David Kaarsemaker at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill in Ottawa

In The Fragile Surface, an exhibition of recent work at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill, David Kaarsemaker adds to the dialogue between painting and photography. His pictures are surely about painting, representational while verging on abstraction, the canvasses rendered diaphanous through the application of colour and thinly layered images. They are also about photography in that they construct images that appear to be accurate depictions of the visible world while being faithful to the way that lens-based analogues can be blurred and out of focus. More directly, photographs are partly the subject of the paintings. The processes by which the works are made generate their dramatic interest, and though fully on view, as in the painting Cross-Section 1, they add to their mystery by bordering on the metaphysical. Inasmuch as paintings and photographs are about memory through their commemoration of people and places, Kaarsemaker’s process engages with space and architecture not unlike the “method of loci” of the immemorial rhetoricians.

David Kaarsemaker, Cross-Section 1, 2015, oil and charcoal on canvas 

The trick that memory plays transforms the spaces we remember over time. And just as these spaces are subject to change, so too are paintings, photographs, and people. Kaarsemaker’s biography reveals a peripatetic life, traversing the US, Burkina Faso, and many places in Canada, where the artist now makes a home in the Ottawa area. Kaarsemaker’s paintings are mobile in the manner of today’s digital technology. His paintings, such as Cross-Section 4, evoke the inner glow of networked flat screen monitors and equally ubiquitous hand-held tablets and phones. The paintings share the uprooted quality of a digital image that can be anywhere at any time, connected simultaneously to a global, dispersed social network, always at hand but ironically untouchable.

The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the February 24 Akimblog. It is my last Akimblog post, as Akimbo will cease publishing reviews from its Ontario regional correspondents in March 2015.

Cultural Engineering: Investigative Media

Over the next two years, an extraordinary transformation will take place at Arts Court. The Ottawa Art Gallery will be pulling up stakes and moving into a brand new purpose-built high-rise in the lot next door. Arts Court will be renovated and connected with the new building, and a reconfigured interior will see SAW Video take up new digs, including a new media art gallery for the presentation of works. Though physical changes to the site have not yet gotten underway, numerous invested parties have been working towards this goal for a long period of time.

Timothy I. Smith, Daly Avenue And Nicholas Street, November 27th, 2014, 2015, digital  video

SAW Video has commissioned a number of artists to produce media artworks in order to chart, and at the same time contemplate, the progress of the Arts Court Redevelopment. The selected artists will be excavating the complex significance of the site. Though they are participants in the ambitious undertaking, they are at enough of a remove to provide a critical perspective on it. The title of the project, Cultural Engineering, makes reference to an exhibition of video, installations and texts by the artist Tom Sherman at the National Gallery of Canada in 1983. In the 1980s, Tom Sherman was also one of the founding editors of FUSE magazine, which published investigative journalism by artists. The artists in this project are conducting similar artistic research, and what their investigations unearth will be published here for your consideration.

On a regular basis, the Cultural Engineering artists will be publishing their new work on a specially designed website conceived of as a kind of on-line magazine. I am the Project Coordinator, and I will be contributing an introductory text for each issue. Link to the first issue here. Stay tuned for further reports from the field.

Jon Sasaki at the Ottawa Art Gallery

Jon Sasaki has followed the spirit of the letter in Two Roads Diverged in a Wood, the most recent of a series of exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery that invites artists to make interventions in the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art. One of Sasaki’s works for the show literally interferes with items in the collection, placing, as in its title, Three Works by George Thomson 180 Degrees Out of Phase. With an ingenious set-up, Sasaki has projected a day-for-night filter onto three mid-century oil paintings by Tom Thomson’s less celebrated older brother, turning anodyne landscapes into brooding nocturnes. Sasaki’s disruptive conceit is configured to simulate daylight twelve hours out of sync with local clocks, enforcing an untimely consideration of the elder Thomson’s work.

Jon Sasaki, Three Works by George Thomson 180 Degrees Out Of Phase, 2015, three paintings from the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art, projected day-for-night masks, daylight fixture, timer

The two diverging roads in the title of the exhibition could be used to refer to the parallel fortunes of the Thomson brothers, but they could be equally applied to the marked difference in approach between Sasaki and his quarry. Instead of making the same painting over and over again, as George Thomson appears to have done, Sasaki takes the road less travelled, inventing new approaches with each undertaking to test the limits of representation.

The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the January 27 Akimblog.

2014 Critic's Picks

In 2014, as the Ottawa Akimblogger, I tried to write about the most notable exhibitions in the area each month. Unfortunately I had to let some events and exhibitions slip by, mostly due to bad timing. Each year, the Akimblog critics post their critic's picks for the year. I had been looking forward to this opportunity to mention some of my favourite things from the past year that my usual posts could not accommodate.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Year’s Midnight, 2011. 

(Installation view, Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa, 2014. Photo : Jennifer Covert)

In an image that summarizes the past year, my eyeballs are smoking from looking at great art. It’s an effect of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s The Year’s Midnight, a version of which was installed at the new Canada Council for the Arts office in time for their AGM in January 2014. With the work’s reference to the winter solstice in the title, my art viewing experience for the year has come full circle.

The complete text of my year-end post was published here on the December 16 Akimblog.

"Beyond Earth Art" Review in C Magazine 124

My review of the exhibition "Beyond Earth Art: Contemporary Artists and the Environment" appears in issue 124 of C Magazine.

Taking inspiration from the ground-breaking Earth Art exhibition organized by Willoughby Sharp on the Cornell University campus in 1969, curator Andrea Inselman put together Beyond Earth Art, an expansive new exhibition examining the manner in which yesterday’s earth art resonates with artists practicing today. Inselman selected environmentally-themed artworks by over three dozen international historical and contemporary artists for installation throughout Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum and on its grounds. While Earth Art was more strictly conceptual or philosophical in the way that it expanded the boundaries of what could be considered art, the works in Beyond Earth Art more pointedly refer to ecological issues. As a whole, the exhibition registered an increasing sense of urgency around environmental concerns that is correspondingly reflected in contemporary art.

The sprawling exhibition did not offer a succinct chronological outlay, but created an environment for investigation and discovery. Evoking both a sense of alarm and disgust while conjuring up the spirit of beauty, contemporary works in a wide range of media at contrasting scales, from small works to room-size installations, populated an expansive zone for the viewer to traverse, circumscribing states of desecration and preservation. Though Beyond Earth Art has come to an end, the dialogue that was strongly given voice at the Johnson will continue to alert, engage and inspire new audiences.

For the complete review, check out C Magazine 124, available at the finest bookstores, newsstands, and libraries near you.

Samuel Roy-Bois at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa

Samuel Roy-Bois’s Not a new world, just an old trick at Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) is one of the more recent works by the Vancouver-based artist that continues on a trajectory he has been following for many years: making art out of the mechanics of displaying art. By fabricating new spaces within art galleries, such as a recording studio or a private apartment, he effects a mise en abyme that mirrors the function of the space within which it is located and augments its potential. Sort of like an ark with an art gallery inside, the installation at CUAG is an affecting architectural folly that offers an intimate portrait of a public collection with all its idiosyncrasies. I've gone to see it a number of times and as the end of the exhibition nears, the sweet sorrow of parting with it increases.

Samuel Roy-Bois, Not a new world, just an old trick, 2013, wood, paint, clear acrylic, and art objects (Photo: Justin Wonnacott)

While its title suggests that there is some mischief at play here, and Roy-Bois has certainly pulled some pranks in the past, I really don’t sense any maliciousness. The installation’s title is more likely an honest assessment of art as one of the few bulwarks we've got against the passage of time. The longer I spent in there and the more I looked, the more I saw thematic associations and formal links between the elements of the work. It was almost too much to bear.

The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the November 25 Akimblog.

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.