Articles

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  Light | Space | Camera | Language | The Work of James Nizam

  Nizam explored these domiciles during nighttime dérives, occupying and photographing a seemingly unconscious zone of civic and psychic ruin.

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  Complex Polyphonies: Sounding the Art of the Otolith Group

  The Otolith Group has become widely known for the criticality of their research-based video, film and installation works. These demand we think and rethink questions of colonialism, race, time and the subject’s relation to these categories through a range of technologies, ideological filters and speculative possibilities.

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  On Letting Go: How Art Institutions and Artists Are Correcting History

  It is difficult to discuss the unprecedented upheaval of the past year without sounding clichéd.

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  Picasso Remixed

  Responding to Picasso’s enduring influence, Barry Schwabsky writes: “The only way to become a historical successor to a Picasso was to transcend him completely.”

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  Telling Details: The Painted Life of Salman Toor

  We know well that certain subjectivities have been privileged over others throughout history; painting proves no exception. The works of 37-year-old New York painter Salman Toor grapple with that history by manifesting a hitherto underrepresented subjectivity.

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  The Unstoppable Paintings of Philip Guston

  On the June weekend that “Philip Guston Now” was scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, thousands of people were in the streets protesting the killing of George Floyd. The words BLACK LIVES MATTER had been boldly painted onto 16th Street, one block from the White House where a nasty, racist president sat fuming.

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  Quilt World

  It’s difficult now to fully imagine what it was like to see Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts for the first time—not on a museum’s clean white walls but draped over a card table in a flea market or spread out on a couch in a living room. Though far less exotic, I imagine it must have been a little like hearing Robert Johnson on a Mississippi street corner or in a juke joint in the 1930s: you would be startled, and even baffled, by the sudden and unexpected presence of something profound.

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  Donald Judd

  The significant retrospective of the work of Donald Judd at the MoMA comes at a tragic and dire time. This was our first museum experience where we were aware of COVID and our last museum visit because of COVID. In the moment we found the extreme absence of excess in Judd’s work oddly soothing.

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  Studies of Vacancy

  Inspired by her rambling Victorian home in London, Ontario, Kim Ondaatje’s serigraph series “The House on Piccadilly Street” embodies both the serenity and the malaise of being homebound.

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  A Dependant Inquiry into Certain Normal Predicaments of Human Divinity

  “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement…. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.”

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  Webbing the Nest

  Luanne Martineau created The Knitter Woman in the winter of 2019 in response to an invitation by the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). With a curatorial premise that asked artists to “envision and create a ‘nest’ to cope with the end of the world, however it may come about,” the group exhibition was conceived in “response to our current tumultuous and polarized world where we see the rise of Nationalism, the clashing of belief systems, environmental destruction and the fight to mitigate climate change.”

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  Building Ideas

  It’s true there are no visitors, but the art is still there, and I wonder if the unobserved world of the museum is changed by the absence of its requisite viewers.

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