Articles

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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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  Beauty’s Mindless Attention

  Irma Blank, in her ninth decade of life, what she calls her “second life,” achieves a suspension by means of her drawing that may be “writing.” She says on this point that what she is doing is writing, not words that make writing what it essentially is but the gesture.

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  Droning Paradise

  It is possible to imagine a time, maybe not so long ago, when the year 2020 sounded futuristic. There’s something about the repetition of digits that really stakes a claim in the temporal registry.

• Between the glossies and the grotesque

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  Playing the Fiddle While the Amazon Burns

  Nothing makes an artist feel as ineffectual as the looming climate catastrophe. Its existential pragmatism makes short shrift of poetics to focus on questions like: Who is financing the art and where does their money come from? How much waste is produced from the invitations, posters and flyers? What is the environmental impact of the all show accoutrement—the temporary walls, the climate-controlled rooms—of which the artwork itself is just the tiniest element?

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  Close Stitching

  At school, she was eventually consoled by the peaceful attitude of a teacher. “His name was Mr. Webster and he was always so calm. After I saw him, I was interested in learning English.” Then she adds, “My classmates were like me, abducted from their homeland. But we connected really well and we had an opportunity to have fun each day.” Later on, while she was home on breaks from middle school in Churchill and high school in Yellowknife, her father insisted that she and her sister and brother maintain their first language—written and spoken. Not incidentally, she signs all her work in Inuktitut syllabics.

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  Other Pluralities

  In this exhibition recently opened at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Elaine Stocki—formerly from Winnipeg, now living in Los Angeles—here proposes what appear to be two equally emphasized streams of work, one of images produced photographically, and the other and more recent of the two groups in the form of paintings. It’s tempting to retain the simple notion that photography is about looking and recording the look, and painting is about touching and the immediate touch.

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  Her and You

  Tracey Emin’s new paintings, recently exhibited as part of the exhibition “A Fortnight of Tears” at White Cube, London, reveal an uncommon depth of feeling. Yes, her art in all its many media has always been emotionally demonstrative; you always knew what was on her mind—the passions of desire, abandonment, pleasure, revenge, or whatever was at stake in any given piece—and the work declared the feeling…

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  Of Prayer Wheels & Day-Glo

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  Infra-Mincers

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