Artists: Gisele Amantea, Lorne Beug, Victor Cicansky, S. Paul Cloutier, Jack Cowin, Eva Dennis, Zach Dietrich, Olive Dracup, David Dreher, Charley Farrero, Gabriela Garcia-Luna, David Garneau, George Glenn, McGregor Hone, J. Houssey, Marsha Kennedy, Jefferson Little, Joanne Lyons, Don McVeigh, Clint Neufeld, Anita Rocamora, Campbell Tinning, Harold Treherne, Russell Yuristy

Drawn from the MJMAG’s permanent collection of both art and heritage artifacts, the exhibition Stilled Lives explores the subject matter of still life in various forms and approaches within historic and contemporary art practices. This exhibition is positioned in dialogue with Alison Norlen’s works in Odyssey, which investigate a domestic setting with its collections of accumulated objects. In this varied selection of still life works and in the collections of pieces composed together, we stretch and play with the concept of still life, even creating a traditional still life with museum artifacts.

Still life is a European artistic tradition that flourished in the 16^th and 17^th centuries in Northern Europe (the Netherlands) before spreading across the continent. Originating from the Dutch word stilleven, it became a popular genre for depicting arranged inanimate objects, both natural and man-made, which often carried deep symbolic, moral, or religious messages. It includes the genre of Vanitas, still life compositions that present visual reminders of the impermanence of life and certainty of death. Objects depicted in Vanitas paintings would typically include skulls, clocks, rotting fruit or meat, and decaying flowers.

Marsha Kennedy’s work, Setting II from her Stilled Lives series, which inspired the title for this exhibition, references traditional Vanitas painting in its depiction of a dead cedar waxwing on a china plates within a domestic table setting. Presented as a diptych, the work includes an etched label, engraved with the scientific name of the bird and an anthropomorphization of its song, alluding to museological practices of distanced scientific categorization of natural species. In the depiction of a domestic, Victorian table setting, this work acknowledges European domestication of nature, speaking to the impact of settler history and western progress on natural species, especially migratory birds.

Métis artist David Garneau’s contemporary canvases are also rooted in the tradition of Vanitas symbolism. Garneau’s still lifes offer metaphorical meanings in their positioning of subjects that reference Indigenous traditional knowledge in dialogue with everyday objects that reference European colonialism to address Indigenity, colonial history and reconciliation. In Two-Eyed Seeing, a cow skull is stacked on top of a bison skull on a white linen table, suggesting displacement of bison on the Plains with cows.ⁱ The stacked skulls bring to mind the late 19^th century photographs of stacked piles of bison skulls and bones on the Plains, which were then shipped off to England for the bone china trade, perhaps alluding to the implicity of European settlers who profited from the slaughter and decimation of bison populations on the Plains. Driven by westward expansion, the transcontinental railroad and government-backed policies, the systemic decimation of the bison herds served two primary goals: economic expansion and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples of the Plains nations. The title refers to an Indigneous concept of viewing the world, “from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing”, using both of these eyes together.ⁱⁱ With the cow skull positioned as representing European ways of knowing and doing and the bison skull representing Indigenous ways of knowing and doingⁱⁱⁱ, perhaps Garneau is considering what reconciliation may look like when navigating within a post-colonial world.

Joanne Lyons’ multimedia work, Needful Things, presents viewers with a video set within a small chest of drawers of thrifting in a thrift store or second-hand shop. In the video’s depiction of perusing through piles of discarded or recycled belongings, this work speaks to the excess of our consumerist ‘need’.

Cast in porcelain with floral patterned decals like Delft or fine china ware, Clint Neufeld’s Alternator is transformed within the context of the gallery from its original mechanical function as a car part to an object of decorative beauty and leisure as a curio or even museum artifact. While his subject matter speaks of masculine theory, the decorative elements of the work and its presentation on an antique table domesticates it and takes it into the feminine realm. Neufeld’s practice of positioning pre-digital mechanical forms with furniture pieces of a by-gone age, not only creates a sense of nostalgia, but reinforces the notion that these alternators, engines, transmissions and such of the pre-digital age are now things of the past and the social meanings that they once carried are lost. He reclaims this outmoded technology and repurposes it, rendering it useless of its original intent to have audiences reconsider it in a new light and re-examine the meanings they now carry.

Within this cross-pollination of artworks and artifacts that highlights objects in the MJMAG collection, the exhibition is as much about collecting as it is about still life, reflecting on the colonial history of a museum collection in its practice of acquiring objects for preservation and interpretation.

Jennifer McRorie, Curator


i. From correspondence with the artist, May 17, 2026

ii. Quote from Elder Albert D. Marshall on Wikipedia, Two-Eyed Seeing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Eyed_Seeing, accessed May 17, 2026. This concept was introduced by Mi'kmaq Elders Albert D. Marshall and Murdena Marshall from Eskasoni First Nation, alongside professor Cheryl Bartlett.

iii. From correspondence with the artist, May 17, 2026