War is the theme of Stephen Andrews’s recent McMichael exhibition, “Aftermath,” curated by Sarah Milroy. Adjacent is the blockbuster exhibition, “David Milne: Modern Painting,” which Milroy also curated, including Milne’s lesser-known work as a war artist. Next to the Milne exhibition is “The Sleeping Green,” Dianne Bos’s series of photographs taken at former battle sites along the Western Front. Collectively, the three exhibitions mark the Armistice centenary, and Milroy has further linked Andrews’s exhibition with Milne’s for common ground in their respective portrayals of war. Keep Reading
The first comprehensive exhibition of Paul Klee’s work in Canada in over 40 years, the Berggruen Collection exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada comprises 75 paintings created over the span of his all-too-brief career. The amplitude of works, chosen to reflect this span, broadly reveals the playful variation achieved from a personal lexicon of reductive form, shape, sign and cipher but, above all, reduced scale. Examples of his ceaseless experimentation with paint and surface move from ink drawings and watercolours to oil paintings and monotypes. Few artists in the modern era have had the ability to reveal such an expansive inner world in such an intimate manner. Keep Reading
Hervé Guibert’s photographs are portraits of friends and lovers, many of whom appear in his books: Thierry Jouno—i.e., T—director of IVT (International Visual Theatre) and CSCS (Centre Socio-culturel des Sourds), on which Guibert based his novel Des aveugles(1985); Vincent Marmousez, the boy-love muse of Fou de Vincent (1988); the Belgian writer Eugène Savitzkaya, with whom Guibert had a decade-long exchange, collected as Lettres à Eugène: Correspondance 1977–1987, 2013. A few are unnamed, as in Le Poète, who lazily smiles up at him. Keep Reading
The Winnipeg photographer David McMillan was first drawn to Chernobyl as a subject eight years after the disaster. He had read a 1994 cover story in Harper’s by Alan Weisman entitled “Journey Through a Doomed Land: Exploring Chernobyl’s Deadly Ruins.” Weisman was accompanying a team of American and local scientists attempting to a create a tool kit for survival in a toxic landscape. Keep Reading
A recent survey of work by American artist Carolee Schneemann depicts both the pleasures and costs of an early decision to foreground the body, always politicized, over five decades of production and as many genres. Perhaps best known for key performances such as Meat Joy, 1964, an orgasmic celebration of materiality in which she and others roll about in paint, fish and chicken parts, newspapers and more, Schneemann also made paintings, installations, film and video, and photographs, and it’s this largesse of production that the survey brings neatly into focus. Keep Reading
The amount of video around these days is reaching the point of saturation. A friend, a video artist and educator in the UK, tells me that it’s become the fallback position in the art schools-if you can’t think of anything else to do, you make a video. Lately I’ve had a growing desire to see something I’d call “extreme video,” which means I’d have to strap on the gear and scale a 30-metre wall to see the monitor, or bungee jump into the abyss to find a screen waiting where my nose comes to a stop, before I snap back into the air. Then in November I attended a lecture by Carolee Schneemann, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the “Global Village: the 60s” exhibition currently on view, where she talked about her body of work and screened her most recent video project. The new work pushed me over the edge in to a free fall, no gear, no parachute and no hope for a soft landing. Keep Reading
Presentation House Gallery (PHG) in North Vancouver is a physically unprepossessing space: three modestly made over rooms on the third floor of what was once somebody’s home. Still, those old rooms have hosted an astonishing array of historical and contemporary exhibitions of photo-based art. Recently, PHG undertook the brilliant pairing of shows by pioneering performance and multi-media artist Carolee Schneemann, who divides her time between Montreal and the New York countryside, and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who died in Victoria in 2003. Keep Reading
This an exhibition with an agenda. Carolee Schneemann (born 1939) is famous for her performances and their filmic and photographic records in the period bracketed by Meat Joy, 1964, and Interior Scroll, 1975. The exhibition “Kinetic painting” at Museum Für Moderne Kunst proposes, first, that her work should be seen as expanded painting, thereby challenging the received primacy of medium, and, second, that her whole oeuvre— more than 300 works— should be attended to seriously, from the 1950s through to her current production. Keep Reading
A paladin of New York painting since the 1980s, Ross Bleckner has influenced countless younger artists with his works’ unimpeachable painterly chops, mournful sentimentality and imagery of pictorial space both vast and ethereal. One of these artists—as this handsome exhibition on the two floors of the University of Saskatchewan’s College Art Galleries was designed to demonstrate—Regina-based draftsman Zachari Logan, shares thematic interests with Bleckner, as well as his sense of romantic melancholy. Organized by the Galleries’ curator Leah Taylor with Wayne Baerwaldt, currently an independent curator based in rural Saskatchewan, the show offered examples of several of Bleckner’s aesthetic modes, which range from the abstractly representational to the representationally abstract. A 2018 four-foot-square canvas, Untitled, pictures pale flowers floating in a glimmering silvery green field; blurred out with a dry brush, the image suggests late Monet essayed by early Richter, except that instead of tapping into the nostalgic veracity of old photographs, Bleckner’s painting conjures a fey dream. Yet, a non-representational painting the same size appears the near double of Untitled. The dark ground of Crowd, 2016, features a number of soft-focus splotches that seem to glow from its depths, the points of light approximating the unmoored flowers and vice versa. Keep Reading
“Shining Tapestry,” by Steven Leyden Cochrane, is an exhibition of works made over an 11-year period which includes large-scale crocheted lace “tapestries,” digitally altered images, and mixed media. It is more than just a collection of individual works; it is a window into a genealogy. The beauty of what is assembled reveals a multivalent layering of themes and associations—not merely surface resemblances, but echoes and whispers of ghost-like impressions. The works critically and poetically investigate inconsistencies of subjective experience, loss and the inefficacies of language. Keep Reading
Haven’t found what you're looking for? Explore our index for material not available online.
Border Crossings • 500-70 Arthur Street • Winnipeg, MB • R3B 1G7 • (204) 942 5778 • Toll-free (866) 825 7165 • Fax (204) 949 0793 • Email
Advertise with Border Crossings
Border Crossings wishes to acknowledge funding from the following organizations:
