Our First Issue
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Meet Us Halfway!
This project started as a series of kitchen table conversations about the need for a local outlet for art writing, somewhere to expand the life of creative work beyond the representations of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Over the course of making this journal, we’ve had many such conversations, in many different contexts and we’ve received an outpouring of words and actions of support. Writers from across the region have reached out to us; there is clearly a real hunger for more writing, reading, and publishing about arts and culture.
We also feel the insularity of living on an island with a small population; aside from self-promotion, how do Island artists get seen and talked about? Avenues are scarce. On Epekwitk (PEI) we don’t just talk about the precariousness of being an artist; we talk about the precariousness of art in general. Partly for this reason we decided to showcase Island writers and the work of one Island painter in our first issue.This edition is an initiation/inauguration in what we hope will develop into a large, diverse, and self-sustaining pool of local writers on art and culture.
We organized a conference in 2023 that brought together many diverse voices on art criticism, including the writers and artists whose work follows. We adopted an open-minded approach with respect to form and content; we wanted to publish what people wanted to write about and felt qualified to write about, in the style they were most comfortable with. In the end, in essays about such diverse creations as home videos, trashy sci-fi, quill art, and sculpture made from discarded objects, a theme emerged organically. We might call it revaluation, a process of drawing attention to, and granting value to the discarded, the nearly-forgotten or lost, the ordinary, or the overlooked; and of making a case for that which hasn’t always been granted the status of art. Our writers and the artists they write about seem to be mirroring an anxiety about art’s precarious position here that is driving the creation of this journal itself. Themes of preservation and open-ended promise run through all of these essays. They also embody another meaning of revaluation, the desire to shake things up, to switch some categories and hierarchies around, to use criticism as a vehicle for looking, and for looking again.
What’s Featured
We’ve started out with an artwork by a P.E.I.-based artist, David Garcia Jimenez’s painting Student and Instructors, and hope to showcase a timely artwork in every issue. Five “pairings” follow. Our introduction is paired with a poem by Tanya Davis that presents an argument for supporting culture. The second pairing features two essays, an overview of the past and future of Mi’kmaq quill work, and a review of Ursula Johnson’s installation at the Blue Building Gallery in Halifax, that position contemporary Epekwitk within the wider space and time of Mi’kmak’i and the effects of colonialism. The third pairing involves conversations with Maritime artists who share a methodology that seems to be trending on the Island: the use of discarded materials as a primary medium. The fourth pairing sheds light on “low” or overlooked cultural production, and use irony to question categories of taste and other rhetorics of aesthetic evaluation. We hope the final pairing - a report on the state of a precarious local art institution by an advocacy group, and a plea on behalf of suppressed journalists, especially women, by a former television reporter in Afghanistan that puts the stakes of our local concerns into stark perspective - doesn’t directly deal with art or cultural production itself, but rather the need to pay attention to and work to preserve safe and supportive contexts for art and criticism.
