Abstraction, Legibility, and Desire in the Work of Brenda Draney
Sawridge First Nation artist Brenda Draney paints open-ended memories, what might have been or should have been or could have been otherwise. Her solo…
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Magical/Market Thinking: Reflecting on the Rise and Fall of Artscape
On August 29, 2023, the Globe and Mail published an article headlined “Toronto’s cash-strapped Artscape to enter receivership, end management of 14 artist facilities.”…
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Through the Looking Glass: Distortion and the Fantasy of a Feminist Nude
Rarely do I find a work of art as disturbing as Louise Bonnet’s innocuously titled painting Figure Holding an Orange (2023). This thirty-square-foot oil-on-linen…
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Forms of Echo: Sónia Vaz Borges & Filipa César Draw from a Sense-Memory Educational Legacy
Decolonization involves destruction and upheaval, but in equal measures is a process of creation—a radical world-building that imparts not only a political but cultural…
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Tracking the Sapphic Social Imaginaries: Lesbian Art in Print
Often scraping by on shoestring budgets and volunteer labor, periodicals by, for, and about lesbians—lesbian being a capacious term that increasingly embraces queer, trans,…
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“A Multiculti Blitzkrieg”: On the Ascendance of the Curator of Color
Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion of the Museum of Modern Art integrated the glass buildings on either side of the museum so that when you…
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We’re Alive, Pablo Is Dead
Pablo Picasso is so famous and so ubiquitous and so dead that he is easy not to think about at all. It’s as though…
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The Polyphonous Calls for Land (and Land Back) of Manuel Axel Strain
Among the works installed by Manuel Axel Strain in Unit 17’s florist turned gallery space were: A stolen white-picket fence hemmed in by a…
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Dataspace: From the Observed Object to the Participating Subject
The first time I visited Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA), a house of creative electronic experimentation in the heart of Mexico City, I didn’t know…
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The Art of Accumulation in an Age of Decluttering
My childhood home in California is filled with antiques. Fragile Han Dynasty ceramics, dirt-encrusted Chinese Buddhist sculptures, various porcelain, lacquer boxes, and snuff bottles…
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