Author: Leah Garrett

Film and Video

True confession

Leah Garrett / July 10, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Conversation

Leah Garrett / July 10, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Exhibitions

MuHKA’s foyer

Leah Garrett / July 8, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Ralph Rugoff championed the works of seminal Pathetic Artists

Leah Garrett / July 7, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

The past is always inseparable from the present

Leah Garrett / July 6, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Some of the best and purest video art

Leah Garrett / July 4, 2015
“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,…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Cloth is a distillation of politics

Leah Garrett / July 4, 2015
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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Hooded sweatshirt with Maurice

Leah Garrett / July 2, 2015
Imagine you saw someone (let’s say me, for argument’s sake) wearing a hooded sweatshirt with Maurice. Would it matter that one of the Caribbean’s political revolutionaries was blazed on cotton and being sold to a mass audience for mass consumption? Okay, except for the bit about mass distribution, actually doing this is impossible, for a very strange, 21st-century reason: I…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Canada, locate yourself!

Leah Garrett / July 2, 2015
It is often pointed out to me that people from Canada can’t stop talking about the place. This is doubly true if you come from Toronto. Although I’ll leave aside the anecdotal evidence for now, I know that I indulge in this habit. It’s a weird condition, suggesting that the country lacks definition in the minds of its inhabitants. Another…

Continue Reading→