ARTS EAST

Monica Lacey continues her story with her visual works and words… (If you missed Part 1, click here ).   Curiousity: a love letter to abandoned houses , digital composite, 2013 © monica lacey 2009-2013 all rights reserved I am currently working on a large installation project for Art in the Open, a local outdoor art festival held in August.   I'm creating an outdoor installation of an abandoned house, but minus the walls, roof and floor.  So the space, in the woods of Victoria Park here in Charlottetown, will be delineated by hanging windows, doors, and furniture.  I'm making personal item-type things to have around the 'rooms,' but the furniture and other materials I'm using are almost exclusively salvaged.   I've had a fascination with/attraction to abandoned houses for years - I have photographed and explored hundreds of them.  I'm interested in the curiosity that drives this exploration, why I/we want to look through someone else...

self-portrait,  digital photograph, 2011 © monica lacey 2009-2013 all rights reserved  Monica Lacey   is a full time visual artist living in Charlottetown. She creates commercial and conceptual work representing a variety of intriguing two and three-dimensional media. In 2011, she graduated from the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design where she was awarded the country’s largest national scholarship for college study—the W. Garfield Weston Award—as well as the  Governor General's Medal. More recently, she was the first artist from PEI to ever participate in a residency at the living museum Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina. When she is not creating visual works, she co-manages a dance collective with her husband and is involved with a number of community arts organizations. Despite her prolific creativity, palpable talent and copious accomplishments, Lacey, humbly, still considers herself an “emergent artist”. In this online exhibit, sh...

Runaway Horses, A novel By Alfred Silver Pottersfield Press (2013) Did you know that in 1849, there was a Nova Scotia Pony Express ? Pony Express seems quite a silly name (although that was also the moniker for the Wild West’s famous horseback delivery service) as some of the province’s fittest and fastest horses were employed. For approximately nine months, riders galloped the 144 miles from Halifax to Grandville Point (now called Victoria Beach), carrying news that arrived from England. They raced against the clock, and the rival Barnaby company, to arrive at the Bay of Fundy dock. From there a steam boat couriered the bulletins to Saint John, where they were telegraphed to the Associated Press in New York. Alfred Silver’s Runaway Horses brings this little known historical gem to life as he invites readers to explore life in Annapolis Royal, Kentville, Windsor, Halifax and the communities in between, from over a century and a half ago. He also adds emotiona...

Bruce and Dylan Guthro, The Trews, The Rankin Family, Stan and Garnet Rogers…It’s not uncommon for professional musicians to sprout from the same family tree. But it’s quite intriguing when kin produce completely different genres of music. Charlottetown’s Paul Broadbent and his son Eric seem to fit this paradoxical profile, at least on the surface.   We asked the folk-rock musician/prolific stage actor and the multi-award winning hip hop artist to answer some questions about one another, to realize their passions are much more harmonious than expected. Eric describes his father Paul Broadbent Q: What's your first memory of your dad playing/singing? EB: It's so engrained in his identity that I can't remember a time when I didn't think of him as a singer and guitar player. Q: How has he inspired your own creativity/music? EB: I ask his opinion on almost everything I work on musically. He taught me how to play guitar and I have used so much of his gea...