saltbox: contemporary arts festival

2018

This exhibition is the remnants of the scheduled performances by Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Hazel Meyer, Jerry Ropson, and Adrian Stimson during the 2018 Saltbox: Contemporary Arts Festival. Saltbox also included programming such as Biscuit Box Cabaret for student and community artists, panels addressing issues relevant to visual arts and culture in Newfoundland. During the run of the Saltbox exhibition, Grenfell Art Gallery served as a forum for public engagement events in partnership with Visual Artists Newfoundland & Labrador, AIDS Committee of Newfoundland and Labrador, Community Youth Network, and Community Mental Health Initiative.

Presented in conjunction with a series of generative panels, public forums, and events hosted at Grenfell Art Gallery and the wider Corner Brook area, the festival features leading contemporary performance artists from across the country including Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Hazel Meyer, Jerry Ropson, Adrian Stimson and the inaugural Saltbox writer-in-residence Amy Fung.

The festival’s name, Saltbox, references a form of vernacular architecture commonly associated with Newfoundland, reflecting the festival’s intention to resonate with specificities of place. Curated by D’Arcy Wilson and Matthew Hills, Saltbox draws on regional cultural traditions of Newfoundland such as folk music, storytelling, and theatrical rituals such as mummering, to mine the experimental and speculative potential of performance and contemporary art in a context specific to rural Newfoundland.

Saltbox: Contemporary Arts Festival is supported by Memorial University’s Public Engagement Accelerator Fund, the School of Fine Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts. The Saltbox logo was designed by Chris Friel.