Julian Hou & Sylvain Sailly at Spare Room
Staying out of the sun seems to be the main operation in Julian Hou and Sylvain Sailly’s exhibition Mucking around at the beginning and the end at Spare Room. It opened in the midst of a heat wave and...
View ArticleWavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival
Wavelengths has always provided the best bet for contemporary art heads looking for a fix at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now that the Lightbox has shut down their gallery and the...
View ArticleRebecca Belmore at Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts
The photograph as memory is the point of departure for At Pelican Falls. Now on display at Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, this exhibition is attributed to Rebecca Belmore, but is,...
View ArticleDana Buzzee at The Lily
We’ve descended into a 1970s leather session: grainy black and white posters curling at the edges, leather strap-ons, chokers, O-rings entangled. Leashes hang from black screws. Harnesses hold pointy...
View ArticleAnnie Pootoogook at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection
The exhibition of Annie Pootoogook’s drawings now on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is both a celebration and an elegy. It’s a confirmation of her place in Canadian art history as it...
View ArticleTime, Lines: Drawings from Concordia (1948-2017) at Foundation Guido Molinari
In his 1846 review of Delacroix’s works Charles Baudelaire gushed: “My heart is full of serene joy… I am selecting my newest pens… so happy do I feel to be addressing my dearest and most sympathetic...
View ArticleMaking Models at the Art Museum
Toronto is a city doomed to suffocate due to its own lack of imagination. As more people arrive and more buildings get built, one would hope creative ways to absorb the increased density would be...
View ArticleZane Wilcox at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery
The perceptual play of Regina artist Zane Wilcox’s one-man show at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery is immediate. I catch myself miscounting the elements that make up the installation. I catch...
View ArticleBlake Williams at the Vancouver International Film Festival
I was among friends and about to launch into a diatribe against a film, when I quickly corrected myself: “I can’t even call it a film. It’s a movie.” Couldn’t it just be a bad film? No, I was adamant...
View ArticleMarla Hlady & Christof Migone and Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau at...
The four artists who collaborated on the current exhibition at Katzman Contemporary could easily be considered a Canadian contemporary art supergroup. Marla Hlady, Christof Migone, Chloë Lum and...
View ArticleBodies in Translation at MSVU Art Gallery
Bodies In Translation: Age and Creativity at MSVU Art Gallery is an exhibition about aging, and all seven of the contributing artists identify as seniors. Their work addresses institutional barriers to...
View ArticleFloe Edge at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art
Floe Edge, currently on display at Urban Shaman, is an eclectic compilation of contemporary works coming out of the expanses of Nunavut territory. For the Winnipeg stop of this touring exhibition, we...
View ArticleDeanna Bowen at Mercer Union
Deanna Bowen’s exhibition at Mercer Union is like a hall of mirrors that refracts into a dozen different angles each time you think you’ve oriented yourself. It begins with the fabrication of a missing...
View ArticlePatrick Cruz & Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill at Stride Gallery
I am greeted by an alligator eating a goose. Miniature plastic figurines swimming in a pool of grey paint enact the bloodthirsty scene. They share a makeshift plinth of foraged skids with a holiday...
View ArticleStephen Appleby-Barr at Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Stephen Appleby-Barr is moving to London. This isn’t surprising. He must be hard pressed to find art that is old and European enough to inspire his own old European paintings here in Toronto. This city...
View ArticleField Guide at Remai Modern
“Picasso’s new home on the Prairies” proclaims a roadside billboard. I am aghast, ready to join the legions of complainers and naysayers. It seems natural to be sceptical about Remai Modern, the...
View ArticleAnjuli Rathod & Vanessa Brown at Projet Pangee
Anjuli Rathod and Vanessa Brown’s work, currently on display at Projet Pangée, is whimsical and inviting. Reoccurring icons in the former’s canvases (footsteps, creeping paws, serpents, spiders) and...
View ArticleTamara Henderson & Fastwurms at Oakville Galleries
We are all artists when we dream. Every one of us fabricates incredible visions in the depths of our slumber. We imagine a world both familiar and unexpected that haunts us through our just-risen haze...
View ArticleCharlene Vickers at aceartinc.
Abstraction is a way to make audiences work a little bit harder. It is a way for an artist to own their agency and deny specificity for a more buoyant and sophisticated representation of a discursive...
View ArticleTranscendence at InterAccess
Searching for transcendence in the age of search engines might not be as optimistic an endeavour as curator Stacie Ant makes it out to be, but her exhibition Transcendence at InterAccess certainly...
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