Erica Mendritzki
Hold Everything

September 27 to October 12, 2025
open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm or by appointment

Opening Reception: Saturday September 27th, 2-6pm

Artist Talk: Saturday October 4th, 2pm

Erica Mendritzki is an artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. She is a professor of painting and drawing at NSCAD University. 

States Mendritzki:

Hold Everything is an exhibition of ink drawings of vessels made in very different locations—a château in France, a barn in Germany, and my North End studio, which is located in Veith House, a former orphanage. These drawings were made while people waiting in line for food in Gaza were murdered. They were made while forests burned. They were made during drone strikes in Kyiv. They were made while people protested, and argued, and fucked, and laughed, and grieved their parents, and stared at their phones, and worried about their kids, and talked about painting, and watched the waves hit the shore.

It is hard to take all of life in, and to hold it. 

I make these drawings kind of compulsively, and I think it’s partly because this gives a deliberate pacing to the act of taking things in. Each vessel is a place to put something, anything, everything, even if the task of holding everything is ultimately absurd. Containers break, they get mislabeled, they spill and leak. 

Some of these drawings are scented. In perfumery, the word silage is used to describe the way that scent moves through space. I’m experimenting, here, with how scent can be both a literal and metaphorical way of exploring the silage of ideas, or drawings, or the things we see and experience. Feel free to sniff your way around the show.