translated into French, Japanese, Mi'kmaw, Spanish and Swedish. In 2000 he was awarded the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction, for the book Studio Rally: Art & Craft of Nova Scotia (Goose Lane, 1999), and he was short-listed for a Canadian National Magazine Award in 2004.
Robin worked as a sleeping-car porter on CN/VIA Rail for ten years, starting in 1975, while active in the emerging gay liberation movement, and as an independent writer, curator, critic, editor and broadcaster from the mid 1980s through the year 2000. He was Curator of Contemporary Art at Museum London, in Ontario (2001-2004), and Director/Curator of Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, Kjipuktuk/Halifax, from 2004 through 2020. Significant exhibition projects include Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) with Mi’kmaw artist Ursula Johnson (touring 2014-2018), for which he supervised the production of a trilingual (Mi'kmaw, French, English) publication; Camp Fires: The Queer Baroque of Léopold L. Foulem, Paul Mathieu, Richard Milette (touring internationally 2014-15); and Queer Looking, Queer Acting: Lesbian and Gay Vernacular (MSVU Art Gallery, 1997; remounted 2014). He has served as President of both APAGA (Atlantic Provinces Art Gallery Association) and CAMDO (Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization).
Since 1975, Robin has been active within 2SLGBTQIA+ communities locally, across Canada and internationally, as an organiser, journalist and community archivist and historian. He is currently developing the Passage Memory Project - a non-institutional Queer archival and cultural meeting place - from his home in Sheet Harbour Passage (Weijuik, Eskikewa'kik District), based on more than four decades of collecting Queer historical documents, books, artworks and ephemera.