Robert Enright

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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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  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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  Making in the Not-Knowing

  Toronto-based sculptor Jen Aitken stresses the importance of intuition as “a valuable form of knowledge and expertise.” She sees it as having a double register: for her as an artist, it’s a way of making, and for us as viewers, it’s a way of perceiving…

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  Material Ability

  Mia Feuer, the Winnipeg-born, California-based sculptor and teacher, turns material into worlds. It is a process she initially recognized as a teenager while working as an unpaid volunteer at Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage, the longest-running outdoor stage in North America…

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  All Sorts of Things That Are Bigger Than Myself

  Phyllida Barlow is a material magician, the consummate alchemist of stuff. She is able to take the most unimpressive things—plaster, foam, PVA, chicken wire, cardboard, sand, polyurethane, lumber, rubber cable, paper, clay and the occasional ironing board or television set—and transform them into objects and environments of irresistible charm, depth and beauty.

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  Inspirational Embodiments

  In 2015 Valérie Blass made a sculpture called “La méprise” consisting of two porcelain objects in flocking, standing on a marble slab and facing a mirror. One of the objects is a black cat with its tail sticking straight up.

• The Destiny of Pictures: The Donald’s Hollywood on the Potomac

  I have been the film columnist for this magazine for 15 years and for many years before that was the film critic for CBC television in Winnipeg. I admit that I had become jaded watching Hollywood producers, year after swampy year, pull from their filmy top hats the same old tired cinematic rabbit tricks, so I take special delight in being able to review a movie masterpiece.

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  The Worth of Living and Loving

  A small new painting by Marlene Dumas in the first room of her recent exhibition “Myths & Mortals” at David Zwirner in New York seemed, by dint of its strange force, to pull all attention to itself.

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  Dark Enlightenment

  David Lynch, a painting student in 1967 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, was working on an all-black painting of a night garden when he sensed that a wind, mysteriously generated from within the canvas, stirred the leaves he had just rendered.

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  Painting in an Expanded Field

  Is it too early to refer to the Owens Effect? I’m describing what happens when a single artist gathers up the traceries of what an art form has been and the trailings of what it has become in the digital age and presents what she makes out of the commingling as some kind of new and generative pictorial language.

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  Image-Grappler

  The art of painting necessarily engages the act of questioning. The questions can be material ones: What surface do I paint on; what do I paint with; what kind of painting do I want to make?

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  The Structure of Connecting

  Throughout the 30 years he has been making art, initially in Germany where he was born, then in Vancouver and London, UK, where he was educated, and now in Winnipeg where he lives and teaches, Holger Kalberg has been attracted to the ways in which paintings are structured.

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