Shine a Light: The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery in Ottawa

The Canadian Biennial is a showcase for the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art. Every two years it offers the opportunity for visitors to get a close look at what some of the best Canadian artists are doing across the country and around the world. If the main purpose of a curator is to build a collection, as Contemporary Art Curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois said at the media preview for the show, then the biennial is an opportunity for the public to see how well our national curators are doing that job.

Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass (detail), 2012 (National Gallery of Canada; courtesy: the artist, Catriona Jeffries Gallery & Casey Kaplan; photo: Anders Sune Berg).

The exhibition title Shine a Light refers to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and suggests that the artists in the show are modern day philosophers who reveal things that might have otherwise remained hidden. It also handily refers to the function of the exhibition itself, which is to shine a light on the diversity of contemporary Canadian artists and their innovative work taken from a collection aiming to be as representative as possible. Framed by the curators’ invocation of the Allegory of the Cave, exemplary works such as Leaves of Grass by Geoffry Farmer and Stray Light by David Hartt encourage us as viewers to take a closer, harder look at the images that make up our world of appearances.

The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the October 28 Akimblog.

Marc Séguin's Nordic Landscapes at Galerie Jean-Claude Bergeron in Ottawa

Nordic Landscapes, the exhibition of new work by Marc Séguin in Ottawa, came as a bit of shock. I knew that Séguin had built his career on a seemingly unrelenting series of dark and brutal images that employed provocative use of serial killers, terrorists, crash sites and the like, so I steeled myself for what I was about to see and still found myself completely unprepared. In a sequence of ten new oil paintings, the artist has rather straightforwardly rendered pleasantly picturesque views of northern Quebec and Labrador. These paintings were inspired by Séguin’s hunting and fishing trips in the area, as well as by his recent experience shooting a feature film there. Previously, Séguin has said that he felt it was his duty to pursue in paint what deranged or disturbed him. These easily enjoyable works indicate perhaps that the trips up north have helped to mellow him out.

Marc Séguin, Paysage nordique No. 6, 2014, oil on canvas

In the same way that I suspect there is a calculated agenda behind Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s seemingly benign arctic tours, I can’t but think that Séguin is playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing with these new paintings. In conjunction with this exhibition, his Ottawa gallerist Jean-Claude Bergeron has also organized a small retrospective in Gatineau at the Galerie Montcalm that gathers together a range of Séguin's works from 1996 to 2014, the majority of which are on loan from collectors in the region. The proximity of both exhibitions affords visitors the opportunity to get caught up with Séguin’s work and discern a continuity in his aesthetic strategies that suggests there is a darker side to his Nordic Landscapes.

The complete text of my review of the exhibitions was published here on the September 23rd Akimblog.

Land Reform(ed) at Âjagemô in Ottawa

Land Reform(ed) at Âjagemô invites the viewer to re-examine notions of the Canadian landscape in contemporary art. The exhibition is the first to be installed in the new gallery at the recently developed Performance Court where the Canada Council for the Arts is the anchor tenant. The Council moved there at the beginning of the year and Âjagemô opened in June to give the organization an attractive street presence. The space will be used to show off the holdings of the Canada Council Art Bank, which has been collecting Canadian artworks since 1972 and renting them to government and corporate clients. Land Reform(ed) offers a quick thematic tour as delineated over the past four decades by some of Canada’s greatest hit-makers.

Marlene Creates, Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, 

Newfoundland 2007 (and ongoing), 2007 (photo: Brandon Clarida)

Curated by Stanzie Tooth during an internship for her MFA at the University of Ottawa, the exhibition offers scant evidence that contemporary Canadian artists naïvely celebrate a direct communion with an unspoiled wilderness. Even the most innocuous project on view, a series by Marlene Creates where the artist photographed her hand against tree trunks, demonstrates that Canadian artists do not leave the landscape untouched by their interventions.

The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the August 26th Akimblog.

Beyond the Edge at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa

Recently, on a beautiful summer day, I visited Beyond the Edge: Artists' Gardens, an exhibition at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa. Curated byJudith Parker and Mary Faught, the exhibition features five projects by six artists (Barbara Brown, Karl Ciesluk, cj fleury, Deirdre and Glynis Logue, and Deborah Margo) on six sites throughout the Agriculture Canada Research Plot. Using existing and new plant material as a medium, the artists cultivate a hybrid of artistic and scientific research across ten acres of the historic working farm and research centre founded in 1886.

Karl Ciesluk, Mechanical Spiral, 2014, installation view

Beyond the Edge: Artists' Gardens is the inaugural project of the Canadensis Botanical Garden Society, a volunteer organization working to institute a national botanical garden on the same site. At present, the site (and the exhibition) offers a pastoral, if not rural, respite from the urban environment in the very heart of the city.

I wrote about the exhibition for the July 15 Akimblog, which can be read in its entirety by clicking on this link.

The Great Stone Face

I laughed, cried and split my side while writing a text to contribute to the catalogue for I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side an exhibition organized and curated by Dagmara Genda for AKA artist-run centre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan from 2 May to 20 June, 2014. The exhibition explores the manner in which horror and humour intersect in works by the artists Kyle Beal (Calgary), Erica Eyres (Glasgow, UK), Christine Negus (London, ON) and Shanell Papp (Lethbridge, AB).

Christine Negus, Ditto, 2013
, engraved razor blade, silver thread.

The catalogue was launched on June 19 at the Frances Morrison Central Library in Saskatoon as part of  a night of book sales, signings and readings to celebrate and launch recent exhibition catalogues and publications produced by galleries in Saskatoon, including AKA artist-run centre, BlackFlash Magazine, College Art Galleries/Kenderdine Art Gallery, Kimiwan Zine, Mendel Art Gallery, and PAVED arts.

The following is an excerpt from my essay, The Great Stone Face:

“When stand-up comics perform, they either “kill” or “die.” The use of these words in comedic shop talk reveals an antagonistic power dynamic between comedians and their audience. But the artists in the exhibition I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side are not your garden variety comedians. They are different, as Dagmara Genda notes in her curatorial essay. They are deadpan. The deadpan inhabits an ambivalent, ambiguous zone of the undead where the rules that distinguish between killing and dying don’t necessarily apply. As in the etymology of the word, the deadpan presents a dead “pan” or face, like Buster Keaton’s great, emotionless, stone face.”

The complete text, and more, was available for a short period of time on the AKA website as a downloadable e-text pdf. Now, in order to get a copy you will have to look for Tragedy Plus Time.

Rehab Nazzal at the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa

In each work in the exhibition Invisible, at the Karsh-Masson Gallery from 9 May to 22 June 2014, the artist Rehab Nazzal employs a formal device that actually obstructs the full expression of the content presented. For example, the 2010 video Bil'in combines the sound of a crowd getting tear gassed with out-of-focus images and abstract flashes of colour, as if the camera too were blinded by tear gas. At the heart of the exhibition are works that utilize found footage of a military exercise at a prison in Israel resulting in the injury and death of Palestinian political prisoners. Frames from the Negev Prison is an installation of 1,700 4"x 6" digital prints that runs the length of one gallery wall. The individual prints make up a mosaic that represents a highly pixelated image, with completely black "tiles" indicating footage that was suppressed by the authorities, and others offering only limited views of the events.

Rehab Nazzal, Frames from the Negev Prison, 2013, 1700 digital photographs on paper (detail)

In an artist's talk on June 1, Nazzal said her work formalizes the process of making visible that which has been suppressed. The works remain incomplete in order to betray the force of suppression. Above all, the works invite the viewer to look further into what is only being partially presented. Most certainly, Nazzal's exhibition and the works within it have made the dialogic visible, creating the space for a polyvocal response.

I wrote about the exhibition on the June 17 Akimblog. For the complete text, click on  the following link.

Petra Halkes: Lights On!

My review of "Lights On!" at the Cube Gallery in Ottawa from 2 - 26 January 2014 is on newsstands this summer, appearing in issue 130 of Border Crossings. An exhibition by the Ottawa-based artist, writer, and curator Petra Halkes, “Lights On!” was comprised of recent oil paintings that reproduce the aesthetic qualities of hasty snapshot photography in order to defamiliarize everyday scenes and make them seem otherworldly. Curated by Marcia Lea, the exhibition included selections from two related bodies of Halke’s work, her Window Shopping series and her Reflections series. In both series, Halkes refers to source photographs in the production of her paintings, and she plays up the accidental effects of the lens-based imagery in them, underscoring the disproportionate time and materiality of their making. Halkes confounds the traditional conception of a painting as a window onto the world by superimposing the perspectival planes of more recent technological developments, multiplying windows to other possible worlds.

For the complete review, check out Border Crossings 130, available at the finest bookstores, newsstands, and libraries near you.