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.

These paintings, which are for coloured electric light, are not paintings of anything, and with the abandonment of the subject (architectural, natural) that had persisted in Hutchinson’s work until now, perspectival space within the painting is displaced by compositions based on an isometric grid whose size is determined by that of the brush that will be used.

When Ct set out to make The Chorus, I understand he was looking for a way to gauge the enormous transformation that has taken place in China since the era of Mao.

Works in Waters’ new exhibition ROTOZERO are not homogenous: they comprise, he says, a kind of garage salefragments of experience.

Faith La Rocque’s work takes shape from an unexpected mix of skepticism and belief. It arrives through the excavation of material histories and discovering the vagaries of cultural value they accrue over time.

Despite their reductive appearances, Groombridge’s work holds an indexicality or reference to the real. The forms are not entirely arbitrary; they are rooted in sourcesfacts, data, measurements; some common, some notor a system of his own devising. There’s a there thereyou just need to look harder to see it.