Doing Our Own Thing, a conversation with Amish Morrell

Amish Morrell / /

EVENT: Sunday, August 23 @ 7PM

In the early 1970s, hundreds of people fled from major cities to rural parts of Atlantic Canada, heading “back-to-the-land” and forming a counterculture that was shaped by its isolated rural surroundings, as much as by global forces such as the sexual revolution and new communications technologies.

Join us Sunday, August 23 at 7 PM in Connexion ARC​’s main space, for a conversation with Amish Morrell, using artworks and documentary fragments to talk about recent local history.

The discussion will look at National Film Board photographer George Thomas’s images of back-to-the-land families, read from personal accounts of a free-school in Cape Breton which focused on sexual exploration and discovery as a way of overcoming social repression, discuss publications like the Whole Earth Catalog, Cape Breton’s Magazine, and Harrowsmith Magazine, and consider projects by contemporary artists such as Fenn Martin, Simon Brown and Sheila Wilson.

Amish Morrell is Editor of CMagazine​, an international publication of art and cultural criticism, and co-curator of “Doing Our Own Thing: Going Back-to-the-Land in Atlantic Canada during the 1970s” an exhibition presented by the Cape Breton University​ Art Gallery, and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery​.

IMAGE: George Thomas, “Forest Glen” (early 1970s)

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