Interviews
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History Maker
If Stan Douglas weren’t a filmmaker, video artist and photographer, he’d be a writer. He thinks like a writer. When he talks about his projects and bodies of work, how they come into being and how they develop, it is like listening to a novelist outlining a plot, setting a scene or describing a character. He provides a narrative frame in which stories and characters present and configure themselves, often in complicated situations.
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Riding on the &
In 2011 the artist Iain Baxter officially registered the trademark “&” with the Intellectual Property Office of Industry Canada. Iain Baxter became IAIN BAXTER&. It was a sensible, even inevitable transformation
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The Beautiful Lament
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Making in the Not-Knowing
Toronto-based sculptor Jen Aitken stresses the importance of intuition as “a valuable form of knowledge and expertise.” She sees it as having a double register: for her as an artist, it’s a way of making, and for us as viewers, it’s a way of perceiving…
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The Structure of Connecting
Throughout the 30 years he has been making art, initially in Germany where he was born, then in Vancouver and London, UK, where he was educated, and now in Winnipeg where he lives and teaches, Holger Kalberg has been attracted to the ways in which paintings are structured.
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Picturing The Red Line
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The Weight of History
Richard Serra told us that he came to a place in his work where he didn’t want people to be simply looking at a single object; he wanted them to experience the work by going through it.
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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 Many Faces of Suzy Lake
In the case of Suzy Lake, contemporary art history has had to go back in time to recognize her present achievement. From the beginning she was interested in the places where pictorial formats crossed over into one another.
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The Synonym Revealer’s Life
There is a playful sense of menace in Farber’s work. One blog entry includes a list of “Songs improved by replacing the word love with the word blood,” and among them is “Blood Me Tender,” a tune that reimagines Elvis Presley as a crooning vampire. The imminence of something that approximates tender bloodletting, and other kinds of chaos, is everywhere visible in Farber’s paintings and drawings. These activities are more genial than gruesome. Things forever teeter on the edge of some anticipated occurrence, the conditions and consequences of which are not immediately apparent.
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Painting’s Giant Dialogue
Kim Dorland
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Showing Nothing, Showing Everything
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