The Cold War between the West and the Eastern bloc of communist nations was fought at many levels, including cultural. The work of American abstract expressionist artists of the mid-twentieth century for instance, was advanced and promoted to exemplify or symbolize freedoms injoyed in the United States as opposed to the repressions of communist regimes, in particular the Soviet Union. Peter Dykhuis and Adrian Göllner draw upon the phenomenon of modernist abstract art used as camouflage for the advancement of political agendas outside the purview of the aesthetic. In their work, it is a central point of both reference and response. Recent work by both artists that explores the encoding of abstraction will be shown in relation to select works of mid-twentieth century abstract art held in the Permanent Collection of the RMG - paintings by the likes of Jack Bush, Harold Town, and Serge Tousignant.

Born in Metz, France, poet Gil McElroy grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. His poems and other works have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993–2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999). He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.

McElroy has also been an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia. A selection of his catalogue essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. in May through October, 2000, it later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring the country throughout 2001. McElroy’s curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.

Gil McElroy's profile page

David Aurandt's profile page