Film and Video

KATHRYN WALTER REMNANTS ZSA ZSA GALLERY, TORONTO

Virtual capitalism assures us that economic production is now dean. Industrial spaces are transformed into expensive lofts or tourist centres, supply shops become art galleries, manufacturing has moved offshore or is hidden away in sweatshops. As the meanings associated with these spaces are exchanged for new ones, older histories are erased We are left with vestiges of the old way,…

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Film and Video

ROBERT LEE MINIMA MORALIA IMAGES FESTIVAL 2005, TORONTO

“Every visit to the cinema leaves me against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.”–Theodor Adorno I suspect Robert Lee must approach his own images with a reluctance similar to Adorno’s. If the Toronto artist’s past attempts at suspending his videos from distribution are any indication, he harbours troubled sentiments towards image-making. With only rare glimpses at his work possible in…

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Film and Video

True confession

True confession: Before I saw his recent feature film Stryker at the Ontario College Of Art And Design earlier this year, I didn’t know a lot about Noam Gonick. After interviewing him by phone-me at a sweltering, heat wave—cramped desk in Toronto and he in Guy Maddin’s air-conditioned purple bathroom in Winnipeg–I don’t know if I’m any closer to understanding…

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Contemporary

Conversation

KT You talk about the site? What triggers the discussion? NL It depends. Sometimes we get the call Take, for example, we are supposed to have an exhibition in Luxembourg this summer. We came back from Luxembourg with a small idea. And then we keep talking. We talk about it when we are on the road. We talk about it…

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Exhibitions

MuHKA’s foyer

If emotions were places, MuHKA’s foyer could be mistaken for an intersection. The first four works in this timely exhibition represent tendencies within the psychosphere, from Bas Jan Ader’s film I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1971) to the euphoric teen in Althea Thauberger’s photo Hiker’s Bliss (200l). However, it is the second pair of cardinal points that provide the…

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Contemporary

Ralph Rugoff championed the works of seminal Pathetic Artists

Curators such as Ralph Rugoff championed the works of seminal Pathetic Artists like Mike Kelley and Cady Noland as “haplessly falling short of the idealized norm.” Rugoff identified the Pathetic movement with the abject, relating it to Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the scatological impulse in “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.” Kristeva, responding to the writings of Freud and…

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Contemporary

The past is always inseparable from the present

The past is always inseparable from the present. Its dialogue is a circuitous exchange. The present moment is one in which continued forms of colonialism are reared in every national institution–education, labour, health, trade and agriculture. In the time we spent together, Allen never missed an opportunity to connect the production of these cloths to a global awareness of transnational…

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Contemporary

Some of the best and purest video art

“Some of the best and purest video art … is being made by complete morons.” So writes Meesoo Lee, a video artist from Vancouver, a city on the art world radar as a hotbed of slacker art made by artists such as Damien Moppett, Steven Shearer, Geoffrey Farmer and Myfanwy MacLeod. For his Toronto screening at Pleasure Dome in January,…

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Contemporary

Cloth is a distillation of politics

Cloth is a distillation of politics across the diasporic experience. It reflects issues of growing concern that impact the political, social and economic lives of the many communities that cohere around its symbolism. Spending time with Allen I learned that he also moves–in the sense that he readily takes on the critique of social messages that many of these politically…

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