| Lisa Baldissera, Bruce Johnson, & Shauna McCabe

The exhibition Beauty Queens began as a partnership between curators of three institutions located on significant Canadian island. Intrigued by the conditions of cultural production that exist in these settings of varying scales and with differing political and cultural relationships to their "mainlands," each curator selected artists from their locale as well as artists from an international site through which to deepen and extend the investigation. The resulting exhibition presents the work of thirteen artists whose work emerges from and reflects on their positioning in locations that are at once centres and margins. In the inter-weaving of artistic visions, what emerges are common concerns of identity and environment, history and tradition, cultural and social compression, as well as distance and communication.