Rodney Graham, a work from Wet on Wet: My late early styles, 2007.
Image: lissongallery.com

Read my review of Rodney Graham’s recent exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery:

Greg Girard, Doorway, Wukang Lu, 2003. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

Vancouver photographer Greg Girard has been living in Shanghai for a number of years, documenting the changes to the city’s landscape.

Read my review of his recent exhibition at the Monte Clark Gallery:

In the Spring/Summer issue, out now.

Click thumbnail to enlarge:

Oh, and don’t miss the artist’s court hearing, April 3rd, 2008 at 3 pm in Toronto.

There’s an important exhibition on at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the Blackwood Galleries, Toronto on the relationship between art and war.

January 17 - March 2, 2008

Art and war may make strange bedfellows, but artists have long explored the emotions provoked by war and documented its realities…

Kristan Horton, Drawing of A History of the First World War (Disc 01), 2008.
Image: kristanhorton.com

Click on the thumbnail to read my full article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail:

For more information on the exhibition, please click HERE.

An excellent book has just come out by Elspeth Cameron about the lives of 20th century Canadian sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle:

Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Image: lac-bac.ca

Read my review in Quill & Quire HERE

Simon Starling: Cuttings (Supplement) at the Power Plant, Toronto

March 1 – 11 May, 2008

Simon Starling, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), 2007/8. Image: thepowerplant.org

The Power Plant will open a retrospective of British conceptual artist Simon Starling with a newly commissioned work made for The Power Plant, part of the gallery’s Commissioning Program launched in 2006.

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Click on the thumbnail to see my review of Auto Emotion: Autobiography, Emotion and Self-Fashioning, which ran this summer at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

It’s in the October issue of Art Review magazine.

And on this thumbnail to see my preview of the Toronto International Art Fair in the Globe and Mail:

Excerpts from an article that I wrote in the current issue of Border Crossings Magazine:

“Hyper-real installations confront the viewer with an illusion of which we are aware. Or are we? The historic, ages old idea that the world as we experience it is an illusion reaches back to a branch of ancient Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta, which teaches that Brahman (consciousness) represents the Infinite Reality, and the world (Maya) is merely an illusion; likewise, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners, deep inside a cave, face shadows that they perceive to be “reality”. As in Plato’s story, hyper-real installations destabilize the viewers’ perception of truth, by presenting one reality beside another.

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