Once upon a time, in an era of drips, zips, and chapels, abstraction was the route to truth in painting.

Throughout time, we have struggled to gain insight into the human condition; to find meaning and purpose in our existence; to make sense of our relations to one another and to the world we inhabit. However tentative, these positions have revealed structures of knowing and becoming, casting light on the creative process itself and in turn on its formal, functional and dynamic possibilities. These preoccupations lie at the very heart of Michael A. Robinson’s work, presented here in The Origin of Ideas.

Maura Doyle’s smoke sealed clay pots are not re-creations exactly, but the artist confirms their point of reference comes directly from the pasteven for those works in the show modeled after things from the contemporary world, like a paper coffee cup.

She is a photographer. But once she said that photography felt like making nothing, that one doesn’t have the feeling of making a photograph. This is why she turned to drawing, choosing to work with charcoal and with chalk. Black and white, like gelatin silver photographs.

Nobuo Kubota left his career as an architect in the 1960s, to eventually become one of Canada’s preeminent inter-media artists. For the past forty years, Kubota has performed, recorded, published, and exhibited internationally. He has produced an astonishingly dazzling array of artistic hybrids including sound sculptures, video installations, three-dimensional poems, improvisational art-music, and mouth mechanics. He is a founding member of The Artists’ Jazz Band (1962), CCMC (1974), and the Music Gallery (1974) in Toronto. Kubota is also the recipient of the 2009 Governor General Arts Award, Canada’s most prestigious arts prize.

Like collages, dictionaries are composed of incomplete, dense little fragments of information; while they purport to explain and provide a context, their abridged format is so concise that they only ever present partial statements, and always in point form.

The early 1980s were a time when a war of images played across battle lines defined by identity and representation. Artists and critics fiercely debatedoften in the turgid jargon of French Theorythe return of the image following more than a decade of militant dematerialization. In some ways, this crisis was sparked by artists’ new flirtation with the mainstreamparticularly the aesthetics of movies and TVfollowing conceptualism’s prohibitions on visual pleasure.

A condensed and revised version of a talk delivered at YYZ Artists’ Outlet on May 29, 2013.

Looming. Defined as:

A shadowy form that is large and probably threatening.
An event, which is threatening to happen.
A (maybe) exaggerated, vague first vision of an object in darkness.
A distant dim reflection barely visible.
Origins in Low German or Dutch such as lomen – move slowly.
Or lemenbe weary.

Hanna Hur’s latest body of work is informedor compelled, ratherby the constraints illness has visited upon her. Durations of solitude and muscular atrophy, paired with intermittent losses of lucidity, act as a veil through which the artist squints at her new life.