Articles

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  “Through Lines”

  Redaction (along with its bedfellows censorship and erasure) may be the archetypal bugbear of democracy—one only has to point to examples like Joseph Stalin’s excising disfavoured figures from Soviet history to stir up fears of state paternalism and oppression. Nevertheless, the increasingly fraught political and media landscape of today’s West may also be prompting a kind of redaction renaissance.

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  “Future Possible: Art of Newfoundland & Labrador to 1949”

  How do you begin to write an art history and what are the vital questions to ask? Which marks are most prominent in the visual culture of a particular place, and which are nearly invisible? What narratives exist and why; where the gaps and erasures?

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  Walter Scott

  Walter Scott’s recent exhibition, “Betazoid in a Fog,” at Saskatoon’s Remai Modern was a complicated mash-up of visual signs that hint at much but resist easy reading. Rather than neatly summing up the exhibition’s theme, its title introduces an offbeat element—Star Trek’s race of telepathic empaths, Betazoids—to create an analogy between reading artworks and reading minds.

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  “Days of Reading”

  Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs” is a tightly edited exhibition of objects, performances, works of sound and light performed on Nuit Blanche, panels, a book fair and lectures. Works by 14 artists are associated by syntactic flow, conceived through four themes: “Appropriated,” “Collecting,” “Cloaking” and “The Reveal”—adjectives, gerunds and nouns that get us on our way.

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  “Tom Burrows,” edited by Scott Watson and Ian Wallace

  Opening this book, I must also open the conversation of a city in crisis. A timely, if tragic, motivation for the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery retrospective and subsequent publication of the work of Canadian artist Tom Burrows is the sudden and surely irreversible lack of affordable housing in the city.

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  Tammi Campbell

  Dear Tammi, I want to start this letter, this meditation on your work, by expressing my gratitude for what you have put out into the world. Your exhibition “Dear Agnes” is a beautiful rendition of the epistolary form that I have come to love in literature, and that you translate so elegantly into the visual.

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  “Surreal Science: London Collection with Salvatore Arancio”

  Italian-born artist Salvatore Arancio has created an unusual one-room exhibition. It combines historic objects from the collection of London-based retired banker and author George Loudon with his own works, integrating the whole into a display akin to the tradition of the cabinet of curiosity.

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  “Live” by Janice Kerbel

  Janice Kerbel’s wide-ranging practice—from typographic posters to choreographed performances of synchronized swimming—can be divided into two broad bodies of work: those to be read, and those to be seen or heard, typically through live performance. LIVE, a new publication of three scripts and a score written by Kerbel over the past ten years, provides the textual counterparts to four of her major performed works.

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  “Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy”

  “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy” was a powerful and troubling show at the Met Breuer in New York, which ran from September 2018 to January 2019. It advertised itself as the first major exhibition to directly tackle conspiracy theory and related themes as its main subject. Whether or not that claim was exactly true, it is certainly the case that the 30 artists whose works made up the show were a highly impressive and broad-ranging selection.

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  “The Silver Cord”

  I had already written the following review when I learned that my friend, the painter and improvisational jazzman John Heward, had died. Instead of amending it, I thought it should stand as is. Here is my latest act of interpretation on work that I have followed closely since 1980.

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  Spiritualisme: Hilma af Klint, Paul Klee, Kai Althoff

  Before global warming and the publication of Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans”, Paul Klee noted in his diary (“The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918”) that in Switzerland the summer of 1911 was one of extreme heat.

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  What More Is There to Say?

  The last thing we see in “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”, the devastatingly important documentary made by filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky, is a text dedicated to Sudan, the name of the last surviving male northern white rhino.

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