Articles

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  Pretty Upsetting at the End

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  Life is Puzzling

  Édouard Levé wrote Autoportrait in 2005. It was followed by his book Suicide in 2007, and then by death at his own hand so shortly after. The English edition appeared in 2012, seamlessly translated by Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, if you can say about a book of apparent fragments that it is seamless…

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  The Landscape Going on Without Us

  For Jennifer Carvalho the Anthropocene is not an endgame. “It’s an in-between time,” she says. “I’m not trying to emphasize an end but a line of thought that leads away from ourselves. What does it mean if the world has a will of its own and what is our relationship to that? What would the world look like without us?”

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  Resolving this too, too sullied melting snow

  Erica Mendritzki has spent so much time looking at snow that she has become an aficionado of its properties. Her low-key, close-valued colour sense combines the snowy and the muddy in equal measure in what the Winnipeg-based painter calls her “late winter in Winnipeg palette.”

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  Fine Lines

  Wanda Koop, one of Canada’s most distinguished painters, has always been able to find ideas in the work she has already done that suggest ideas she might develop in what she is about to do. That connection is particularly apparent in the “Sky-Line Paintings,” a new series that developed out of a four month-long stay in New York City from January through May of 2015.

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  The Man Who Falls to Earth

  David Alexander, an Okanogan-based artist, admits to a sense of landscape wanderlust; he has painted in Iceland, the Arctic, Scotland, Taos, New Mexico, in Saskatchewan where he lived for 23 years, and in British Columbia where he was born. He recognizes that his pursuit places him out of step in the current art world.

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  Taking the Polymath Test

  Chris Cran, the Calgary-based artist, educator and arts advocate, is a picture-making polymath. There is no visual language he doesn’t understand well enough to mimic, transform, redirect and dismantle. At various points in his distinguished 35-year-long career (which is being recognized in May of 2016 with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Ottawa), he has performed all these functions. Cran has made art making, particularly painting, a pursuit coloured by his uniquely inventive and playful intelligence.

  Cran first came to public attention with a virtuoso series of self-portraits begun in 1984 and which continued for another five years. Their combination of wit, art historical awareness and skilful rendering made them irresistible. His occupations are various; he joins combat nymphos in Vietnam, reflects on eye and nose charts, visits art galleries, watches television and reads famous books.

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  The Uncertain Certainty: States of the Art of Painting

  Painting, it appears, has more lives than a cat. No matter the height from which it falls in critical estimation, it always lands on its feet and from there, walks in its own particular direction. Or let me hold this most human activity in the animal kingdom: painting is the phoenix art, gathering and re-forming from the ashes of its previous self.

  To help us assess the current state of painting we asked six artists to address what are the central questions they face in their studios. The responses, as wide-ranging, personal and individual as their practices, were generated without prejudice from the heart and the head.

  Allison Katz, David Salle, Tal R, Cecily Brown, Amy Sillman, Melanie Authier.

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  Painting’s Whole Being

  Joffe is an engaged reader and makes frequent references to writers she admires. The American poet Emily Dickinson is one, and in the following interview Joffe was asked if she makes tight tonal shifts in her paintings equivalent to the small but significant alterations Dickinson made through the substitution of a single word. Joffe’s response was that there are painters who paint in a manner closer to the way Dickinson writes, and she does see in her own work moments that make that connection but added, “it’s very hard to describe in the act of painting the way that hard things sit against soft things.”

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  Thoroughly Modern Lawren

  Dislocation seems an apt word in looking at the decade of Lawren Harris’s paintings selected for the exhibition, “The Idea of North,” co-mounted by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It is curated by the Hammer’s Cynthia Burlingham, the AGO’s curator of Canadian Art Andrew Hunter and Steve Martin, and will open in Los Angeles in October, 2015.

  Border Crossings talked with Steve Martin who, as well as being one of the exhibition’s curators, is a noted comedian, actor, screenwriter (in June 2015 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute), playwright and a splendid novelist.

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  Poring and Pouring: The Physical Body and Its Gestures

  Benglis’s work in every medium speaks to the more ungovernable corners of the human imagination. The work glitters and then glitches, it is transcendent and excremental, it moves from the curvaceous to the crepuscular.

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  Indigenous Criticism

  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.

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