This year’s CONTACT photography festival kicked off with a bang at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto. I was pleasantly surprised by this year’s show, Collected Shadows: Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC). An arrangement of images on the deep purple wall at MOCCA: Image: VoCA I had never heard of the AMC, even though it is Toronto
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The DHC Art Foundation in Montreal is small, and wonderful. The exhibitions that I’ve seen there have been beautifully installed and it’s a lovely experience to see so few works at a time, curated as they are across four intimate floors and into a nearby space. Thomas Demand is well known in Europe as the photographer who meticulously recreates images
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For anyone who missed it, here are a few photos from the inaugural exhibition at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre. Titled Archival Dialogues, the exhibition brought together eight Canadian artists who were asked to make work in ‘dialogue’ with a chosen perspective on the famous Black Star Collection of about 292,000 photojournalistic prints from the 20th century, which was donated to
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The National Gallery of Canada very kindly invited me to Ottawa – expenses paid – to see the current exhibition, which is called ‘Builders’, and is the second Canadian Biennale. (Did you know there was a Canadian Biennale?) According to curator Jonathan Shaughnessy, the show’s title is inspired by the idea of artists as not only players in the game,
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It’s been seven years since Toronto’s first Nuit Blanche. I’ve been to five of them and this year will be my sixth. Overall, we can probably agree, they’ve been pretty great. The experience of being out all night – despite the often dodgy weather – seeing Torontonians absorbing visual art en masse is fantastic. Toronto City Hall, during a previous
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I recently reviewed a new book about the famed portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh. Karsh’s portrait of Georgia O’Keefe. Image:lalumiereetlobscurite.com Karsh arrived to Canada from Syria in 1925 and eventually set up in Ottawa, where he worked his connections in politics, eventually photographing Sir Winston Churchill, which made him world famous. For the last 18 years of his life, he lived
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This was a fantastic show. The Pompidou is such a great venue – somehow even the crowds don’t take away from the experience. Having seen the documentary Gerhard Richter: Painting, I was aware of the process that he uses to make the squeegee painting – it involves a lot of thinking and waiting – it was wonderful to see many
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Over the past ten years, artist Max Dean has collected other people’s photo albums. He’s got about 500 of them, which are being used as part of his latest project at this year’s CONTACT Photo festival in Toronto. Artist Max Dean. All images (except Google map) by VoCA. The project is called Album, and it involves Dean loading up his
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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.“ – Marcel Proust Today, I swung by Feheley Fine Arts gorgeous new gallery at 65 George Street, where ADAC (the Art Dealers Association of Canada) was hosting a lunch in honour of the upcoming exhibition Oh, Canada that will open at Mass MoCA on
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My daily online art auction project, ARTBOMB, has been up and running – very successfully! – for over three months now, so I thought I would give you a peek inside the studio. The view of our photographer’s set-up, from the side. ARTBOMB is a project by myself with my incredibly brilliant partners Jim Shedden and Carrie Shibinsky. We scour
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Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...