"Closely Related", an exhibit featuring mixed media paintings by Taiya Barss and wood and stone carvings by Joshua Barss Donham, opened at Lyghtesome Gallery in Antigonish on Monday October 4th, with an afternoon reception and the artists in attendance. Mother and son, both artists currently live and work in Halifax, but their work relects years of living in a rural environment on the shores of the Bras D'Or in Cape Breton.
Taiya Barss was born in Boston, Massachusetts and immigrated to Canada in 1973. She studied at Antioch College in Ohio and graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has exhibited in New England and extensively throughout Nova Scotia for the last twenty years, including several group shows at Studio 21 in Halifax, Centre Bras d'Or Festival of the Arts, Baddeck, the University College of Cape Breton Art Gallery in Sydney, the Far and Wide '94 and '96 exhibits organized by Visual Arts Nova Scotia and Ars Sacra, Halifax in 1984. In addition to solo exhibitions mounted at St. Mary's University Gallery in Halifax and the University College of Cape Breton, she has participated in two-person shows on three other occasions, once with Anne Richardson at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, and twice with well-known Nova Scotia photographers, her brother, Peter Barss, in 1984 and more recently, Carol Kennedy in 1994. This is her first mother-son show. She has contributed to several Lyghtesome Gallery exhibits beginning with the gallery's 10th anniversary "Celebrations" show in 1985, "Workings of the Spirit" in 1989 and several of the Miniature Art shows held in recent years. Taiya Barss received a Nova Scotia Arts Council grant to study in Italy in March of this year and following the exhibit at Lyghtesome, she will be exhibiting at the University College of Cape Breton with fellow Nova Scotia artists Dawn McNutt and Nick Marsh in a show called "Connections" that opens November 19th in Sydney.
Taiya Barss' paintings are delicately layered mixed media works that reveal the natural world's inherent organic cohesion. She renders luminous tangible elements of sky, water, earth, plant and creature, surrounding the emotional fibers of animated life forms with a dense primordial atmosphere. Each painting manifests as much mystery as it does beauty surrounding dragonflies and owls, turtles, fish and frogs, green and growing things, pointing to the immense yet subtle complexity of their make-up and that of the environment out of which they emerge.
Joshua Barss Donham's stone and wood images also emerge effortlessly from the raw ground of their being. Frogs, lizards, fish and spirit beings rise out of the natural forms of a choice variety of woods (spalted yellow birch, burnt red manzanita root, black cherry, yellow staghorn sumac) and two types of stone (grey and white alabaster and yellow to green serpentine/marble). Barss Donham brings deeper color and grain to the emerging figure with a high polish, while leaving the remaining wood or stone in its original found state. As he explains: "One of the greatest pleasures I take in my work is being outside scouring the beach and the woods for material for carving; this must take up half my time. The moment in the process that always takes my breath away is seeing the beautiful colors and grain pattern emerge from a weathered, bark covered, and seemingly unassuming piece of wood as the surface is carved away."
Joshua Barss Donham was born in Massachusetts in 1970 and moved to Kemp Head on the shores of the Bras d'Or Lakes in Cape Breton two years later. Growing up in a creative household, he began drawing before he walked and was introduced to carving at the age of twelve. He studied printmaking and oil painting in high school and went on to obtain a degree in classics at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. During university he began working with the Cape Breton wood artist, Clair Ryder, and started applying his carving skills to both wood and stone. He has participated in group shows at Centre Bras D'Or in Baddeck, the North Sydney Artists' Association, Acadia University, Cape Breton School of Crafts and the University College of Cape Breton.
"Closely Related" will be on exhibit until October 30th and will be followed by a solo show of work by Ron Hazell entitled "Revisiting Antigonish". The show marks the 20th anniversary of Hazell's first solo show as an artist held at Lyghtesome Gallery in 1979 when he was teaching at St.F.X. University in the Engineering Department.
