Articles

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  Karen Asher

  Winnipeg artist Karen Asher has so far been known primarily for her impressive photography. Her intimate portraits, which could call to mind Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus, are often set in unstaged domestic environments or unidentifiable outdoor locations and focus on everyday people.

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  Swimming Upstream

  Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 9:30 a.m. My wife, Cynthia, calls me to tell me that Robert Frank had died the day before. I’m grateful I learned the news from her. Nearly 30 years earlier, just married, young and finding our way, we moved together across the US—Tucson, Arizona, to Washington, DC—so I could take the job of my dreams, organizing the archive of the world’s greatest photographer-artist.

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  Luminous Being

  In October of this year the Montreal-based, award-winning photographer Benoit Aquin published a book in Paris called La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii (The Network’s Etheric Dimension by Anton Bequii).

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  The Hand Made’s Tale

  Lindsay McIntyre’s films are familial and cultural meta-narratives; at the same time that they tell the story of her Inuk great-grandmother’s life, they also tell the story of their own making.

• Words About Pictures

  In this suspicious and cynical time it is obligatory, in the interests of transparency, to admit to something referred to as “full disclosure.” Since I am a creature of my time, here is my admission: I am a print interview freak.

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  Recovery Artist

  Alex Bierk has both feet firmly planted in the present because he has two feet rooted in the past. His past was a difficult one: an accomplished family with six siblings to emulate, and fail to measure up to; the death of both parents four years apart; and a lengthy descent into various addictions followed by a nine-month-long rehabilitation.

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  Objective Portraiture

  Luther Konadu, the Winnipeg-based photographer and writer, is on a roll. In 2019 he won three national competitions: BMO’s 1st Art!, the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award and the Salt Spring National Art Prize. He has done residencies at Salt Spring Island and at Gallery 44 in Toronto, where he was writer-inresidence, and was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’ magazine to do a portrait of Roberto Carlos Lange, the electronic folk pop singer who performs under the name Helado Negro.

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  Entanglements

  A discriminating survey is the most tantalizing and revealing of exhibitions because it tells us much, and promises even more. Entanglements, which includes 60 paintings by the perennially gifted Gordon Smith, is one of those exhibitions; it indicates how much he has achieved in his distinguished career and for how long he has done it.

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  Remembering Gordon Smith

  The first time I saw Gordon Smith, he was delivering a talk to a group of students at what was then the Banff School of Fine Arts. I was 19, enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Calgary and, in an attempt to catch up on credits after switching my major from English to fine arts, was taking a summer painting course in Banff.

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  Nancy Spero: Grit and Grace

  For me it all started in 1991 in Munich at the Glyptothek. First visit there and unsure about the city with its place as a fertile bed for the rise of the National Socialist Party, indeed its foundation was there in 1919. Even though it was May, the weather had turned and we were faced—dressed in light jackets, jeans and sneakers—with angled sheets of rain and snow…

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  The Best Damn Way to Write History “Mike Wallace Is Here,” directed by Avi Belkin

  It takes four minutes and 14 seconds before the title of Avi Belkin’s brilliant documentary about legendary American journalist Mike Wallace finally turns up. That interval is a capsule of what the remaining 127 minutes will reveal: that Wallace’s 60-year-long career was more complicated than you could ever guess by simply watching the game-changing, compelling interviews he did on 60 Minutes, beginning in 1968 and continuing until his retirement 37 years later.

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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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