Author Archives: llavery

Climate Futures and Spectral Atmospheres in Tracy Peters’ Bog Sensing

16 March 2024

By Lindsey french

“The sound is incredible. I knew I might never hear anything like that again.” As artist Tracy Peters describes this to me, I try to imagine the squelch of snowshoes pressing into a dense mat of waterlogged Sphagnum moss. The artist is telling me about her recent research trip to Store Mosse National Park, the largest protected bog in Sweden, where she spent three days during the autumn of 2022 walking among acid-loving plants, submerging film and photo paper below the wet surface, and making audio and video recordings. She sends me a video from the resulting exhibition in Stockholm: it depicts her hand reaching into wet soil, submerged, then gliding through the peat while mismatched audio of footsteps sonically tell me more about the surface of this landscape than what I can visibly see.

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We Are All Electric Beings: Inter-species meet-cute at the Art Gallery of Regina

27 February 2024

By Jera MacPherson

Last October, I procured a new house plant under unique circumstances. A small Hoja specimen was transferred into my care at the Art Gallery of Regina during a free plant adoption project by artist Alyssa Ellis. During the exhibition’s run, visitors were asked to symbolically enter into an interspecies social contract with their new plants, signing a formal agreement  hinged on reciprocal notions of care. Even though the exhibition has long since closed, the themes of the show become ever more imposing—not unlike the plant that continues to grow in my care.

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Alibaba Conundrum at Griffin Art Projects

11 February 2024

By Ido Radon

What more can be written about what has already been said? Before these fingers so much as touched the keyboard, the discourse ran thick around Alibaba Conundrum, an exhibition at Griffin Art Projects by an artist duo of the same name. So many words had been said and written by the artists Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar, curator Lisa Baldissera, and invited panel respondents, that even the gallery checklist was layered with further descriptions and explications beyond the usual fare. 

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Precious Elements: In Conversation with Parastoo Anoushahpour

31 January 2024

By Anqi Shen

I can’t say for certain why Parastoo Anoushahpour’s recent film The Time That Separates Us (2022) absorbed my attentions. In the spring, I found myself on the edge of the University of Toronto’s St. George campus in Innis Town Hall, a cinema and lecture theatre. I was compelled to take out my notebook in the dark to record some thoughts: Story of the Ammonites / Lot’s daughters—The key to taking a selfie is to take just one—’Valle’–Yes—There–English—Not everything is meant to be written—All memories become important—A light hand / a Heavy Land.

As part of a 2023 Images Festival screening series called Passages, Anoushahpour’s film was screened alongside the works of Iranian filmmakers Naghmeh Abbasi, Siavash Yazdanmehr, and Rojin Shafiei. Collectively, these works spoke to each other in Arabic and Farsi, between modes and metaphors. I tried to understand the language between them. Shot in Jordan and Palestine, The Time That Separates Us is grounded in the land and the mythologies around Lot’s Wife and the Pillar of Salt. In the film, an intimacy of thoughtful and honest intentions is foregrounded in the exploration of the film’s subjectivities in a heavily mediated landscape.

A couple of weeks after the screening, during a trip to New York City, I reached out to Anoushahpour to ask if she would be open to talking about her work. The Toronto-based filmmaker and artist spoke with me from Athens, Greece, where she was at the time. Our conversation meandered between ideas I had sent her in an email, and we spoke about elements of craft and process—not in a way that would explain certain artistic decisions or meanings, but to more insightfully navigate why I came away feeling so touched by her work. 

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Protest Lip Slips

27 December 2023

By Amanda Boulos

When I’m chanting for justice, peace, a ceasefire, and mercy for Palestine and Palestinians at protests in Toronto, I catch myself mixing up the carefully constructed asks. I blame this on my grief—my cold body marching for hours at a time. I think about these mix-ups and how perhaps the variations on these chants, many of them over 30 years old, will help someone to finally hear what I’m saying. These mix-ups—or, as I sometimes like to call them, lip slips—allow me to take a different cognitive path to the part of my brain that keeps me living and creative, the part that works on healing. 

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Because Every Day is Filled with Unmemorable Time: A Conversation with Hyang Cho

14 December 2023

By sophia bartholomew

At sunset, in the calm before a torrential downpour, I spoke with artist Hyang Cho inside the makeshift studio she’s set up inside her garage in Guelph, ON. We talked about her most recent exhibition, Certain Things from Uncertain Moments, which ran from January 14 – March 11, 2023 at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and reflected on using time as material when creating sculptural work, the relationship between time and boredom, and the near-geologic sedimentation of her varied material accumulations. She walked me through the differentiation she makes between “collecting” and “saving,” and why she always “pauses” her projects rather than “ending” them. We discussed the subtle variations in mass produced objects like glass jars and plastic bags, and whether or not materials can ever truly be transformed. In Cho’s process, a book always remains a book, even after it’s been torn up, mixed with glue, and turned into a rock-like lump of papier mâché—and through our conversation, she also convinced me that sometimes tearing a book apart is more pleasurable than reading. 

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PLL BCK TH CRTN: On Colin Miner’s The clearest image

21 November 2023

By Jonathan Scott

01.

The clearest image is a fucking mess. Holes are cut in and through walls. The crap that came out swept together with the other detritus from the installation into little piles around the space. A deathtrap of electrical cables lay strewn on the floor, excretions from the neon-light entrails which spiral to infinitude. A polluting vibration of sound embroils itself with the feeling of controlled unruliness. A patient kind of anger tightens the air as if we’re waiting for something to happen, but unsure if we’ve just missed it. 

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A Tangent Line Gently Touching Coins: Micah Adams at MKG127

11 November 2023

By Erika Verhagen

I went to Niagara Falls, Ontario and all I got was this lousy coin. Well, no, actually, it was in the thick of the manufactured thunderstorm at the Rainforest Cafe where I begged my roommate for a loonie to trade in at the gift shop desk for a single American penny. I walked over to the great touristic crank machine, inserting the penny to receive in return a flatter, more oblong coin sporting a new copper vista: Niagara Falls’ Rainbow Bridge behind a posed cheetah with a body like Tony the Tiger and a face like the Cheshire Cat (years of evolution, and all he got was this lousy grin). My newly minted coin featured two of the three most popular iconographic features of currency: animals and infrastructure, but without the third: a bust on the coin’s obverse. What then, is my suggestion? A dignified portrait of Cha! Cha!, the Rainforest Cafe’s iconic red-eyed tree frog. 

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Notes on Empathy: An Analysis of Zinnia Naqvi’s films: Seaview, The Translation is Approximate, and Farzana

4 November 2023

By Nawang Tsomo Kinkar

Toni Morrison wrote that fiction “is a product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with what really happened, or where it really happened, or when it really happened, and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much in it can be verified.”After watching Seaview (2015), The Translation is Approximate (2021), and Farzana (2021), three short films written and directed by Zinnia Naqvi, I found myself at a crossroads, unable to distinguish right from wrong, true from false, or fact from fiction. 

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Archival Legacies: THAT WHICH WE WERE GIVEN at The Next Contemporary

27 October 2023

By Ignazio Colt Nicastro

Masked in the dramatic shadows of the dim, ivory gallery space, THAT WHICH WE WERE GIVEN was a luminary exhibition that spotlights the ongoing processes of displacement and dispossession within Black communities. As The Next Contemporary’s second exhibition, the Toronto gallery’s group show furthers themes that are prevalent to director Farnoosh Talaee’s curatorial framework: elevating BIPOC and historically marginalized voices while exploring stories of migration and memory. The collective works by artists Anique Jordan, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Mallory Lowe Mpoka delve into nostalgic recalling, archival navigation, colonial disruptions, and somatic relationships that carve space into history for their stories. 

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Machined Sun: Ryan Park at  YYZ Artists’ Outlet

18 October 2023

By José Andrés Mora

It’s always the same time of day in my memories when I revisit them: the light remains frozen, and time behaves differently. There’s something about the temporal quality of light that can quickly transform into analogies of time and memory, and, if anything, it’s because working with light is working with energy that continually wants to dissipate. When wrangling light into art projects, the continuous loss of energy must be constantly resupplied—like keeping alive a memory that wants to become undone—while the surfaces and filters that both absorb and reflect light always lean towards decay. 

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PR 2023 Fundraiser Auction

15 September 2023

From Sunday September 17 – Friday September 29, 2023, Peripheral Review will host our second annual online auction of artworks from thirty-seven Canadian and international artists. The auction will take place entirely on our website and includes a wide-range of works at varying prices for increased accessibility. All proceeds of the sales will go to the artists and Peripheral Review’s publishing activities.

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Follow Architect turtle through a world of wonders: Mikaela Kautzky at nap

31 August 2023

By Stephanie Wu

made for, by, and in my garden :,), a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Mikaela Kautzky, was especially memorable for the care taken in the placement of its contents. To enter the show in a small project space called nap, visitors had to traverse through an apartment in the basement level of a house in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive neighbourhood. In the room to the right of the entrance, the fluorescent lighting and low ceilings of the bedroom-turned-gallery-space welcomed viewers, which felt somewhat ironic considering the show’s title, which referenced a garden. The confined space made me feel as if I had eaten the enlarging ‘Eat Me’ cake from Alice in Wonderland, a feeling which created a notion of enchantment that continued on throughout Kautzky’s show. 

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Marlon Kroll at Parc Offsite

4 August 2023

By Rosemary Flutur

Let us assume that an artist is a translator of what constitutes them. Even the most ostensibly impersonal art is a revelation of the artist’s curiosities and desires, and the more empathetic viewer enacts a form of deciphering. My tendency, or perhaps my problem, is that when a work of art moves me, I experience a vague desire to gather information about the artist, not unlike the energy that coils inside me when I have a crush: when were they born; what motivates them to live; did they have a difficult childhood? Unless you’re personally acquainted with the individual (and even then), one has to turn to the contentious landscapes of history or gossip to fill in the gaps. Context doesn’t necessarily offer clearer insight, but it can affect the impact. It also helps with identifying whether or not the artist is privy to artmaking’s capacity to reconfigure their ontology, which occurs when treating the act as one of great intimacy between material and maker.

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Becoming Slime: A Field Guide to a Gooier Life

22 May 2023

By Lauren Prousky

1. Have your child squeeze about ½ cup (4 ounces) of glue into a glass bowl.1

For as long as I can remember, I’ve found comfort and pleasure in the sensation of soft things slipping through my fingers. I actively sought, and continue to seek out, sensory experiences I can squish in my hands, savouring the feeling of something being squeezed through the delicate space between each finger. As such, the space between my fingers has long been a murky secondary pleasure zone, producing in me an eagerness to run my hands through any dangling, soft, or gloopy matter within reach.

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On Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller

17 April 2023

By Madeline Bogoch

Cookie Mueller holds the niche title of it girl’s it girl—which may be partially attributed to  remaining just obscure enough to fly under the radar of mainstream recognition. A recent reissue of her collected writing, Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, has reignited interest in the always multi-hyphenated Mueller, and ensured that her legacy continues, several decades after her death of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. The expanded text, originally published by Semiotext(e) in 1990, features a range of Mueller’s oeuvre as an art writer, essayist, fabulist, and advice columnist, alongside a new introduction by author Olivia Laing.

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Mutable Matters: A Conversation with Laura Hudspith

15 March 2023

By Katie Lawson

I first came across Laura Hudspith’s work in 2019, which coincided with a shift in the artist’s practice to a more autotheoretical approach that draws on her lived experience with chronic illness. At that time, I was months deep into my own isolating and confusing journey that would eventually lead to the diagnosis of fibromyalgia, the latest in a growing list of medical conditions that have shaped my life to date. I was immediately drawn to Laura’s compelling use of object, image, and text in relation to both the individual and the collective body. I felt a wave of relief; I felt seen. Despite the fact that I initially encountered Laura’s work virtually, the impact of her practice is evident in the sense of connection and comfort it offered me in a time marked by unknowing. 

Splitting her time between Pittsburgh and Toronto, Laura has since continued to deepen her engagement with the intersections of art, critical theory, politics, and medicine, resulting in a wide range of material experimentation as she works towards the completion of her graduate degree. This winter, I had the privilege of sitting down with Laura for an in-depth conversation about her practice, traversing multiple bodies of work from 2020 to the present day. 

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Truly, Madly, Deeply; A Case for Vulnerability: In Conversation with Beau Gomez

5 February 2023

By Nawang Tsomo Kinkar

How does one evaluate the authenticity of an artist’s work? Is it the artwork itself or is it the engagement with it? In this late-capitalist, image-driven world, what does meaningful engagement with contemporary photography look like? How do we value generosity, connection, depth and above all—truth? 

I am often at a crossroads between admiring an artist’s body of work at face value—the aspects that are detectable on the surface, the interpretations that comfortably linger in the presentation space—and how I might nurture this relationship between artwork, artist, writer, and as a human being. It therefore came to me as no surprise when I fell in love with Beau Gomez’s El Angel. I fall in love so easily, and photography can be such a beautiful thing. However romantic this may be, it’s important to remember that love too can be fickle, and photography, by its very nature and science, is also a fickle phenomenon. 

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Resisting Quantifiable Instruction: Lan “Florence” Yee’s Tangerine, After Grapefruit

7 January 2023

By Marisa Kelly

The Montréal- and Toronto-based artist Lan “Florence” Yee is showcasing their newest series of works Tangerine, After Grapefruit in their upcoming solo exhibition, Just Short of Everything, which will be showing in January 2023 at the Pierre Léon Gallery inside Alliance Française Toronto. Their series of works Tangerine, After Grapefruit features nine different swathes of large five-by-five-foot linens, which are hand embroidered with dark blue thread. The embroidery instructions read as a kind of wry and whimsical poetry, which are partially inspired by Yoko Ono’s 1964 conceptual instructional poetry book Grapefruit. Similarly to Ono’s instructions, Yee’s do not offer much didactic sense to the reader—their instructions are achievable, but are humourous because they aren’t inherently logical, presenting as counterintuitive to our capitalistic mindset that hyper fixates on productivity and rational thinking. In this sense, the artist’s instructions are anti-capitalist agents, where Yee playfully deviates from the standards of the rational and instead calls for the viewer to step into their emotions. 

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In Confrontation with the Erotic in Hearth’s Erotic Awakenings

17 December 2022

By Priscilla Barker

“We want to hear your narratives,” is the statement that introduces the online exhibition Erotic Awakenings presented online by Hearth Garage. The ongoing virtual exhibit is an archive of personal erotic awakening stories that were collected, written, and submitted by various named and anonymous contributors—a result of a collaboration between curator Fan Wu and Hearth founders Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, Philip Ocampo, and Benjamin de Boer. The series of written poetry and stories approach the very personal and vulnerable experience of sexual awakening from the seemingly dichotomic elements of innocence and carnality. The three-volume collection of texts reminds the reader of universal truths, which are often comedic in nature, found as a result of the vulnerability of sharing personal narratives. Personal, intimate, and voyeuristic, the project mirrors the idea of online forums yet is more tailored in subject and composition. Writing and eros converge in the retelling of lives transformed by an erotic experience, each story expanding on the limitations and freedoms of sexuality. Interestingly, the accounts and memories collected occur from varied points in the subjects’ lives, breaking the popularized mold of the linear development of sexuality within childhood at the onset of puberty, or another coming-of-age narrative. 

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A Wish Stays With You: Hannah Doucet at PLATFORM Centre

12 December 2022

By Sophia Larigakis

At the centre is a bright yellow fountain, its three brimming basins ascending like a tiered wedding cake. Perfect circular droplets, forming chains of liquid beads, cascade from the top. This sculpture, Hannah Doucet’s Wish Fountain (2022), installed at PLATFORM as part of her solo exhibition A Wish Stays With You, is doubly deceptive. To create the “water,” the artist printed a photograph of the liquid onto fabric, made folds in the textile, photographed that, and then made vinyl images out of its composite. The result is both painterly and deeply digital, evoking a Hockney pool by way of The Sims, with all the flattening of density that entails. Approaching Wish Fountain, it is clear that this is no ready-made; it is not a functioning, real-life fountain, nor does it pretend to be.1 As the viewer moves around the sculpture, however, even its slim claim to verisimilitude (in that it is a recognizable form) is called into question. What appears at first to be a three-dimensional sculpture is in fact images on vinyl on two separated pieces of wood, the space between them the space of fantasy itself—the fantasy of dimensionality, of immersion, of liveliness. 

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Lutz Bacher at Treize, Paris

11 November 2022

By Alex Turgeon

The martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, is said to have been the result of being flayed alive for his acts of Christianity by the Armenian King Astyages.1 The saint is often depicted in votive images carrying his flayed skin about him like a cloak, his anatomical musculature exposed as if it were truly rid of all worldly possessions from his selfless act of piety. One of the most iconic representations of Saint Bartholomew is his inclusion in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1535-1541), which was part of the artist’s commissions for the Sistine Chapel. There, Bartholomew is presented under the right foot of Jesus, carrying his representative cloak of flesh in-hand. The face of this draped skin is often considered a self-portrait of the artist Michelangelo himself, rendered in the hollow folds of its mask-like face—absent of a body.

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Justin Aranha’s A Night To Remember at Gallery 44

8 November 2022

By Maria Kanellopoulos

Toronto-based photographer Justin Aranha’s first solo exhibition at Gallery 44’s Member’s Gallery transported us to the early summer of our senior high school year. In June 2018 and 2019, Aranha photographed graduating students of his alma mater, St. Joan of Arc CSS (formerly Jean Vanier CCS) in Scarborough, Ontario. A Night to Remember included dozens of undirected snapshots of prom-goers: couples, individuals and groups of friends. The interactions with his sitters were brief, lasting a few minutes in his paper-backdrop photo booth set up in the prom banquet hall, but the impressions the students made on him and his viewers will last a lifetime. The artist was recently chosen by The British Journal of Photography for their 2022 Ones to Watch list,1 the journal’s annual selection of emerging image-makers. Aranha’s simple yet disarming photography centres around portraits that capture fleeting moments of joy, courage, laughter, love, desire, angst, and beyond. 

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Natural Speculations: Multi-Species Daydream: a garden in the depths of winter by SK Maston and Merle Harley

3 November 2022

By Cason Sharpe

If the past two pandemic-burdened years have taught me anything, it’s that humans are very strange creatures. Without context, the way we behave—how we live, communicate and move through the world—sometimes makes very little sense. Take art, for example: what strange impulses, to make art, to share it with others, to build sacred halls for its display. These were the thoughts I was having as I ferried across Lake Ontario to the Toronto Islands this past February to visit Multi-Species Daydream: a garden in the depths of winter, a site-specific installation by SK Maston and Merle Harley. 

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Elemental: Oceanic at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery

1 November 2022

By Ricky Varghese

Keralites are a chronically melancholic sort of people. I should know; I am one. How could you not be when you hail from a 600-kilometre-long thin strip of tenuous horizon, where a violent blue sea, a lush, verdant land, and the hot pinkish-hued sky all meet—pushing against the very limits of our capacities for perception, experience and overall interestedness in matters of living and dying? I learned a little something about living and dying on that coast of the Arabian Sea when I used to spend childhood summers visiting family in Kerala. The mythological origins of the land are well-rehearsed, especially among scholars of Hindu philosophy and mysticism—the warrior sage Parasurama, the sixth avatar of Lord Vishnu, threw his axe across the sea and when he did so, the water began to recede as far as it reached. This strip of land, Parasurama Kshteram (Parasurama’s Land), borne of the anger of an old man directed at the sea, would come to be known as modern-day Kerala. A tale as old as anachronistic time itself, about an old man and the sea, one that even predates Hemingway’s melancholic novel.

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Liza Eurich: pockets, postscripts, peonies

4 October 2022

By Kim Neudorf

Positioned like an offering at the entrance to artist Liza Eurich’s exhibition, a paper cone holds a gathering of peonies. However, on a closer look, the paper cone is a shirt sleeve with a buttoned-up cuff cast in pale-peach resin. There’s a muted, soft quality to the combination of violet-pink, dark green and pale pink colours in this bouquet. Combined with the cast sleeve, the impression is understated (perhaps this is a bouquet for a formal gathering) but with a dryly funny tone, as the sculpture performs its straightforward bouquet-ness with a knowing wink to the audience.

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What Remains to be Seen: Gonzalo Reyes Rodríguez at Blinkers Art + Projects

23 September 2022

By Madeline Bogoch

There’s an obvious irony in the title of Gonzalo Reyes Rodríguez’s recent exhibition, New Photographs, which revolves around a pack of thirty-year-old photographs the artist acquired in Mexico City. Dated between 1987 and 1993, the photos depict a young, seemingly queer man who signed the backs with the enigmatic moniker, “Technoir.” The details of this opaque nickname are never revealed, and we are left to speculate on the meaning of this and other particulars through images of him amongst his friends, family, and lovers. What were initially intimate snapshots documenting a young man’s life have been reauthored by Rodríguez as cultural artifacts. The novelty alluded to in the title presumably refers to these shifting contexts, and the subsequent accumulation of meaning as the photos are subjected to the scrutiny of public viewership. Plastered in vinyl text alongside the photographs is an excerpt of an essay by author and curator Miwon Kwon, reflecting on the photo archive of the late artist Félix González-Torres. In this passage, Kwon remarks on the intimate familiarity we recognize in the images of others and how such images invite us, briefly, to inhabit them. New Photographs is designed to stage these very encounters, if only to underscore the failure of images to disclose the full picture.

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The Garden of Spoil: Maria Simmons’ Rat, Plastic, Wood

17 September 2022

By Chris Hampton

I’d never noticed the building at 10 Tom Street in West Hamilton, a Sunday school tucked behind an old church, let alone considered there’d be any reason to explore its basement. Past the doors, the scent greeted me first: fresh and mineral, like the smell of earth after a rainfall (but on a return visit, it was sweet like rot). A curious purple glow leaked into the stairwell from the lower floor, intensifying with each step downwards. Then, off the landing, a large room opened, revealing an extraordinary subworld—a garden of sorts—living virtually in secret.   

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Amongst our Contemporary Ruins: future relics of our time at Equinox Gallery

14 September 2022

By Lauren Lavery

Yesterday afternoon my usual commute home was interrupted by a surprise flat on my bike’s rear tire. Along the route from the downtown office to my apartment, there are three sites of open excavation—one a literal pit, which is to be the future location of a new subway station near the local art university. At this particular spot, the usual protocol of a primary coloured, temporary rental fence has been swapped for a more permanent plywood installation, complete with pre-painted information and cut-outs to see what’s happening in the ever deepening, vast cavity bored into the earth below. As I peer through the holes in the plywood to inquire after the progress, the most alluring objects to catch my eye are the brightly coloured debris littering the edges of the worksite. Everything from cherry red Tim Horton’s coffee cups, to the iridescent wrappers of granola bars, to bright white styrofoam takeout containers riddle the area, and are tangled amongst discarded chunks of dried cement and other construction materials. My thoughts immediately jump to how the majority of our contemporary infrastructure is built on a bed of non-biodegradable garbage, eternally preserved for the future generations to discover—what a legacy to leave beneath the impressive glass monoliths erected across this city with extraordinary speed.

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To be Continued: Troubling the Queer Archive at Carleton University Gallery

2 September 2022

By Adam Barbu

With To Be Continued: Troubling the Queer Archive, a group exhibition presented at the Carleton University Art Gallery, curators Anna Shah Hoque and Cara Tierney argue that queer history as we know it is an incomplete, exclusionary concept in need of reinvention. Bringing together a group of thirteen artists and collectives, To Be Continued draws attention to the local trans and BIPOC voices that are repeatedly erased from museum surveys of queer artistic practice. Hoque and Tierney target forms of symbolic violence that underlie this erasure, critiquing dominant queer histories that are narrated from the perspective of the white, cisnormative, gay, metropolitan subject. In this diverse collection of works, including, for example, Ed Kwan aka China Doll’s installation of drag regalia, Aymara Alvarado Sanchez’s performative manifestation of the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor and Pansee Atta’s sculptural exploration of a mythical gender-bending time traveller, the curators propose an alternative, more inclusive queer archive, one that problematizes what is known and knowable about identity and community across the historical continuum.

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The Group Show Garden Metaphor: You Sit in a Garden at Centre Clark

30 August 2022

By Elora Crawford

If a sculpture garden was the “original” group show, which could be said, the central conceit in You Sit in a Garden brings the exhibition back to its roots. In the 1990s archeologists found broken stalagmites arranged just so in the Bruniquel Cave in France. The crystalline structures were set down in rings, for a purpose as yet unknown, though the resultant composition is compelling. It seems to satisfy the gestalt principle of good form named for the quality of visual arrangement our brains perceive as balanced and pleasing. The site dates back 175,000 years and predates any found cave painting, thus, conceivably, it could be the first sculpture garden, or the first ever group show. Similarly, the way the sculpture “garden” exhibition at Centre Clark in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is installed seems to wink in recognition of this history. The group show as a garden is evidently a useful metaphor, it remains consistent across time.

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PR 2022 Fundraiser Auction

12 August 2022

From Saturday August 13 – Saturday August 27, 2022, PR will host our very first online auction with an ambitious roster of work by Canadian and international artists. The auction will take place entirely on our new website and includes a wide range of price points for increased accessibility. All proceeds will go towards supporting PR’s publishing activities and contributor fees.

Thank you for your support! 🙂

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Contorting Ourselves to Appease Them All: Alexa Hawksworth’s Semi-Detached New Build at Projet Pangée

9 August 2022

By Kate Kolberg

You’re sitting, reading in a cafe. Your brain announces to itself: “I’m a reader,” as if somehow that makes you virtuous. In theory, the book’s subject is interesting, but if you’re honest with yourself, you’re struggling to get through a single page, let alone internalize the information being presented to you. Instead, apprehension floods your brain: Am I comfortable or too caffeinated? Do people think I look smart? Maybe I seem mysterious or, maybe, just pretentious. Wait, do I even like reading? This dizzying relationship the self can have to the self—often seemingly innocuous yet fundamentally fraught—was the subject of much of Montreal-based painter Alexa Hawksworth’s work in her recent exhibition Semi-Detached New Build at Projet Pangée. Through an ad-hoc assembly of caricatures and scenes, Hawksworth’s paintings explore the relationship we have with ourselves: the non-negotiable correspondence that is ever-vulnerable to context, doubt, timing, and, perhaps most importantly, our perception of how we are being understood by others.

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Honouring the Trees in Reitzenstein’s FML (forests may lie)

11 July 2022

By William Brereton

After a few deep breaths, I took many strolls among the mysterious yet beautiful installation works of Reitzenstein (the artist formerly known as Reinhard Reitzenstein) in FML (forests may lie) at Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition showcased a survey of the artist’s latest sculptural and photographic works that have signified his long-standing investigations into the environment and environmental degradation. For those who may have sought a critical yet playful experience in nature, Reitzenstein’s latest presentation seamlessly offered interpretive and high-spirited vantage points from which to experience the works, as many of us tried to find reprieve during the early months of the global pandemic. As some museums and galleries in Ontario briefly reopened in Fall 2020, this exhibition affirmed the need to experience art in person and perhaps encouraged us to go on an introspective journey. With a direct focus on our geographic surroundings, the exhibition especially paid homage to the artist’s direct engagement with trees native to, and the communities that reside within, the Golden Horseshoe region of Southern Ontario.

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