Creating A Scene: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association
By the early ’80s the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London had become a rich incubator of architectural speculation and the gathering place for the liveliest architectural discussions from around the world. The ringmaster of this potent construction was Alvin Boyarsky (1928–90), a Canadian who had studied architecture at McGill University (1946–51) and undertaken graduate studies in urban planning at Cornell University (1957–59). His meticulous and inventive curation of the AA stemmed partly from his critique of architectural education at the time and also from a fascination with how architecture might evolve during a period in which Modernism appeared to have run its course. Keep Reading
Being Architecture: The Passion of Phyllis Lambert
As a student at Vassar College, Phyllis Lambert found the question of influence—as it was then taught—to be superficial. “I disliked that enormously, it was like saying that the wind blows this way so the artist or philosopher did that.” Provoked by simplistic narratives of causality and easy connections that amount to little more than trivia, Lambert readily speaks of the precedents, traditions and especially of the wide range of factors that combine to shape architecture. Keep Reading
“Touch is the taboo of Western-style museums. They are sites of discipline. They demand that individuals control themselves, particularly that we repress touch, taste and smell in order to sharpen vision and imagination […]” David Garneau discusses institutional marginalization. Keep Reading
Tammi Campbell is known for works that look like Modernist hard-edge paintings in progress, with particular focus on the Modernists’ use of tape. Included in this series are meticulous, halffinished greyscales where masked sections are readied for a new application of paint. Other pieces are explicitly based on Frank Stella’s signature stripe paintings but made with what appears to be masking tape alone. The works exist in a state of anticipation, awaiting the application of pigment and the eventual peeling off of all the tape. Keep Reading
On Not Walking With Our Sisters
Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore and Cree curator and critical writer Richard W Hill’s criticisms of “Walking With Our Sisters” reveal perplexing issues in Indigenous cultural politics that are barely discussed in public—the challenge of the secular Native, and Indigenous criticism of Indigenous culture. Keep Reading
Erica Eyres’s short films tend to hint at stories which are hard to pin down, and do so with a certain awkwardness which may arise naturally and which Eyres chooses not to edit out. She prefers to embrace an aesthetic which seems somewhat amateur and slightly off-kilter but is still visibly produced, more akin to bad TV or instructional videos than to the home products of the Internet. Keep Reading
The Artful Life of Colleen Heslin
Today she is a painter who stitches her pictures together. But for many years, the artist Colleen Heslin was perhaps best known, around Vancouver art circles anyway, for her project space called the Crying Room, a completely self-motivated curatorial project by an emerging artist studying at Emily Carr, intent on showing other emerging artists. Keep Reading
The Montreal based painter, Chris Kline, has mentioned his attraction, his listening to the Jacob van Ruisdael painting The Linen Bleaching Grounds Near Haarlem, 1670. In this landscape painting, the rectangular fields or grounds are shown from a distant viewpoint, with their hundreds of rectangles of whitening fabric spread out on the earth in grids, under tumultuous cloudy skies. This concern with fabric and textiles is a theme we see unfolding in the works of the painters Chris Kline and Dagmar Dahle. Keep Reading
The Nomadic Paintings of Martin Golland
Over the last 10 years, Golland has executed what are arguably some of the most restless paintings being made today. Profoundly nomadic in their mien, with contents splayed out like warped architectures gone awry, they extrude upon us like rude kinetic tropes of the built world. Keep Reading
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