Your Cultural Concierge! VoCA offers critical commentary on the Canadian art scene, with a focus on Toronto. Featuring exhibition previews, critics picks, interviews and in-depth articles on art in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax.
February 15th, 2008 — Articles by Andrea Carson, Toronto and region
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.
October 22nd, 2007 — Articles by Andrea Carson
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:
June 26th, 2007 — Articles by Andrea Carson
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 “realityâ€. As in Plato’s story, hyper-real installations destabilize the viewers’ perception of truth, by presenting one reality beside another.
Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...Read full bio