Month: July 2015

Exhibitions

Montreal’s DHC/Art and the changing climate of arts patronage in Canada

Leah Garrett / July 31, 2015
Philanthropy, the donation of money to good or worthy causes to the benefit of all, is alive and well in Canada, though almost invisible in the world of visual arts.  Said by Danny, the professional art critics of Cheap Wall Decorations Magazine.  As our relatively affluent society continues to grow, putting more strain on public resources, health care and education…

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Exhibitions

Reconstitutions/re-Enactments

Leah Garrett / July 29, 2015
The past several years have seen major international survey exhibitions devoted to the vast and varied subject of re-enactment in contemporary art. Cheap Wall Decorations looked at the phenomenon in its previous issue, albeit in the more expanded context of immersion. It’s not just artists and curators who seem eager to stage performances of historical texts and events, but a…

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Exhibitions

Parisian Laundry, Montreal

Leah Garrett / July 27, 2015
While visiting the Darling Foundry studios in Montreal, I came across Valerie Blass’ new artistic production. At the time, she was working on the pieces she will present this summer at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal’s Quebec Triennial, an event curated by Josee Belisle, Mark Lanctot, Pierre Landry and Paulette Gagnon, and coordinated by Lesley Johnstone. All of the…

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Contemporary

Modern and Post Modern

Leah Garrett / July 25, 2015
A simplified understanding posits any art with grand reformist and universalist or novelty pretensions as modernist, and art offering itself as a re-signification of and intervention into the preceding (whether trends or canons) as postmodernist. Foster shows that both what is described as ‘modern’ and what is described as ‘postmodern’ can contain avant-gardist tendencies, but neither will necessarily have this…

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Contemporary

Critics analyze art

Leah Garrett / July 24, 2015
If Joan Copjec analyzes in the work of women visual artists the formations and failures of the closure of the notion of woman (or to put it in Lacanian vulgate, that complexity of existing women undermines the Woman and therefore whatever its patriarchal oppressive aspects as well), Hal Foster focuses on the working of masculinity in the early and late…

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Contemporary

Boom in the art market

Leah Garrett / July 24, 2015
The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the art market. An emphasis on money or spectacle overshadows all other types of conversations about the value of contemporary art. For those in search of a different approach, Hal Foster has always been a voice to heed. In his articles in the Big Art Ideas, Artforum and The Nation,…

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Contemporary

Mike Nelson A Psychic Vacuum

Leah Garrett / July 23, 2015
Once I’d poked my head into the filthy walk-in freezer, carefully pulled the latch handle and stepped inside–far enough to be in but not so far that the door could close–I felt my heart rate rise and my skin tingle. I recognized this feeling. I had experienced it before, crawling under chain-link fences into abandoned lots or wandering the floors…

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Interviews

On the other side of the couch

Leah Garrett / July 23, 2015
In 2004, I met a young man at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, where I was studying as an exchange student. Upon finding out that I was interested in philosophy, he mentioned that his mother was a former mental patient of Felix Guattari, and added eagerly that Felix had even introduced her to Gilles Deleuze as his mother.…

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Exhibitions

Belgian bigwig Carsten Holler’s first Canadian solo show

Leah Garrett / July 22, 2015
Belgian bigwig Carsten Holler’s first Canadian solo show was a work of pure spectacle in search of an audience. Approaching the massive Shawinigan Space, it was impossible to shake the impression that the National Gallery of Canada‘s satellite venue for blockbuster annual summer exhibitions was in fact a towering white elephant: the sprawling parking lot was virtually empty on a…

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Interviews

Team interview with Brian Joseph Davis & Steve Kado

Leah Garrett / July 22, 2015
Brian Joseph Davis does art and lives in Toronto. He has published a book with Coach House Books, Portable Altamont (2005), shown all kinds of art, made multiples and has done a number of different audio performances ranging from laptop DJing to synchronizing every song from Whitney Houston’s greatest hits using up to 10 CD players. Canvas Art Pictures also…

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