Borderviews

The Democratizer

Vancouver-based photographer, videographer and bookmaker Ho Tam is committed to the idea of a picture democracy. In his recent exhibition at Winnipeg’s Platform Centre for Photographic Art, he brought along only a quarter of the 400 images he had taken for a series called “Posers”…
Stoke Signals

If you were a regular gallery-goer and had wandered into the limestone-clad entrance to the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Eckhardt Hall on the evening of November 18, you would have thought you had entered the wrong building…
The Stone Snake

Louis Bakó has been a presence in the Winnipeg art scene for 50 years. His family emigrated to Winnipeg in 1957, fleeing the revolution in Hungary. As a child, he had been interested in art and that dedication continued into his adult life…
The Beauty of Being Boxed In

The work of Winnipeg artist Brian Hunter traces a process of ongoing and inventive transformation with the object he is painting, transforming into different subjects. A letterpress box that was used as a display case for trinkets his wife’s grandmother had collected has been changed into a body of paintings that touches on everything from architecture to an engagement with the history of modernist painting.
Figuring Forms

When Arlene Shechet decided to call her current exhibition of porcelain sculpture at The Frick in New York “No Simple Matter,” she was underlining two things about her attitude towards art-making. “I was using matter as both idea and material. The word is commonly used in both ways and I like that slippage,” Shechet says. “The other thing is our culture views porcelain as a simplistic, frilly material and I wanted to have the show address the fact that it is much deeper and more complex than that.”
Painting Paintings

Words freed Eric Fischl to make images. In the process of writing his celebrated memoir, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas in 2013, the American painter came to recognize what the art world had become.
Forensic Architecture

“Reporting from the Front” is the name picked by curator Alejandro Aravena for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Among the exhibits in the central pavilion is The Evidence Room, developed by Robert Jan van Pelt, Donald McKay, Anne Bordeleau, Sascha Hastings and a team of students from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. The Evidence Room, which has an accompanying book, will be on exhibition in Venice from the 28th of May to the 27th of November.
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.
Painting by Numbers

Winnipeg-based multimedia artist Collin Zipp is intrigued by the things that can happen to paintings; they can be admired, appropriated, copied and stolen. In his recent work he has concentrated on a combination of the last two—copied and stolen—the former being a response to the latter.

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