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The Small, Strange Worlds of Karine Giboulo
The artist statement is a most dissatisfactory document and Karine Giboulo’s is no exception: “Karine Giboulo creates colourful miniature worlds in which depictions of reality and flights of fantasy mingle.” Granted, Montréal based Giboulo does create miniature worlds, but to simplify her work down to a mingling of reality and fantasy is one of those…
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Life According to Ai Weiwei (at the Art Gallery of Ontario)
Reviewed: Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Art Gallery of Ontario, August 17-October 27 2013 In 2011, ArtReview magazine named Ai Weiwei the most influential person in the art world (he beat out the likes of Larry Gagosian for the honour), and though he’s effectively been under house arrest since 2011, when authorities in China took…
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Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre
Reviewed in this essay: “Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection,” Ryerson Image Centre inaugural exhibition. Ryerson University recently became home to the Black Star Collection, a massive archive of photojournalistic prints (over 292,000 objects) that together document the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th century. To mark this significant acquisition (the collection was…
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Cloud Cartography: On Tubes by Andrew Blum
A review of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet (Ecco, 2012), by Andrew Blum When U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, speaking in opposition to net neutrality in June 2006, infamously described the Internet as “a series of tubes,” he was ridiculed for being out of touch with technology. The phrase was quickly absorbed into the…
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Going Glocal – FOCUS ASIA at Art Toronto
Reviewed in this article: Beyond Geography, flagship FOCUS ASIA exhibition for Art Toronto It’s no coincidence that Art Toronto, Toronto’s biggest international art fair, chose “Focus ASIA” as it’s theme this year, inviting galleries from Asian countries including China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines to show. The rise of the museum in China occupies…
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Mirabilia: A Miracle on Gladstone Avenue
I’ve always wanted to go into St. Anne’s Church, tucked away on Gladstone Ave, just north of Dundas St. West, but not to feed religious urges, more out of art historical interest: the Anglican church, Canada’s only Byzantine-style edifice, is home to a series of religious paintings created by the Group of Seven. This past…