- City of Hamilton Arts Awards
Despite my reservations about the nominations process, I attended the City of Hamilton Arts Awards this past Monday with an uncharacteristic degree of optimism, assured that the “sold-out” status of free tickets for the event and the unique venue would guarantee a bustling, energetic night for the arts community.
Sure enough, attendance at the Awards […]
- Lip(stick)service
I didn’t realize that arts award season was well and truly upon us until my morning skim of the BBC news feed heralded the announcement of this year’s Turner Prize nominees with the usual distancing panache designed to further mystify contemporary art for the general populace. This year’s opening zinger…
An artist who uses make-up and […]
- Loving the KWAG
First things first for my Canadian audience - if you haven’t yet done so, get your ass away from your computer and VOTE. Seriously, if you read this before you’ve voted you’ll make the ghost of Sir John A. MacDonald sob into his scotch. And if you really care about art, don’t vote Conservative but […]
- Weekend Links: Diminished Worlds
I’m keeping this week’s selections of posts on the short side as I’m in a bit of a hurry to get over to Wayzgoose 2011 out at Grimsby Public Art Gallery for my annual hit of book arts awesomeness. But before I go, here’s three highlights from this past week in the art blogosphere.
From the […]
- Weekend Links: Calling Out
In honour of sci-fi subversives everywhere and the start of Doctor Who’s sixth (or thirty-second) season tonight, this weekend’s links celebrate those who are telling it like it is.
The Doctor: shaking and stirring the melting pot since 1963.
Art, criticism and calamari: It’s going back a couple weeks now, but Robert Storr’s final column for Frieze […]
- Encounters: McMaster Summa 2011
The opening reception of McMaster University’s Summa exhibition of Studio Art graduates is always a crowded affair, and this year was no exception. Even with one of the most restrained selections of work that I’ve seen in recent years, the main floor galleries at the McMaster Museum of Art were so densely packed that it […]
- The Candidates and the Arts
I was going to wait until my current essay deadline had been slapped into submission before digging into the quagmire of the upcoming Federal Election, but the fact is that I already started pulling this post together over a week ago, very shortly after the Leaders Debate aired on CBC. As Leah Sandals has rightly […]
- Idle hands and other essays
I won’t be writing a review of this month’s James North Art Crawl as per my usual practice for the simple reason that I wasn’t in attendance at last Friday’s event. Between the combination of exhibitions being carried over from March and others for which I have already attended openings in the weeks since then, […]
- Michael Allgoewer at b contemporary
The same night I was milling around the reception for Paul Cvetich’s exhibition at transit Gallery, word was circulating about the concurrent opening of b contemporary, a new gallery on James Street North. Whether by choice or circumstance, former transit gallerist David Brace had kept news of this first reception fairly quiet - b contemporary’s […]
- Paul Cvetich at transit Gallery
The visual pleasure that pervades Paul Cvetich’s Ichikupark at transit Gallery is both immediate and fully justified after slower consideration. While the many individual sculptures produce a cacophonous effect from a distance, the writhing shapes of each work slow the eye down when one stops long enough to take in the show one piece at […]
