“The sea is everything,” wrote Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe.… It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.” As such, no human vision of the sea can be finite; each connects and merges with those of others elsewhere, sometimes quite distant in space and time. Keep Reading
You’d be forgiven for wanting to dig your fingernail under the masking tape stuck to the surface of a Matt Schust painting, but you wouldn’t have much luck peeling it off. The trompe l’oeil is effective and not something expected in what is ostensibly dyed-in-the-wool abstraction. The commitment to the pictorial space of abstract painting is, ironically, what saves these representational tricks from being a banal gimmick. It’s an irony made credible, perhaps, by earnestness. Keep Reading
Is happiness a fiction? Reflecting on “Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism,” an important new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, we might be inclined to think so, even if the exhibition is one allegedly in pursuit of that most august of ghosts. Keep Reading
In a photograph titled Open Ocean, an older man, a woman and a teenager row a punt filled with belongings through a dark night. The vessel, their clothing, bags and a large wood-framed mirror all reflect a rich orange glow that catches the surface of the black water around them. Even the end of the paddle is luminous through the waves. This is the first in a series of photographs that forms a narrative spine for Will Gill’s new exhibition, “From the Lion’s Den.” Keep Reading
Talent-spotted at 16 years of age, in Mexico City, by John Skipping, a visiting Royal College of Art sculpture professor, Helen Escobedo enrolled at the college the following year, 1951. She stayed in Europe for four years, primarily at the RCA Sculpture School, then led by Frank Dobson and staffed by, among others, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Ossip Zadkine. Keep Reading
What is a gardener’s universe? Are its constellations made up of clustered globes of tomatoes and eggplants? Do black holes of compost suck up the sun’s radiant energy and all manner of decomposing plant matter, concentrating it in their loamy depths? Keep Reading
Two years ago the Gallerie dell’Accademia initiated a program—coinciding with each Venice Biennale—of showing modern art in its newly refurbished ground floor spaces. The idea is to examine the influence of traditional techniques on current practices. First came a widely acclaimed Philip Guston show, now Georg Baselitz follows. Keep Reading
Joseph Tisiga’s multidisciplinary practice is at once enigmatic and forthright, fantastical and banal. In interviews, he has spoken of giving mythic shape to what might otherwise be too concretely described as the legacy of colonialism—the complex of psychological, social, economic and cultural challenges facing Indigenous people today. He has also said that his work is underlain by a kind of “sublime nothingness” that stems from his experience of Whitehorse, the place he moved to in his youth and where he is still based. “It’s the core of banality, for me,” he told Momus in 2016, “the way it’s been represented by, say, Samuel Beckett.” Keep Reading
In this lean, powerful and timely exhibition, the Chicago artist, activist and practising urbanist Theaster Gates draws upon a daunting archive of Black American popular imagery with a decidedly feral and interrogatory eye. The making of cultural meaning and the legacy of Black images are meaningfully interwoven in “The Banner Waves Calmly.” It is the most recent in a continuing litany of similar interventions with, and articulations of, archival materials by Gates. In fact, the works presented in Montreal are integral to a more expansive production on display contemporaneously at the Prada Foundation in Milan. Keep Reading
There’s a lot going on in a Katie Bethune-Leamen installation. Walking into one of her exhibitions is like entering the middle of a lively conversation. Her sculptures don’t actually speak, but they contain such a heady mix of loose association and specific detail that their connective potential keeps growing and metamorphosing the more time you spend watching them. Keep Reading
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