Reviews
On Charles Campbell and the Underrepresentation of Caribbean Art in Canada
The Jamaica-born, Victoria-based artist has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and Pérez Art Museum Miami—but only recently had his first Vancouver solo show
On Charles Campbell and the Underrepresentation of Caribbean Art in Canada
The Jamaica-born, Victoria-based artist has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and Pérez Art Museum Miami—but only recently had his first Vancouver solo show
Cedric Bomford: Scaling the Heights of Creative Critique
Many cast a skeptical eye at Toronto’s corporate-sponsored Red Bull 381 Projects when it opened. But Gabrielle Moser finds Cedric Bomford’s tower installation there actually reinvigorates the critical potential of artists vis-à-vis their exhibitors.
Making Worlds: 53rd Venice Biennale
Contemporary art all but takes over La Serenissima during the Venice Biennale, spilling out of the Giardini and the Arsenale, the official exhibition sites, to dot the city with additional national exhibitions and special events, disturbing her serenity with art-world buzz.
Reece Terris: Houses Beautiful
For his artwork Ought Apartment, Reece Terris constructed a 60-foot tower containing six full-scale apartments stacked vertically. As Heidi May observes, the work invites us to consider consumerism’s impact on public and private space.
Jeanie Riddle
This year, Montreal has seen a surfeit of shows focusing on the connections between art, music and clubbing. In a solo exhibition at Centre d’exposition Circa, Jeanie Riddle brought a very different tone to the party with a work of silent grandeur called California.
Kavavaow Mannomee
Kavavaow Mannomee is, like Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona, part of a third generation of Inuit artists who are drawing attention to the art made above the Arctic Circle.
Roger Ballen
The anthropologist Victor Turner defined the word liminality as “betwixt and between.” It is a transitional state that involves moving between two existential planes; normal restraints on behaviour and understanding are relaxed, leading to new perspectives. Roger Ballen’s photographs epitomize this process.
The Pictures Generation
In the early 1980s, I framed a photocopy of an art-magazine reproduction of a Sherrie Levine appropriation of a Walker Evans photograph. It seemed a logical conclusion to the appropriation chain, and I can see now how it pointed to the problem with so much of the art made by the Pictures artists: there were simply too many logical conclusions.
Rothko/Giotto
Housed in a modest room in the Gemäldegalerie, this small exhibition nonetheless came equipped with a big catalogue, wall texts and a videoguide. It was substantial support for an exhibition made of only three works—Mark Rothko’s Reds No. 5 (1961) and Giotto di Bondone’s Death of the Virgin (ca. 1310) and Crucifixion (ca. 1315).
Francis Alÿs
Fifteen years ago, Francis Alÿs began shopping at flea markets, bazaars and jumble sales for discarded paintings with which he could build an art collection. Unsurprisingly for an artist whose practice consists of open-ended, exploratory projects, he had no idea what the outcome would be.
Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni, the puckish, baby-faced Italian, has long been beloved by art students everywhere for his Merda d’artista (1961), 90 small cans of what was purportedly his own shit, sold at the time for the price of their weight in gold.