The Tug of the Earth and the Tug of the Sky: The Writhing Stillness of Agnes Martin
Ask yourself, What kind of happiness do I feel with this music or this picture? – Agnes Martin, “Beauty is the Mystery of Life”…
Read MoreReviews
Abigail DeVille Unburies Bodies at The Contemporary
What happens to history in a black hole? Abigail DeVille’s exhibition Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See the Stars is a dense,…
Read More
Printmaking in the Anthropocene: Sean Caulfield’s Uncannily-Timed “Firedamp” Burns Darkly
Beneath a cloudless, 180-degree sky, the prairie landscape is littered with alien, industrial objects. This is the backdrop of Sean Caulfield’s childhood in rural…
Read More
The Unspecific (But Straining) Politics of Joan Jonas
Long an idiosyncratic priestess of the limbo between myth and art, Joan Jonas has moved into pagan revivalism. They Come to Us Without a…
Read More
Evasion and Euphemism: The Guggenheim Underintellectualizes and Depoliticizes László Moholy-Nagy
In 1921, the Hungarian expat László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), then in Berlin, signed a “Call for Elementarist Art,” alongside Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, and…
Read More
In the Skin of a Gallery: Sylvie Bélanger’s Challenge to Photography
The image disputes the presence of the thing. In the image, the thing is not content simply to be; the image shows that the…
Read More
A Parallel Landscape: Ned Pratt’s Abstract Sublime
In Canadian art’s long and unswift adaptation of an avant-garde, landscape painting yielded to an important reduction, an essentializing that rendered place ancillary, and…
Read More
Troubling Self-Care in a Selfie World: The Photographs of Karen Asher
Karen Asher has always photographed people, from those she knows intimately to the strangers she meets in passing. As portraits, they fall within an…
Read More
The “Fuck Em” Sex and Class Reversals of Alicia Gibson
A blind date is unfolding at Canada Gallery, in Alicia Gibson’s painting My Mom Set Me Up With a Redneck (2016). If, like me,…
Read More
Vancouver Art Gallery’s “MashUp” Too Limited in its Understanding
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s survey exhibition MashUp is a missed opportunity. To be clear, that’s not because the artworks are “bad” (they’re not) or…
Read More