Articles

Beauty’s Mindless Attention

Irma Blank, in her ninth decade of life, what she calls her “second life,” achieves a suspension by means of her drawing that may be “writing.” She says on this point that what she is doing is writing, not words that make writing what it essentially is but the gesture.
Where Mystery Leans on the Side of Suspicion

When she is thinking about art, Toronto-based mixed-media artist Nadia Belerique holds in her mind both space and material; for her, material is content, while space is context.
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
Mountain Man

Simon Hughes’s one-person exhibition opened on March 5, 2020, at the Peel Art Museum and Archives in Brampton, Ontario, and closed a week later due to the coronavirus. The gallery, smartly, has decided to continue the show through October 12, which is a good thing, since the work deserves a large audience.
Total Horizontal Integration

Each in his own way, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, the partners in Development Ltd., is a dreamer. What they have dreamt up is a movie company that operates out of total vertical integration.
Subjectivities

In the span of three years three books have been made available to readers in North America where the simple statement “I am my own subject” could apply.
Clarice Lispector: The Thereness of Language

Everyone who reads Clarice Lispector grapples with the figure who can’t be interrogated now, since she died in 1977, and couldn’t be queried any more readily when she was alive. To read her is to enter a state of involuntariness.
Andy, We Hardly Knew You

In his lifetime Andy Warhol took an inventive approach to the facts of his biography. At different times he claimed to have been born in 1929, 1930 and 1933; he even lied about his age to his doctor; and he changed his place of birth from Philadelphia to Newport, Rhode Island, and to Cleveland.
Reverence Points

A piece of used carpeting measuring 100 by 74 inches, with white paint or primer on the surface, doesn’t add up to much unless you read the marks and find there a representation of the Annunciation in one of its many iterations. Think of 14th- and 15th-century paintings by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci. Two figures in profile, the angel, often on the left, carrying the divine message, and on the right, the humbled, astonished recipient, seated or kneeling.
“First We Take the Museum”

Long-time design collaborators Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft have made a practice of working with colour and light. From the colour strategy they employed for the interior corridors at PlugIn ICA in Winnipeg, to the public sculpture commission, “HOFA,” in Berlin, Germany, the team uses colour to provoke new forms of interaction within public space.
AR Penck

I hadn’t guessed that AR Penck was quite such a hero in his hometown. It hadn’t even occurred to me when I was booked into Dresden’s Penck Hotel that the coincidence of names was anything more than that, a coincidence— but no, I found the lobby filled with marvellous canvases by the artist, named Ralf Winkler by his parents, a 1939 son of the city who died in 2017.
Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford ’s show “Cerberus” at Hauser & Wirth in London consists of nine paintings and a video. The video is Dancing in the Street, and has Martha and the Vandellas projected, recorded and filmed flickering across city blocks, fences and garages on a drive through Los Angeles.

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