Against Nations
At the 59th Venice Biennale, many of the stand-out pavilions were those that contested the pavilion structure itself. Consider Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s lustrous…
Read MoreArt Gallery of Ontario
Caribbean Being and Becoming in “Fragments of Epic Memory”
In his 1992 Nobel Lecture The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, Derek Walcott characterized Caribbean poetry as a remaking of fragmented memory. The Art…
Read More
Situating Great Ocean Art in Canadian Museums
I come from the villages of Leulumoega, Siʻumu, Salelologa and Āpia in the western islands of the Sāmoan archipelago. My family also comes from…
Read More
The Apocalypse is Selective, Not Total: Geoffrey Pugen’s Disanthropic Moment
I clung to my ferocious habits, yet half despised them; I continued my war against civilization, and yet entertained a wish to belong to…
Read More
It’s Okay to Laugh: The Political Turn in Bridget Moser’s Prop Art
When we meet on St. Catherine Street in Montreal on a chilly Thursday afternoon in October, Bridget Moser tells me she has recently been…
Read More
Notes on a Crisis in Beauty
1. “I do not mourn for what I have lost. For if there is one new art that we have had to learn, those…
Read More
“Where Does Art Get To Live?”: A Conversation Between Anique Jordan and Michèle Pearson Clarke
On a perfect spring day in late May, I found myself huddled in a crowded gallery for an artist talk, my head leaning forward,…
Read More
Branding the Anthropocene: Canada’s Art Institutions Privilege the Artificial
Anthropocene – the wide-reaching exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) – tackles perhaps the greatest…
Read More
Performance Art in a Precarious Time: A Conversation with Johanna Householder and Francisco-Fernando Granados
In movement study of a standard North American strip-search procedure, Francisco-Fernando Granados gambols through a codified gestural sequence: “empty pockets … remove clothing ……
Read More
A House Divided: Theaster Gates’s Confused Beat at the AGO
Touted as “a new immersive work,” Theaster Gates‘s first museum solo exhibition – self-knowingly titled How to Build a House Museum, and recently on show…
Read More