Articles
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What’s at Stake? The Canadian Presence at the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition
In his published remarks as the President of the 15th International Venice Architecture Exhibition, Paolo Baratta describes the time in which we live as one “characterized by an increasing disconnection between architecture and civil society.” EXTRACTION, Canada’s entry in the 2016 Exhibition, takes a wide view of the practice of architecture and focuses on the processes and attitudes that have produced some uncivil conditions in Canadian society.
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Figures of Influence
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.
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Figures of Influence
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.
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Martin Golland
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Marginalized by Design
“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.
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Degrees of Subversion
Nature may play a role in how we look but nurture determines what we become. Fred Wilson grew up in a mixed Caribbean and African American family with a devotion to learning. There are now three generations of educators in his family, so it is not surprising that he would find himself a teacher as well, in public galleries, universities and, most significantly, in his role as one of America’s most persuasive conceptual artists.
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Duping the Plunderers
For a dozen years, an image from the Iraq war lodged in the mind of Winnipeg artist Ian August. When the time came for him to make a new body of work, the image became especially generative. “I remembered when the Baghdad museum was being looted there was a picture of an American tank sitting by while looters walked out with everything from office chairs to busts. I wanted to bring it back to one event in which I could get all the stuff involved in that photograph.”
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Paint the Revolution Without Me
Vigée Le Brun was a 23-year-old self-educated portraitist when she was summoned to Versailles in 1778 to paint Marie Antoinette, a young woman who was exactly her age. Vigée, as she was called, was sociable and beautiful, but what made her especially attractive to the Queen and the world of the ancien régime was her unparalleled ability as a portraitist.
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A Danceable Feast
The evolution in Marcel Dzama’s drawing made him an ideal choice to do the set and costume designs for the world premiere of the New York City Ballet’s production of The Most Incredible Thing.
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David and Goliath
Karl Mattson’s art has focused on a series of sculptures he calls “Life Pods;” beautifully awkward objects made from found industrial and farm materials that are also survival chambers, equipped with oxygen tanks and communication devices.
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Frank as Ever
Don’t Blink, Laura Israel’s feature documentary about photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, makes it easy to forget how unusually close she has taken you to the world’s most influential living photographer, an artist who changed the history of his medium.
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Robert Walser: looking at pictures and the soft, cold, lethargic sun
Engaged with art writing as I am, it is with some nervous reluctance that I ask myself, what is it? What is it that art criticism, art writing is supposed to do?
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