- David Shrigley’s Pringle of Scotland animation
Among the many Scottish artists I came to appreciate and sometimes adore during my time in Glasgow, David Shrigley always managed to stand out by stint of his underwhelming style in the midst of the high-concept conversation happening around him. His drawings are simple and wryly comical - think of a slightly more rude Marcel […]
- Professional Practice Bonus Feature (with props to Diana Poulsen)
Further to my ranting last Friday about the meanest basics of submitting one’s work to galleries and granting bodies, I’ve been wondering whether there might be a place on this blog for further anecdotes on career development for artists. While I’m still undecided on that count, I still can’t resist sharing another snarling pearl of […]
- Professional Practice Primer
One of the consequences of sitting on two Boards of Directors for Hamilton’s artist-run sector - and consequently, on two Programming Committees - is that I invariably end up spending a lot of time looking at artists’ application packages for everything from exhibitions to commissions to OAC Exhibition Assistance Grants. Just this week alone, I […]
- White cats and black humour: suicide as farce
Among my less-than-glowing observations of this month’s Art Crawl, few have lingered in my mind the last few days save for a comment left on the post by a fellow art crawler who took issue with Laura Paolini’s exhibition Hello, Schrodinger? at Hamilton Artists Inc. My preoccupation is certainly not with his negative impression of […]
- Vital Donation Via Vital Africa
The media invite for this morning’s launch event for the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Vital Africa year of exhibitions was sweetened by the dangling carrot of a donation announcement that drew a substantial crowd and mild speculations that proved essentially accurate. Frequent AGH benefactors Joey and Tony Tanenbaum already have a well-known history of bequests […]
- James North Art Crawl: January
As I was pulling together my thoughts on this month’s uneven exhibition efforts and not-entirely-pleasant cold, I finally recalled that I have no basis for comparison to last year’s January Crawl. This time last year, I’d been in Toronto for the opening of Misplaced: Animals Lost and Found at XPACE, in which I was showing […]
- Excerpt: An age of austerity for the arts
A side-effect of my recent love affair with Adrian Searle’s Private Views has been an expanded interest in the other cultural podcasts offered by The Guardian’s website. While the critical heft doesn’t quite compete with CBC’s Ideas (a long-standing favourite of mine), the series of recordings from the 2009 Cambridge Festival of Ideas have been […]
- Studio Notes: On Cleaning and Making Messes
Further to my goal to better preserve my studio time in 2010 (after the chilling revelations discussed in this post), you may start to notice an increase in studio-related posts on this blog in the interests of self-enforced accountability. This is the first of such entries in what we might call the sobriety-sponsor relationship; however, […]
