Let Them Eat Crystal: Rodney Graham and the Bankruptcy of Ironic Art
The following words are angry. Their author has discarded the separation between emotion and analysis customary in his line of work. How else could…
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Unequal Planes: Vancouver’s Architectural Clash of Ideal and Real
When socio-political awareness gathers to a breaking point, and nerves are raw, and people start getting fed up, fantasy runs into problems. In fraught…
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Wire and String: Olga Balema’s Sinewy Abjection
What does it mean when the most meaningful thing is damn near nothing at all? Not the antiseptic nothing of Marie Kondo’s puritan minimalism,…
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The Erotics of Liberty: Dorothy Iannone’s Cultivated Bohemia
Whatever else they do in this world or the next, gods take up space. Consider Dorothy Iannone’s recent exhibition Lady Liberty Meets Her Match…
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Ana Mendieta’s Death is Not a Metaphor
Let the art come first. This must have been the axiom behind Covered in Time and History, Martin-Gropius-Bau’s 2018 exhibition of twenty-three films and…
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What’s Wrong with a Fairly Good Biennial?
What’s not to like about good art, hung well – not too packed, not too sparse – across venues of many scales and vintages,…
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Worrying the Note: A German Stage for Arthur Jafa’s Black-American Chorus
Arthur Jafa’s exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Collection exceeds the oft-recited cliché that “context matters.” In Berlin, it forms an imagistic phenomena, like some luminescent…
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What is to be Learned, What is to be Done? Thomas Hirschhorn at the Remai Modern
Three months ago, I bought a CD of poetry from Johnny Marceland, a sixty-year-old Dene man who lives in my hometown of Saskatoon. Throughout…
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“More Than Those Who Despised Her”: Unforgetting on the Prairies
How can – how should – the ghosts of our brutalized bodies be ushered into public space? This was the enigma posed by Gregory…
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Dubious Icons: Godheads, Messiahs, and the Artist as Celebrity
Perhaps it’s an unfair caricature of MFA students, that each appears to inhabit their own personalized reality TV show. Perhaps. But having been one…
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