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Pamela Norrish at Glenbow Museum
Ok, full disclosure – I am currently under contract at Glenbow Museum doing some curatorial work. That said, I had absolutely no direct involvement with Pamela Norrish’s exhibition. This was the work...
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Counterpoints at the Art Museum
If you’re only going to see one exhibition this summer, then you’re not trying very hard. For those with efficiency on their minds, the current preponderance of clever group exhibitions invites the...
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Terroir at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Terroir is a word used on vineyards to refer to a combination of factors – including soil, climate, and sunlight – that give grapes their distinctive character. Terroir is also a survey of Nova Scotian...
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Down to Write You This Poem Sat at Oakville Galleries
Similar to when an actor tries their hand at singing or when a singer appears on screen, I experience a noticeable scepticism and disdain when visual artists encroach on the world of words. Part of it...
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Yael Bartana at Walter Phillips Gallery
I gave my companion a hearty eye roll when the gallery assistant at the Walter Phillips Gallery initially outlined the screening schedule for Yael Bartana’s On Cohabitation exhibition. I am a bit jaded...
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The Algorithmic Imagination at InterAccess
The prejudice against art as the progenitor of artifice, deception, and metaphysical decay goes all the way back to Plato, but science shouldn’t be let off the hook too easily. Particularly in the...
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Isabel Nolan at the Contemporary Art Gallery
The sixteen works in Isabel Nolan’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery come across like a group show. Titled The weakened eye of day, it mines the poetry of geological time, citing Greek...
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Between Land and Sky at Olga Korper Gallery
I just returned from two weeks in and around Vancouver and, as my wife (who happens to be from BC) routinely pointed out, Toronto is ugly and boring compared to the west coast metropolis. What with...
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Ulla von Brandenburg at The Darling Foundry
I was glad to learn that Ulla von Brandenburg would be showing at The Darling Foundry this summer. Her bold visual and historically based practice has been of interest to me for a while. Camped in the...
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DIY at MKG127
When I read the acronym DIY, I immediately think of the sloppy diagram of three guitar chords with the text: This is a chord, this is another, this is a third, now form a band. To me it's the essence...
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Clay Bodies at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Crafting is an act inextricable from the body. The maker is ever present through form and clay is especially physical. Whether the visible fingerprint is left impressed or is smoothed away, clay...
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Theaster Gates at the AGO
While I was sitting in my car on Dundas waiting for the Art Gallery of Ontario to open, the rapper k-os was on CBC radio trying to explain what he meant when asked about an old quote in which he said...
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Caitlin Thompson at Esker Foundation
Caitlin Thompson’s Dandy Lines in the Esker Foundation storefront project space is a work in constant motion. Her opulently embroidered capes turn and flutter atop wooden kinetic sculptures that are...
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Wanda Koop at Division Gallery
There is a particular time of the year when the sun sets directly along the east-west axis of Toronto’s main thoroughfares. It makes the evening’s commute hazardous if you’re heading west (and, I...
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The Great Outdoors
Half of my summer was spent weathering traffic congestion and heat waves while chasing down exhibitions. The other half was spent trying to escape the city in search of open spaces and cool breezes. No...
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Steve Hubert at Duplex
The inaugural exhibition at Duplex, a newly established studio and project space in Fraserview, is a modest group of works by Steve Hubert with the oblique title Dragging the Deleted Block into the...
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Matt Crookshank at General Hardware
When I first met Matt Crookshank, he was in the first phase of survival for any young artist – that period after art school when one has to figure out how to pay the rent, feed oneself, and find the...
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The Edge of the Earth at the Ryerson Image Centre
There's a fundamental contradiction between the theme of The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video, now on view at the Ryerson Image Centre, and the works it exhibits. This...
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And yet we still remain, going around, and again in dominion's plot at the...
It’s not clear what to expect from an exhibition with the title “And yet we still remain, going around, and again in dominion's plot....” It’s a group show at the Dalhousie Art Gallery featuring,...
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Divya Mehra at The New Gallery
Now on display at The New Gallery, Winnipeg-based artist Divya Mehra presents three new works informed by the experience of losing her father Kamal (June 15, 1948 – May 22, 2015) last year. It’s really...
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