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2018 Critic's Picks
When I moved to Montreal just over ten years ago, I picked up a copy of an artist-run centre directory – the fledgling art critic’s Lonely Planet. After counting as many parallel spaces in the province...
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2018 Critic's Picks
A wise Vancouverite once said a life in the arts is a life of mimicry. This past year, I often felt a cognitive strain from experiencing artworks with a certain bewildering déjà vu. Of course there’s...
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2018 Critic's Picks
Exhibition reviews are usually about art as the destination, but my highlights from the past year of searching and seeing were all about the journeys that got me there. The art is the pay-off, but the...
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Chrysanne Stathacos at Cooper Cole
Chrysanne Stathacos wasn’t an emerging artist when I first heard of her, but she was new to me. It was the summer of 1999 and I was working as a gallery attendant at The Power Plant. To prepare for the...
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Jamie Macaulay at Forest City Gallery
Writing on the paintings of Cy Twombly, Roland Barthes speaks of an “essence of writing” that is “neither form nor usage but simply gesture – the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a...
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Jill Ho-You at The New Gallery
Delicate and precise. Destruction on a catastrophic level. Experimental cells devouring the veil between nature and industry. These are elements that emerge in The New Gallery exhibition Inversion by...
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Madeline Mackay at Martha Street Studio
If Madeline Mackay’s solo exhibition Not Yet Earth at Martha Street Studio reminds us of anything, it is the sheer materiality of this often elusive matter we call flesh. If you aren’t a surgeon or...
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Dying at Artscape Youngplace
Perhaps it’s the new year with all its accompanying anxiety, but I was actually eager to visit an exhibition about death, hoping that the content would substantiate my macabre mood. Misery loves...
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Vincent Larouche at soon.tw
Facing the front door of the tiny DIY gallery soon.tw, Vincent Larouche’s exhibition Bouches de Cendres Actives opens with what looks like an art crime. In Hyenes a hunter takes aim across the missing...
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Aslan Gaisumov at the Contemporary Art Gallery
Borrowing its title from a W.G Sebald poem, Chechen artist Aslan Gaisumov’s exhibition If No One Asks, currently on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery, is a gentle contemplation of the unseen. The...
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Antonietta Grassi at Harcourt House in Edmonton
I saw perfect prisms and multicoloured, meticulously drawn parallel lines and – admittedly – checked out. I was overcome with a feeling of emptiness. This I attributed to the number of artists doing...
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Susan Clarahan at Jarvis Hall Gallery
Landscape and bodies thrive and collide in Erotic Nature, a series of sensual and sexy colour photographs by Susan Clarahan currently on display at Jarvis Hall Gallery as part of the Exposure...
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DaveandJenn & PA System at General Hardware Contemporary
When Lux Interior of the Cramps sang about searching for "some new kind of kick” way back in 1981, he was probably alluding to recreational drugs or some transgressive fetish, but he could have just as...
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Juan Ortiz-Apuy at Owens Art Gallery in Sackville
Stepping into Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s exhibition Fountain Mist at the Owens Art Gallery feels like you’re stepping into a sleek modern laboratory where consumerism and desire are distilled to their essential...
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Ekene Maduka at La Maison des Artistes Visuels Francophones
If you think of Nigerian-born painter Ekene Maduka as singer, you can hear her dashing from high pitched eccentricities to hushed lullabies to wordless chanting and back to dramatic, tuneful wailing...
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Khan Lee at Republic Gallery
Technology connects us in powerful and unpredictable ways. Much of this activity, while so central to our lives, is invisible to the eye and thus easy to ignore. Khan Lee’s analytical yet airy...
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Nep Sidhu at Mercer Union
I spent much of the week following the opening of Nep Sidhu’s solo exhibition Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) suffering from FOMO. As I scrolled past dozens of selfies, blurry...
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Nahed Mansour at Articule
Toronto-based artist Nahed Mansour’s exhibition at Articule takes up the figure of the belly dancer in mostly American popular culture. The integrity of the show’s concept is provocatively broken down...
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Jeremy Shaw at the Esker Foundation
Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy features three bold, mysterious, and mind-boggling films. Shown in Venice, Hamburg, and now at the Esker Foundation, the series...
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Rosika Desnoyers at Art-Image in Gatineau
Intrigued by the prospect of an exhibition of neo-conceptual embroidery, I crossed the Ottawa River to see Rosika Desnoyers’ Partridges at Art-Image in La Maison de la culture de Gatineau. The title of...
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