Confederation Centre Art Gallery Presents Winter Exhibitions Celebrating Craft, Labour, and the Living World - Confederation Centre of the Arts
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Confederation Centre Art Gallery Presents Winter Exhibitions Celebrating Craft, Labour, and the Living World

(Charlottetown, PE) – Confederation Centre Art Gallery welcomes visitors this winter with two brand new exhibitions and one revamped exhibition. From contemporary sculpture and textile work that reframes “women’s work” through a feminist lens, to a rare selection of Canadian fine craft and painting drawn from Expo 67, these exhibitions invite audiences to consider how objects carry stories of bodies, botanicals, place, and history.

Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground

Main Gallery Exhibition | Co-curated by Jennifer Matotek and Laura Ritchie
January 31 – May 17

Sarah Maloney, RCA is a contemporary sculptor and textile artist nationally recognized for her compelling representations of botanicals and the human body. Working across media ranging from embroidery to bronze, Maloney challenges assumptions about craft, artistic labour, and “women’s work,” drawing attention to the value systems that shape what is celebrated, collected, and preserved.

Pleasure Ground showcases artworks created between 1993 and 2021, tracing Maloney’s artistic development while highlighting her ongoing explorations of sexuality, reproductivity, economics, and colonial systems of representation. Meticulous, witty, and grounded in historical research, Maloney interprets mythology and symbolism using labour-intensive techniques from welding to stitching. Through a feminist lens, her work reflects on Western history and culture, and reconsiders icons of Western colonialism such as museum collections, domestic gardens, and landscape art. The results are joyful and striking depictions of plants, bones, and organs that speak to gender, pleasure, desire, and power while also hinting at the structured nature of our biological, social, and economic systems.

Organized by Art Windsor-Essex. Toured with support from the Canadian Heritage Museums Assistance Program through Access to Heritage.

Out of Hand

Concourse Exhibition | Curated by Jill McRae
January 24 – May 3

Out of Hand, presented within the Gallery’s concourse, is an exhibition of Canadian fine crafts and paintings originally assembled for the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67, which was an influential moment when the nation’s arts and crafts movement was distilled into a showcase of skill, material knowledge, and regional identity. This collection was originally assembled by Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s first Director, Moncrieff Williamson, and it offers a timely reflection on the enduring desire for hand-made objects.

In a world shaped by ready-made goods and mass production, we continue to seek connection through objects that proudly display their makers’ marks—objects that carry the evidence of touch, time, and technique. “Hand-made objects hold a wealth of information about the places they come from. They tell the story of a region’s natural resources, the people that live there, and show us the rhythms of everyday life,” says Jill McRae, the Art Gallery’s Conservator.

Together With Time

Island Focus: Brenda Whiteway
December 16 – Mid February

This part of the exhibition Together With Time features a rotating selection of Prince Edward Island artists. The second Island Focus shines spotlight on the work of Charlottetown-based Brenda Whiteway, who was recently awarded the Father Adrien Arsenault Senior Arts Award, honouring the lifetime achievement of a Prince Edward Island artist every two years.

Whiteway’s allegorical paintings explore the shifting patterns of life and the effects of modernization in rural Prince Edward Island. Her work juxtaposes elements from disparate sources and moments, ranging from personal family history to observations from nature; a favourite rhetorical device is the insertion of smaller pictures within a larger painting, generating meaning through an internal conversation between images.

The Gallery will host its Winter Exhibition Opening Reception on January 31 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. All are welcome to attend this casual event to meet, mingle, and explore the new exhibitions. Artist and curator tours begin at 2:45 p.m. More details are available on the Confederation Centre website.

Photo: Sarah Maloney, Collapse, 2009, antique fainting couch, bronze, fabric, 74 × 66 × 194 cm
Photo: Morrow Scot-Brown

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Media Contact

Jillian O’Halloran
Manager, Communications & Community Engagement
Confederation Centre of the Arts

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