Organized in conjunction with the solo retrospective John Murchie: À rebours, on display at the Owens Art Gallery until 23 April 2023.
Sackville artist John Murchie joins curator Felicity Tayler for a conversation about the exhibition À rebours, Murchie’s career and artistic practice, libraries, and other points of connection and divergence.
Originally from New Jersey, John Murchie immigrated to Canada in 1967 and has lived in Sackville, New Brunswick, for the past thirty-two years, earning a living as a gallery director, curator, writer, teacher, farmer, and cook. From 1972 to 1990 he worked as Director of the Library at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His art practice spans more than fifty years during which time he published several artist books including A Quiet Evening (1978), Lines (1979), and One Way Ticket (1983). He has had several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at venues including AC Institute (New York), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), Articule (Montreal), Mercer Union (Toronto), The Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), and Open Space (Victoria). He participated in Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival in 2003 and 2008. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (Halifax), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton), and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown). He received awards and grants including two Canada Council for the Arts “Curator and Critics” awards, and, in 1995-1996, he was a Research Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada. From 2003 to 2013, he worked as the Coordinator of Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre (Sackville, NB).
Felicity Tayler, MLIS, PhD, met John Murchie at the 2003 Tiré à part/Off Printing conference on independent and artist-led publishing activities. Their affinities have overlapped many times since then. She currently lives with her family on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory, where she is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa, and was the Interim Head, Research Services (Arts and Special Collections), 2021-2022. She was an Information Specialist at Artexte in Montreal, 2010-2016. Her research, artistic, and curatorial interests include art historical metadata modeling, data visualization, and the print culture of artistic community. She is a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Tayler’s critical and scholarly writing has been published widely and related exhibitions have been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and have taken place at Artexte, and the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, among other venues.
2023
