Features
In the Atmosphere
On January 20, 2021, Jill Biden highlighted a Robert S. Duncanson painting at the US inauguration reception. Find out about Duncanson’s years in Montreal and connections with Canadian artists in this story from our Fall 2020 issue, “Chroma”
In the Atmosphere
On January 20, 2021, Jill Biden highlighted a Robert S. Duncanson painting at the US inauguration reception. Find out about Duncanson’s years in Montreal and connections with Canadian artists in this story from our Fall 2020 issue, “Chroma”
Footnotes from Moscow
We arrived in Moscow on a red-eye, soon to discover that there was not much red left in Russia. (I was with my partner, who was on another art-and-philosophy-inspired assignment, this one to the long-closed city of Kaliningrad, or Königsberg if your nostalgic inclinations are particularly Prussian.)
To Curate or Not to Curate
On the occasion of the curatorial tragedies that are documenta 12, curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, and the International Art Exhibition of the 52nd Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, I would like to examine some aspects of curatorial practice and the difficult and somewhat misunderstood condition in which this profession finds itself at this point in time.
The Bike Lane
There’s nothing like this year’s headlines to make Futurism feel like a quaint remnant of the past. Enamoured of internal combustion engine–propelled speed and flashy automobiles, it’s a school that’s hard to make a case for during our current moment of global warming and rising gasoline prices.
Ed Pien: Drawing Hauntology
The art of Ed Pien fully describes the embodied, multifaceted world of demons, investigating what I read as a phenomenological manifestation of what Jacques Derrida termed hauntology. It is ironic how embodied and present they are— within their ethereality—in contrast to our increasing bodily and material obsolescence and sedation as mortals within virtuality and simulacra.
Giardini Birdland
Those who have visited the Venice Biennale might recall the unusual character of the Canadian Pavilion. Built by Italian architects in 1958, the wood, steel and glass building is surrounded by lush greenery and discreetly nestled between the pavilions of Germany and Great Britain.
Adrian Stimson: Buffalo Boy at Burning Man
Every August, Buffalo Boy returns to Burning Man, an annual festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. During this week-long festival, the inhospitable desert is transformed into a temporary city in which difference and hybridity are embraced and connections among subjugated peoples are forged.
Walter Redinger: Ghost Ship
No ideas but in things, wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams in 1944. He did not know Walter Redinger, who came of creative age a couple of decades later in London, Ontario, and in Toronto. But in writing that terse line—a controversial proposition about reality, a summary manifesto about art, a world view in five words—Williams could have been prophesying Redinger’s art, which his words perfectly characterize.
Warhola: A Horror Film
The prosthesis was a telltale sign. We all had one; forty extras in the first room at least. Without asking, we were each given one for free. Even before we reached the admission desk, it was a necessary interface.
The Surface of Space
In September of 2001, I left Vancouver to accept a teaching job at the University of Waterloo. One circumstance of the move has been an unexpected gift to me as an artist, namely the fact that the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics arrived in Waterloo just before I did.