Articles

Sylvie Bouchard
Sky Glabush
Phyllida Barlow
Material Self: Performing the Other Within

Curated by David Liss and Bonnie Rubenstein, MOCCA’s “Material Self: Performing the Other Within,” a major exhibition at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, looked to eight international photographers who use fantasy and masquerade as conduits for self-knowledge and personal transformation.
Painting Places Painting: Dagmar Dahle and Chris Kline

The Montreal based painter, Chris Kline, has mentioned his attraction, his listening to the Jacob van Ruisdael painting The Linen Bleaching Grounds Near Haarlem, 1670. In this landscape painting, the rectangular fields or grounds are shown from a distant viewpoint, with their hundreds of rectangles of whitening fabric spread out on the earth in grids, under tumultuous cloudy skies. This concern with fabric and textiles is a theme we see unfolding in the works of the painters Chris Kline and Dagmar Dahle.
Itinerary of a Traveller through Darkness

Over the last 10 years, Golland has executed what are arguably some of the most restless paintings being made today. Profoundly nomadic in their mien, with contents splayed out like warped architectures gone awry, they extrude upon us like rude kinetic tropes of the built world.
For the Time Being: Blue Republic’s Vanishing Acts

The two-person art collective who show as Blue Republic are partners in life as well as making. Married couple Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski have been creating a wide range of provocative, beautiful and genre-breaking work for years.
The Grand Synthesizer

Bordered by tangled vegetation, the scene is full of the natural energy and cultural incident that compel Smith’s eye, although he insists that he is giving up representational painting. He repeats that intention three times, like a mantra, and then indicates a crowd of recently completed canvasses, leaning against the far wall.
Iconographer of the Local

David Thauberger has an appetite for making, collecting and looking at art that mirrors the prairie space in which he lives; it’s wide-ranging and moves, unimpeded, in all directions. He is visually omnivorous, a disposition that was planted and grew in the layered art historical soil of Saskatchewan, his home province.
Divided Pathways: Painting’s Choice

McIntosh is a highly intelligent painter whose predisposition is to be on the lookout for new ways of using colour and form. “I never want to fully know what I am going to have at the end because then I wouldn’t need to make the painting.” She is especially interested in a wilfully induced pictorial alienation in which what she sees is what she hasn’t seen before.
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.
Meating Place

Working in his Winnipeg studio at the end of 2012, Ufuk Gueray was hungry. The hunger was for change, not food. In one way, he had already had his fill. He was painting garish cityscapes and abandoned plazas with monstrous vehicles driving through them in an oversaturated Pop palette. “I was attracted to that sense of over-the-top colour. It was like eating too many sweets.” He felt he needed an antidote, something salty to offset all that flavour. He came up with was the idea of painting meat, and the container for that sea change was the common sausage.

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