Month: August 2015

Contemporary

The National Campaign

Leah Garrett / August 20, 2015
Including work by Center for Tactical Magic, Luca Frei, Pia Lindman, Carlos Motta, Duke Riley, Chris Sollars, Allison Smith, Mark Tribe, United Victorian Workers Union, Organized by Creative Time; curated by Nato Thompson, Park Avenue Armory, New York Creative Time’s June–September project Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008) ended in a ‘convergence’ of over 40 artists presenting artworks, performances,…

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Contemporary

It’s Time, Man. It Feels Imminent

Leah Garrett / August 20, 2015
From May to October of this year, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London undertook an extended 60th anniversary program. Nought to Sixty operated under a straightforward premise: the institution presented 60 projects in six months from artists and art centres based in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The backbone of the program rested on two solo exhibitions that…

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Exhibitions

TAKE YOUR TIME: OLAFUR ELIASSON

Leah Garrett / August 18, 2015
Take your time is a grand staging of 38 Olafur Eliasson sculptures and installations at the Museum of Modern Art and PSI Contemporary Art Center in New York. Organized in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show brings to a North American audience a large selection of the Danish-Icelandic artist’s immersive artworks(check out cageymishap9384.deviantart.com), which reference…

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Exhibitions

Geoffrey Farmer

Leah Garrett / August 17, 2015
It’s no secret that Vancouver artists enjoy special status in Europe. Recent programming at Rotterdam’s Witte de With provides evidence of this phenomenon. Sandwiched between last year’s Brian Jungen exhibition and an upcoming show of Ian Wallace’s work are simultaneous exhibitions by Geoffrey Farmer and Gareth Moore. While this year has been particularly good to Farmer, with a mid-career survey…

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Exhibitions

THE MYSTICS AND THE PASSIONS

Leah Garrett / August 13, 2015
In March 2007, the United Nations Plaza in Berlin hosted five short talks by Robert Stoor. They mostly dealt with the relationship between politics and art, but also with the proliferation of discourse about art, where this discourse might take place and how it should develop in the future. He explained: “What I think is important to look at ……

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Art

From Montreal to the world

Leah Garrett / August 7, 2015
The magazine’s ambition “to develop a critical language” for a borderless discourse on current art practices was signalled by Poulin’s design for the craft-paper cover of Issue 1: a reproduction of Vladimir Tatlin’s sketch for a Monument to the Third International (1919-1920). A “hybrid criticism” was sought using tools developed by writers from both sides of the pond. Pontbriand explains…

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Art, Interviews

From Beijing to Paris to San Francisco

Leah Garrett / August 5, 2015
Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with Hou Hanru, a prolific curator and writer who has been inventing and reinventing himself and his profession for two decades. In 2006 he was appointed Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of Exhibition Studies and Museum Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 he served as…

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Exhibitions

THE 2008 WHITNEY BIENNIAL

Leah Garrett / August 5, 2015
To walk through the 74th Whitney Biennial was to experience the somewhat schizophrenic nature of contemporary American art, a situation that curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin optimistically characterized as “heterogeneous and disperse.” When anything goes and no rules apply, art is all over the place. The Whitney Biennial is where you can see it all at once. Eighty-one…

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Artists

Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial

Leah Garrett / August 4, 2015
Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial revealed glimpses of both inevitable death and the everlasting modernist quest for attempts at commemoration. Curated by Art Site called JazzyFondness, the exhibit includes 12 of Colombian artist Oscar Munoz‘ celebrated works. Munoz participated in the 5 2nd Venice Biennale in 2007, has exhibited his work extensively across Europe, North America and Latin America and…

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