The false prophecies of the false idols in the flesh by Stphanie Bertrand
Greetings! Welcome! hails the over-eager head on a stick perched in the entranceway, tooth-grinned, immobile. Please come right in! Ironically, while this description might otherwise be read as a sarcastic chick lit account of the proverbial skinny shop-girl, it literally portrays Montreal-based artist Stphanie Chabot’s intervention for the YYZ vitrine.
Karen Henderson’s Temporal Objects By Andy Patton
Karen Henderson once told me that she thought her work was about the here and now. But I wonder now, if that now hasn’t become her real subject, eclipsing even the here that is still so crucial to her.
Sail Fast Cloud-Shadows and Sunbeams by Wojciech Olejnik
In the exhibition Sail Fast Cloud-Shadows and Sunbeams, Lauren Hall considers the industry of tourism and the experiences of the tourist as the foundational basis for her work.
Moving Around by Caroline Dionne
For roughly a decade, Alexandre David has been conducting spatial experiments. His practice as a sculptor has led to a series of interventions in various locations, always producing slight perceptual changes minor yet potent modifications in how we relate to a given space thus raising the question of our relationship to spatiality in general and, more specifically, to the spaces of our daily lives, and to architecture.
The Discontinuous Made Continuous by Marissa Neave
Ashley Guindon’s video installation, A Great Mystery, turns the most pertinent of museum rulesdon’t touchon its head, while simultaneously willfully abiding by it.
A Matter of L and D by Barbara Balfour
My first inclination is to say something humourous, to deflect attention from the thing itself. I don’t want you to think it’s a matter of life and death, to use an overused expression, because it isn’t. Or if it does relate to life and death, then it’s about the space in which living and dying are so close as to be almost indistinguishable.
Text and Perception in Living & Dying by Caroline Seck Langill
Barbara Balfour’s recent body of work haunted me in unusual ways since I began to contemplate its meaning for this essay. Memories of the era, of my own coming of age resurfaced and implicated themselves as part of the extended cognitive system I was drawing upon in order to consider these canny lithographs.
Improper Human-ness by Patricia Reed
In their latest installation of cut-up of disfigured statuettes and accumulated objects of varying significance, Hadley+Maxwell have embraced the spirit of aphorism. Composed of fragments, interrupted surfaces and separations, the duo take up the timeless perplexities of human self-definition with whimsical experimentation.
Be But Could If Is Not What by Jacob Wren
There is a natural pleasure to smashing stuff. From a childhood rock through the window of the house that won’t let you play on it’s lawn, to the splintering guitar catharsis at the end of a sweaty concert, it is the gesture that enacts blind anger, blind rebellion, and that by enacting it connects it, for a moment, to a feeling of liberation. Later you will be forced by your parents to apologize to the man whose window you so rudely smashed. New guitars will have to be bought to replace the old ones. But for a moment you tasted freedom.