Charlottetown – The Confederation Centre Art Gallery will officially launch six new shows on Saturday, March 7 at 7 p.m. These exhibitions vary greatly, ranging from the oversized works of Big Art, Big Idea to the intricate Mi’kmaw baskets and creations of Ursula Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn (‘Do You Remember’), to the quiet intensity of the early 20th century female convicts presented in portraits in Second Chances.

A part of the RBC Emerging Artist Series, Second Chances is Charlottetown artist Heather Millar’s first major solo exhibition. Painted on copper, the works show off Millar’s technical ability, but also her passion for the subject matter. The images are derived from the prison mug shots of an assortment of women in 1920′s Australia who all served time at the State Reformatory for Women in Long Bay, New South Wales.

Showing in the Centre’s concourse gallery, Restless Vision: The Art of Marcel Barbeau is a collection that spans the career of the distinguished Quebecois abstract artist. The painter and sculptor was one of the original signatories of the ‘Refus Global,’ a 1948 artistic manifesto dedicated to independence and spontaneity and was also member of the Automatists, an avant-garde movement that emphasized the unconscious as a wellspring of creativity and the expressive gesture of the individual artist. A member of the Order of Canada, Barbeau has always stayed loyal in his work to a constant search for wa ...