The Clifton St. group show, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia (2019)

Photography by Seamus Gallagher, images appear courtesy of the Anna Leonowens Gallery

The Clifton Street group show is a collaborative exhibition between four friends living together. We imagined our living room in the Anna Leonowens and what it might look like to welcome our friends and community into that space. The gallery is filled with furniture and fixtures from our apartment, items like couches, a worn coffee table, posters and junk collecting on walls, all of them lived in and occupying space in our lives. The traces of our everyday living in the gallery for one week. Very quickly the contrast between the work and articles of our everyday become skewed. An amalgamation of work, domesticity and play, a fun house of the artists’ lives. This exhibition is a meditation on the labour of gathering and inviting guests into a shared space.

Andrew Thorne’s work explores the fluxus of shared-living spaces by using the ephemera and residues of the apartment, such as hand written notes and other litter. The silk-screen series the “Green Notes”, uses a collection of green sticky notes that someone scattered throughout the Clifton St. apartment during a party. These prints act as posters and images hung on the walls of our home, reflecting the collaborative nature of this space.  

As artists and roommates, we see friendship as a collaboration. Whether we are collaborating on conversation, or deciding what to do today, there exists a creative flux. Just as art uses these fluxes to make our lives more interesting and allows us to see a little more, a good friendship uses these same fluxes to show us and embody beauty and love.