This Issue
This Issue, Fall 2009, pp. 14
Welcome to the 25th-anniversary issue of Canadian Art. To celebrate, we wanted to make some changes that would aim into the future and lay a foundation for the next 25 years. So here we are with a new logo, a wider format and a revamped editorial lineup, including a coast-to-coast news roundup called “Newsfront” that, with other elements, will keep in sync with the weekly updates of news and exhibitions that are now available on our website, canadianart.ca. For the redesign, our Art Director, Barbara Solowan, has created a bigger, bolder look and we wanted to respond editorially by bringing a broader range of voices into the magazine. Some are in the new “Agenda” section, where, alongside a quarterly summary of top exhibitions, artists and curators and gallery directors will comment on the ideas that went into the making of the shows. The framework for our outlook is an equation that combines art, people and ideas and brings a new focus to what we do, including the short personality profiles that are now part of the lineup, the illustrated contributors’ notes and the portrait and self-portrait photographs of the artists profiled in the stories. We wanted to reaffirm our commitment to making the visual arts in Canada more visible and part of that visibility depends on seeing the people who make the art together with those who shape its presentation and reception.
For our 25th anniversary, we wanted to look to the future rather than back on the past. The issue is anchored by a set of feature stories that introduce you to ten of the artists now shaping the contemporary Canadian art scene. Some of them work in pairs, and some now also work outside the country, but all of them are innovators making contributions to the shifting outlines of our art and culture. Working across regions and media, they represent the power of promise in art, its open address to the imagination. Our larger format is a nod in that direction. We think of it as new play space for the art that is backed up by these changes and a few more that you will see in coming issues. Let us know what you think; we’d like to hear from you. To make it easier, we’ve added a new email account—letters@canadianart.ca. It is meant as a channel for your voice.
Richard Rhodes, Editor
Contributors
MARK CLINTBERG is a Montreal-based artist, writer and curator. His writing has been published in various exhibition catalogues and periodicals, including Canadian Art, Maisonneuve, Pivot, the Art Newspaper, Arte al Dia International, Border Crossings, BlackFlash and Photofile. In the coming year he continues his Ph.D. in Art History at Concordia University, where he is researching artists’ restaurants and other art practices that use food as a primary material.
MONIKA SZEWCZYK is a writer and editor living in Berlin and Rotterdam. As Head of Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, she has edited a wide range of publications, most recently Meaning Liam Gillick, the first critical reader on the artist’s work. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Afterall, Mousse and A Prior. In a serial project titled “Art of Conversation,” for the online journal e-flux, she has chronicled her ongoing investigation of the changing aesthetics and politics of discourse.
ROBERT FONES is a visual artist who lives and works in Toronto. He has shown his work across Canada and internationally, and his writing has been published in Parachute, Vanguard and C as well as in artists’ books produced by Coach House Books and Art Metropole. This fall his Leviathan works from 2008 will be showcased in Descant magazine. He is currently working with Museum London on an exhibition of Greg Curnoe’s collages from the 1960s and is also writing essays for a book about art, typography and design.
LEAH SANDALS is a professional arts writer and editor based in Toronto. She contributes regularly to the National Post, NOW magazine and Spacing, and her writing also appears in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and Eye Weekly, among other outlets. Leah is the Associate Editor of canadianart.ca and also blogs often at Unedit My Heart (neditpasmoncoeur.blogspot.com).
DAVID JAGER has been reviewing books and the visual arts for Toronto’s NOW magazine since 2003 and has written a number of feature stories as well as exhibition reviews for Canadian Art. He also teaches music and works around town as a freelance jazz pianist and vocalist. He lives on the edge of Parkdale with his wife, Elizabeth, his dog, Parker, and his cats, Kafka and Buttercup.
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