Engaging with art demands vulnerability and builds the muscles we need to navigate conflict, political resistance, suffering, and healing in our community and our world. This exhibit challenges viewers to embrace both the beautiful and the broken parts of themselves. Nina Bailey-Dick’s powerful batiks and collages are a feminist declaration of love for the land, self-love, and a call to action: Speak up, take up space, make art, and share vulnerability to build the resilience needed for personal and collective healing and action.
Nina says: “I am a feminist, white, Mennonite, cis woman choosing to play big by defying my own internalized patriarchal conditioning that pressures women—especially aging women—to play small, take up less space, and shrink.” Now in her fifties, grappling with grey hair and society’s assumptions about older women, Nina uses her art as a visceral, political act of resistance and self-love. "If you see an older woman, do you assume that she is a visionary leader? An expert?" she asks. “The impetus behind this exhibit is me confronting and changing my internalized patriarchy that tells me to just stay within the lines.”
This exhibit asks us to own and even value our own cracks and messy layers, refusing to choose between suffering and contentment, brokenness and beauty. Nina reminds us that holding both in tension is our work.
We invite you to come and engage with the themes layered into the collection that assert the personal is political:
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Capturing reverence for the sky over farm home and city home, and gratitude for mysterious Divine healing found even in everyday beauty - like hydro wires - while also questioning where home truly lies.
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Grappling with colonized/deforested landscapes of beautiful, serene fields that are also tragic landscapes; maps that carved land into pieces with white men’s names on them. Land that was stolen from First Nations.
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Experimenting with back-lit pieces as a metaphor for what might shift our self-awareness when we open our eyes to see something from new angles with new insights.
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Letting art be broken and beautiful and even temporary. Like humans. What if art is not precious or merely pretty, but ripped, fading, evolving, and temporary?
This exhibit will be open from Saturday, April 4 to Wednesday, April 29.
Parking for the Exhibit
Parking fees apply Monday to Friday from 7:30 am until 7:30 pm. Parking can be purchased through the Honk Mobile app (Zone 9072) or through the Honk QR code (no app needed). The QR code is available in the main entrance vestibule or at the reception desk. Parking can also be purchased with cash or credit at Grebel's reception desk. Parking rates are $3/hour up to $9 per day.