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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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,…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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.…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

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…

Continue Reading→

Contemporary

Congenitally opposed to the macho tone

Leah Garrett / July 21, 2015
Congenitally opposed to the macho tone of so many avant-garde polemics, suspicion of the manifesto comes naturally to feminism. And yet, as the credibility of the manifesto declined over the past 40 years, feminist skepticism informed numerous landmark appropriations of the genre: Valerie Solanas’ “SCUM Manifesto (1968), Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg…

Continue Reading→

Exhibitions

Dolphin Gallery, Glasgow

Leah Garrett / July 20, 2015
The life of a submariner is very much a hidden one; manifestations of their curious crafts are more like UFO sightings. Rarely do we get the movie image of the inquisitive periscope turning this way and that. In the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine the Mersey mariners have a winking eyeball residing in the aperture of the periscope’s body: the sub as…

Continue Reading→