In 2020, the Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery initiated Umbrella Projects, a partnership designed to pool our resources, energies, and respective strengths in order to facilitate off-site, in-print, online, and onscreen programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following an open call in the fall of 2020, eight exciting artist proposals were selected via a jury process. We are thrilled to announce that, over the next five months, Umbrella Projects will be realizing projects with Izzy Francolini, John Haney, Lee Henderson, Marcia Huyer, Arianna Richardson, Yvonne Singer, Derek Sullivan, and Nic Wilson.
The program begins in April with HOT TIPS, by Sackville artist John Haney. Using the medium of neon lighting, Haney’s installation draws on high-impact advertising techniques and is designed to be both funny and obtuse. The words spelled out in its flashing red-and-white neon tubes move rhythmically between nihilist acquiescence and campy shake-off, at once creating and diffusing tension. In the artist’s words, this project represents “a synaptic leap we must make between where we are and where we want to be as our lives begin to realign with…what? How will we be different?” The work will be installed in the vestibule window of the Owens Art Gallery from 14 April to 11 June. Â
John Haney is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in an old farmhouse in Wood Point, New Brunswick. He earned a BA from Mount Allison University in 2001, and an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2016. He has exhibited in Canada, the US, and Germany. He was long-listed for the Sobey Award in 2011, and was a nominee for the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2012. In 2019, in order to make a home for art in the fields, forests, and shorelines that surround him, he launched Wood Point Art Projects with the multi-artist presentation titled the Ark. He is awaiting the outcome of a court injunction launched to forbid the existence of the word “impactful,” and has a pending copyright claim for the word ©Unique.Â
