Articles

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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Play Back Playing Forward

How in the world are we to come to terms with Michael Snow’s production and achievement? His migrating categories address a see-sawing taxonomy. “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor…Also, many of my paintings have been done by a painter, sculpture by a sculptor, films by a filmmaker, music by a musician.” The fluctuating list is accurate but not helpful in assessing or explaining what he calls his “manifold practice.”
Hearing Al Purdy

Al Purdy Was Here…You come away from it with a feeling that you have encountered a writer, a location and a country that are so seamlessly entwined as to be inseparable. In setting his documentary sights on Alfred Wellington Purdy, Johnson has assumed an ambitious task: to tell how a poet who showed remarkably little talent for two decades was able to transform himself into a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry and in finding his own voice, managed to discover a voice for his country as well.
Vagaries, Quirks and a Cracked Kettle: The Way of Translation

“I am not frightened of the truth. I am not afraid to tell a secret. But until now, words have been frailer and more cunning than I would have liked.”

–from Meeka Walsh’s introductory essay to Issue 136: Son et Lumière.
“Lost Space and its Remnants: The Hole in the Wall, A Retrospective”
To Russia with Love
Jon Rafman

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