Articles

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  The Heart of Absence: Patrick Modiano

  Fleur Jaeggy is the most accomplished scribe of detachment. In her collections of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX and Last Vanities, and in the novels, SS Proleterka and Sweet Days of Discipline, there is a prevailing sense of isolation—readily recognizable as the epidemic condition of our time—an almost truculent inability to connect, and desperation without surfeit. And here is Patrick Modiano as heartbreakingly accomplished in these unfortunate states as she is, describing the daily coming into being of the abandoned child who builds a person from the sad materials of neglect, lack of regard, of never having been held, or insufficiently—and then overlooked and left behind.

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  Tracing meaning from Scratch

  Rosa Barba doesn’t settle. The Italian-born, Berlin-based artist is constantly shifting her way of thinking about the art she is making. She is primarily a filmmaker and sculptor, and her inclination is to see how much expansive pressure she can put on the formal confinements of the two disciplines.

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  Angelic Order

  Memory’s dark twin is forgetfulness. Because of its presence, history is often obliged to curl back on itself so that it can set in motion a different story. Chuck Smith’s 78-minute-long documentary on the place of Barbara Rubin in New York’s film and music underground in the 1960s is a film that puts memory so unequivocally back into the historical narrative, it is impossible to view the years from 1963 to 1968 in the way they had previously been presented.

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  Writing the Song of Myself

  In the beginning was the word and the word got fleshed out. That would be the opening line in Sean Landers’s version of his Bible, were he to write one. It would be a kind of secular new testimony because, for him, language is the medium and the message. When I say, the word gets “fleshed out,” I mean it literally.

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  Etching the Language of History

  “Memory is the crux of my practice,” says Toronto-based printmaker, sculptor and installation artist Emma Nishimura. When she interrogates how memory functions in her work, a series of questions emerge: “How do we share it, how does it weigh on us, how do we pass it on?” Nishimura, who won the prestigious Queen Sonja Print Award in 2018 from a list of 42 nominated printmakers around the world, is currently one of eight artists included in a compelling exhibition at the ROM called “Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World.”

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  Cycling the Life of Language

  Lois Andison has a particular interest in concrete poetry because it is both visual and textual. Her tree of life is the 11th installation in the smallest and highest art gallery in Canada, the BMO Project Room. Situated on the 68th floor of the Bank of Montreal tower in downtown Toronto, the 8.11 x 17 x 9-foot space was conceived by Dawn Cain, the curator of the bank’s Corporate Art Collection. She also selects each project.

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  The Unblinkered Vision

  In 1952 Akbar Padamsee, a 24-year-old painter from Bombay, was awarded an art prize by André Breton in Paris for his painting Woman with Bird. It was a signal event in a life that took him back to India, where he set about to create a dialogue between artists in his country and the international avant-garde. From 1969 to 1972 in Delhi and Bombay, he established the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) to further that interdisciplinary conversation. It met with mixed results in India, but his naming and vision have been picked up in Canada by curators Catherine Crowston from the Art Gallery of Alberta and Jonathan Shaughnessy from the National Gallery of Canada for “Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada,” an exhibition that opened last September at the AGA and that is currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, where it will remain through March 23 of this year. (It will then tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and the National Gallery in Ottawa until 2020.)

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  Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan

  A paladin of New York painting since the 1980s, Ross Bleckner has influenced countless younger artists with his works’ unimpeachable painterly chops, mournful sentimentality and imagery of pictorial space both vast and ethereal. One of these artists—as this handsome exhibition on the two floors of the University of Saskatchewan’s College Art Galleries was designed to demonstrate—Regina-based draftsman Zachari Logan, shares thematic interests with Bleckner, as well as his sense of romantic melancholy. Organized by the Galleries’ curator Leah Taylor with Wayne Baerwaldt, currently an independent curator based in rural Saskatchewan, the show offered examples of several of Bleckner’s aesthetic modes, which range from the abstractly representational to the representationally abstract. A 2018 four-foot-square canvas, Untitled, pictures pale flowers floating in a glimmering silvery green field; blurred out with a dry brush, the image suggests late Monet essayed by early Richter, except that instead of tapping into the nostalgic veracity of old photographs, Bleckner’s painting conjures a fey dream. Yet, a non-representational painting the same size appears the near double of Untitled. The dark ground of Crowd, 2016, features a number of soft-focus splotches that seem to glow from its depths, the points of light approximating the unmoored flowers and vice versa.

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  Steven Leyden Cochrane

  “Shining Tapestry,” by Steven Leyden Cochrane, is an exhibition of works made over an 11-year period which includes large-scale crocheted lace “tapestries,” digitally altered images, and mixed media. It is more than just a collection of individual works; it is a window into a genealogy. The beauty of what is assembled reveals a multivalent layering of themes and associations—not merely surface resemblances, but echoes and whispers of ghost-like impressions. The works critically and poetically investigate inconsistencies of subjective experience, loss and the inefficacies of language.

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  “Soulèvements/Uprisings”

  To someone whose research focuses on aerial perspectives, the notion of “uprising” has a particular weight to it. In taking stock of the world from above, you variously visualize a hierarchical system that is based on a vertical model, be it in the form of drone surveillance of contested territories or seeing skyscrapers from above. To describe an uprising in terms of weight may seem oxymoronic—“to rise” is to suggest a kind of weightlessness or a disobedience to the laws of gravity. However, an uprising is not weightless; it is heavy, corpulent, dense, and it is in this mass that it finds momentum. As Elias Canetti reminds us, “A large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly.”

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  Gordon Parks

  Gordon Parks (1912–2006) dedicated his seven-decade-long photographic career to exposing truth, injustice, poverty and inequality. He began photographing in the 1920s, and in the 1930s had won a Fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA). His stark black and white documentary style was modelled on photographers whose work he admired, and developed further during his time with the FSA.

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  Anna Boghiguian

  A huge canvas hangs in the atrium of Museum Rupertinum in Salzburg. This awkward site-specific installation, “Trade and Birds,” leads visitors into this retrospective-style exhibition, which showcases countless works, drawings, collages, artist’s books and installations, and concludes with a reproduction of one of Anna Boghiguian’s many artist’s studios.

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