Five Alive: Canadian Art’s Top Print Reads of the Year
Opening spread of “Marcel Dzama: The Haunting” by Joseph R. Wolin, Canadian Art, Fall 2008, pp. 94-100
1. “The Haunting: Marcel Dzama’s traumatic fantasy worlds” by Joseph R. Wolin
Canadian Art, Fall 2008
Though young mavericks like Terence Koh and David Altmejd are increasingly well known internationally, Marcel Dzama remains one of Canada’s key creative lights abroad. This article by New York–based curator and critic Joseph R. Wolin takes an indepth look at Dzama’s lastest work, a grouping of darkly fantastic sculptures and dioramas that opened at David Zwirner in spring 2008.
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The new New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York City / photo Dean Kaufman Courtesy New Museum |
2. “New York: City of Art at the End of the Future” by Richard Rhodes
Canadian Art, Summer 2008
For better or for worse (and as of September’s stock market crash, we can definitely verify the latter), New York City remains the centre of the North American art scene. In this personal essay, Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes reflects on his experiences there during the March 2008 art fairs, noting that institutions from the revamped New Museum to the old-school Met have much to offer the current (if past-haunted) moment.
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The opening spread from “Painting in Tongues,” David Jager’s look at Vancouver painter Ben Reeves, from Canadian Art’s Summer 2008 print edition. |
3. “Painting in Tongues: The brush-stroke language of Ben Reeves” by David Jager
Canadian Art, Summer 2008
Vancouver artist Ben Reeves, writes NOW critic David Jager, “makes representational paintings that are also deliberate attempts to provoke and unsettle our cultural assumptions about representation,” tension-filled objects that pit “the materiality of paint against what it represents.” In this profile, Jager elucidates Reeves’s practice, as well as connects it to the work of artists including Gerhard Richter and Vik Muniz.
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The opening spread from “A Trapper in the Woods,” Nancy Tousley’s profile of Vancouver artist Damian Moppett, from Canadian Art’s Spring 2008 print edition. |
4. “A Trapper in the Woods: Vancouver’s Damian Moppett strikes a fine balance between innovation and homage” by Nancy Tousley
Canadian Art, Spring 2008
Interdisciplinary artist Damian Moppett works in a wide variety of media, from video to pottery. But as Calgary critic Nancy Tousley explains, “everything Damian Moppett has made since 2003 flows from 1815/1962, an 18-minute video he created that year in which the artist, wearing a long beard, a collarless white shirt and black pants held up by a piece of rope, plays the role of a trapper in the woods.” Drawing connections to the work of Lucius R. O’Brien, David Milne and Rodney Graham, Tousley illuminates the work of this intriguingly multivalent artist.
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The opening spread from “Archaeologies of the Present,” Jens Hoffmann’s essay on curating from Canadian Art’s Spring 2008 print edition. |
5. Archaeologies of the Present: On curating by Jens Hoffmann
Canadian Art, Spring 2008
In the second of two essays for Canadian Art on practices of exhibition-making, San Francisco–based critic and curator Jens Hoffmann reflects on the role of the “so-called independent curator.” Along the way, he discusses globalization in the art world, the increasing draw of institutions and the question of whether art-world innovation is still possible. Also not to be missed: Hoffmann’s expansion on his essay in our one-on-one online audio interview, where he expounds on art fairs and folly at greater length.
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