Projects

FROM THE CURATORS:

Art in the Open includes artworks by more than a dozen contemporary artists from across Canada, the Atlantic Region and PEI. Presented for just one night, in outdoor locations across Charlottetown, the festival offers audiences an exciting opportunity to engage with experimental and non-traditional forms of art, such as performance, sculpture, installation, video art and social practice.

For 2022, many of the artists have been selected around the theme of Outdoor School, a platform for contemporary environmental art led by curator Amish Morrell and artist Diane Borsato. This year’s festival also includes projects by artists from While Black, an upcoming exhibition at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, selected by curator Charles Campbell in collaboration with the Black Cultural Society of PEI. And with the support of curator Kirstie McCallum, PEI artists from past editions of Art in the Open will present new performance and installation-based artworks.

Projects in this year’s festival invite the audience to reflect on their relationship to both natural and social worlds, experiencing different ways of being outdoors, and of being together. They challenge us to expand our ideas of community and sense of responsibility towards our surroundings to include non-human animals, soil, plants and ecosystems. Artists enlist audience participation and learning to explore issues including human/animal relations, climate change, ecological sustainability and treaty relations, as well as access and inclusion, addressing some of the most urgent issues of our time.

For this year’s Art in the Open the artists propose alternate ways of relating to the outdoors and with one another, inviting us to come together and imagine different possible futures.

- Amish Morrell