The Call of the Great Indoors

I missed going to art exhibitions during the early phases of the pandemic. I’m sure artists and curators felt the lack more acutely, but brushing up against art in the company of strangers excites and inspires me, and I lost that source of pleasure for some time. Galleries and museums put resources into online exhibitions, and art creators and appreciators found their own ways to contribute through digital activities like re-enacting famous artworks with household items as props in the #betweenartandquarantine trend (Barajas 2020; Compton 2020). But art is not the same when set in the grey screen instead of the white cube (see O’Doherty 1986). I was happy, then, to receive an email from the Hermes Art Gallery announcing an exhibition running from February 20 to March 28, 2021 called ESCAPE / The Great Indoors, curated by Liuba González de Armas, Halifax’s Young Curator at the time. In this piece, I explore the exhibition in its pandemic-era context through interviews with the curator and one of the artists, its written documentation Hermes is a cooperatively run gallery space around the corner from where I live in the North End of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Housed in a small building that could have originally been a store or a home, it is about the size of two large living rooms, though painted the traditional art-gallery flat white. It is the white cube domesticated, and its small scale is the reason why ESCAPE could take place at all. Mentored by the directors of three university art galleries, González de Armas was supposed to do curatorial work in each of those spaces during her year as Halifax’s Young Curator, but the pandemic shut universities down. Hermes emerged as an alternative exhibition space, a small institution not bound by the same COVID-19 restrictions as the campuses. Hermes could comply with provincial public health directives and still exhibit. González de Armas put the exhibition together quickly. As an emerging curator, she sought emerging artists, keeping an eye out for kindred queer or racialized artists. She assembled four “cozy, bright, and colourful” works that explore and “seek to re-enchant” domestic space. Anna-Lisa Shandro’s textile installation, Back to your roots, spreads like an indoor bower over one side of the gallery. Embroidered and knitted leaves and vines and flowers climb up hanging handmade blankets and dangle from the ceiling. The installation looks like a chunky woolen Andy Goldsworthy piece, but its arrangement is less precise, its elements less precarious. Shandro tells me they are all made from remnants, thrifted, found, or gifted; “they really are fallen leaves from another project.” As handicrafts made from scraps, they are domestic in form but also in process: Shandro made them at home while watching television or listening to a podcast, during a time when she was working eight hours a day to make medical gear. They were a way to “come back down to my roots, spend some time with myself.” Gradually, she gathered a textile forest around herself: Shandro plans to make it her living room decor when she moves house. This appeals to me too, a den in the woods made into a blanket fort. I would settle down inside it and fondle its fuzzy forms, daydreaming with my fingers. The perspective seems askew, a wide angle in a tight space, though it could just be a funny Halifax bathroom in an old house. A door to the right opens onto a room with red walls and a carpet. González de Armas tells me that the bathroom is actually a composite of fictional and real spaces. The …