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Inside at the Blackwood Gallery | Anders Oinonen at Cooper Cole
Just as Jack Gladney, the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, hides a troublesome professional secret (despite having established the academic discourse of Hitler studies, he can’t read or write...
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Fastwurms at Paul Petro | Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline at Katharine Mulherin
One lady said, “They are witches, you know.” And her friend said, “Oh, that’s so funny.” And the first said, “No, they’re really witches.” Then they tried to puzzle out what that really meant, while I...
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Eleanor King at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Quiet singing drifts through a narrow corridor. There is a dark room at the end of the hallway filled with the sound of waves and Eleanor King’s voice rising and falling above them. Projected on the...
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Jason Simon at Artexte | Jean-Marie Delavalle at VOX
If you’re looking for programming that features contemporary art as well as contemporary art histories, the 2-22 building is where it’s at. In the last few years both VOX and Artexte have mined the...
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Kristiina Lahde at Koffler Gallery | Subway at Stephen Bulger Gallery
A lifelong dedication is required in order to be a straight man. It’s not the type of role you can step out of with a wink and say, “Just kidding!” You have to live it and leave the punters always...
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Burnt Generation at The Founders Gallery
The Founders Gallery is a strange entity hidden within the labyrinthine Military Museums. I remember elementary school class trips to the latter, trying to correctly assemble a naval officer’s uniform...
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Lyndal Osborne at the Art Gallery of Burlington
If I just come right out and tell you that seeing Lyndal Osborne’s current exhibition was like staring at the surface of the sun, would you understand what I mean? Probably not. But since it’s the...
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Christopher Reid Flock, Iris McDermott & Christina Sealey at the Carnegie...
Christopher Reid Flock’s first exhibition since winning the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery’s Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics late last year amply demonstrates this accomplishment through the...
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Yesterday Was Once Tomorrow (or, A Brick is a Tool) at Plug In ICA
A few brief visits to Yesterday Was Once Tomorrow (or, A Brick Is a Tool) can hardly be expected to give a complete picture of Canadian artist-run publishing in the 1990s. Despite superficial...
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Sign, sign, everywhere a sign at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery |...
Having graduated in the early nineties with a degree in Semiotics, the Five Man Electrical Band song Signs has a special place in my heart (though I must admit I first heard it sung by Tesla, which was...
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David Kaarsemaker at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill in Ottawa
In The Fragile Surface, an exhibition of recent work at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill, David Kaarsemaker adds to the dialogue between painting and photography. His pictures are surely about painting,...
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Border Cultures: Part Three (security, surveillance) at the Art Gallery of...
Border Cultures: Part Three (security, surveillance), the final iteration of the Art Gallery of Windsor series by curator Srimoyee Mitra, takes on a vast range of issues related to agency, violence,...
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Barbara Lounder at Hermes
Among the images that compose Barbara Lounder’s Daybook, currently on view at Hermes, only one has a title of its own. With T. H., to the Stone Table is one of the few observational drawings in the...
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Maggie Groat at Erin Stump Projects | Niall McClelland at Clint Roenisch
In the process of explaining Maggie Groat’s current exhibition at Erin Stump Projects to a friend, I had to backtrack a number of times lest I misrepresent her work as being something that it wasn’t. I...
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Sophie Calle & Simon Starling at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal
Simon Starling and Sophie Calle both create work that tells a story, but in most other respects they are polar opposites. He makes cerebral projects steeped in research, whereas her art is full of...
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Wanda Koop at the Winnipeg Art Gallery | Nic Adamson at C Space
The Winnipeg Art Gallery, a Tyndall stone sarcophagus at the best of times, was especially dead when I ducked in this past Saturday. In fairness, the museum is between major shows: after five months,...
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Krista Buecking at Susan Hobbs | Felix Kalmenson at Pari Nadimi
I thought for a second I had stumbled into a dentist’s waiting room, what with the jaunty but characterless piped-in music and the colourful but meaningless framed paintings on the walls, but I...
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Mathieu Latulippe at Division Gallery | Lyse Lemieux at Katzman Contemporary
There are times – usually after I’ve just exited a biennial-sized smorgasbord of all the weird and wonderful things that contemporary art has to offer – when everything I happen upon feels like an...
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Talk Show at SBC Gallery
When I need a little distraction from work I love to watch old episodes of the BBC chat show Parkinson on You Tube. The repartee and storytelling, particularly in some of the 1970s clips, are...
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Jacinthe Loranger at Maison des artistes | Marijana Mandusic at C Space
I’ve never been to Montreal, but I’ve built up an image of art in that city based on the trickle of shows that make it to Winnipeg. I’ve come to anticipate the inevitable silkscreen installations, the...
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