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Fabienne Lasserre at Parisian Laundry
Walking into Fabienne Lasserre’s exhibition Les Approaches at Parisian Laundry, I immediately envy the Brooklyn-based artist’s practice in a very physical way. I want to stretch with the shapes of her...
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The pen moves across the earth... at Blackwood Gallery
The danger in asking someone to look closely is that they’ll focus their gaze and lose sight of all that surrounds them. If you want someone to become more attentive to the world, it’s better to ask...
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Derek Dunlop at Lisa Kehler Art + Projects, Winnipeg
“I value difficulty,” Derek Dunlop concedes at the close of an interview accompanying End-Forms, his first solo show at Lisa Kehler Art + Projects. By this point it in the conversation, it goes without...
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Once Removed at InterAccess, Toronto
Computers make bad art. That's what I concluded after visiting InterAccess's current group exhibition entitled Once Removed. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the curator’s point, but it's still worth...
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Three Sheets to the Wind at Avalanche!, Calgary
Calgary has become a hotbed for grassroots artist-run activity operating outside of the longstanding government-sanctioned centres in the city. Avalanche! is on the leading edge of this group of...
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Gathie Falk at Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
Gathie Falk’s fifty-year retrospective at Equinox Gallery is a forest of repeated objects. In the west gallery are piles of oblong ceramic spheres glazed to resemble fruit and snowballs, and then...
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Apprehensions at Circuit Gallery, Toronto
Unless you’re kidding yourself, all landscape photography is now a horror show. It’s soaked in death and each image is a memento mori that includes us all – not just “you will die”, but “we’re all...
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2015 Critic's Picks
Traces That Resemble Us was this year’s essential screening series. Hosted by the Pacific Cinémathèque, each film was chosen and often introduced by an artist whose practice is informed by or...
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2015 Critic's Picks
When I moved to Calgary late in 2014 I definitely never expected to see the NDP win a provincial election. It was the most pleasant of surprises. Still harbouring trauma from BC’s most recent...
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2015 Critic's Picks
It was a decisive year for Canada as a nation. We became politicized in a way that I’ve never witnessed before, and the Montreal art community was no exception. As I sifted through the projects and...
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Patrick Mahon at Katzman Contemporary
My mother was a gardener and my father was a sailor. The relevance of this didn’t occur to me until about twenty minutes into my visit to Katzman Contemporary to see Patrick Mahon's exhibition Nonsuch...
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2015 Critic's Picks
It might be year-end burnout talking, but 2015 has seemed like less than a banner year for art in Winnipeg. There were modest highlights, certainly, but these came punctuated by some discouraging...
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2015 Critic's Picks
The email that rocked Toronto’s art community and sent shivers across the country landed smack dab in the middle of the year on an otherwise innocuous afternoon in June. Jessica Bradley Gallery was no...
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2015 Critic's Picks
BlackFlash 32.2 feature artist Scott Fitzpatrick’s live DIY filmic experiments using film loops, projectors, and appropriated designs and patterns were a highlight of the magazine’s launch in April....
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2015 Critic's Picks
Even though it was outside the province in Moncton, one of my favourite exhibitions of the year has to be Sam Kinsley’s Drawing on Economy at Galerie Sans Nom. Her drawings on white expanses of paper...
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Liz Magic Laser at Mercer Union
I hang around with children pretty often and I think I learn more from them than they do from me. Not in a direct way like they're instructing me, but through epiphanies that register when dealing with...
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Sarah Anne Johnson at Division Gallery
As deep winter sets in, with the holidays fade behind us, and there is little respite until spring, Sarah Anne Johnson’s Field Trip at Division Gallery gives us work that is all about blissed-out...
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Rita McKeough & Niki Boghossian at TRUCK
TRUCK, arguably Calgary’s best known artist-run centre is starting 2016 with a set of cracker exhibitions: ambitious new work from Calgary performance pioneer Rita McKeough and Toronto-based artist...
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Peter MacCallum & Gordon Peterson at Diaz Contemporary
Peter MacCallum has been dealing with object-oriented ontology since well before anyone ever coined such a phrase. He is a human camera, assiduously documenting things – stores, concrete factories, the...
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Laura Piasta at Access Gallery
Sounding the Ultraviolet, Laura Piasta’s exhibition at Access Gallery, did not catch my attention at first. There is something underwhelming or perhaps even inhospitable about encountering such cleanly...
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