C: International Contemporary Art articles from December 1998

C: International Contemporary Art archives from December 1998

Destination: art (exhibitions).
December 22, 1998... Creating a shift in the viewer's perspective and consciousness has been a central ideal of 20th-century art. Yet, as the century draws to a close, it often seems that the evolution of commerce, transportation and communications is the most...

Destination: Montreal (Biennale - art exhibition).
December 22, 1998... In the eighties, Centre international d'art contemporain produced a series of exhibitions under the banner of "Les Cents jours d'art contemporain." The 1985 "Aurora Borealis" and 1987 "Stations" had a critical force and passionate conviction...

Destination: Alberta (art exhibitions).
December 22, 1998... In a province still immersed in its own mythology and romance, curators Cathy Mastin and Catherine Crowston have taken up the theme of frontier as an organizing principle through which to look at both Alberta's contemporary production and the...

Destination: Sao Paulo (24th Bienal - art exhibition).
December 22, 1998... There is nothing modest about the 24th Bienal de Sao Paulo: work by 264 artists (living and dead) spread over three floors of a 30,000-square-metre building; 33 curators feverishly working (independently and in concert); a four-volume catalogue...

In lieu: ... on art installed in washrooms.
December 22, 1998... The pun - simultaneously inventive and irritating - seemed more wholly enjoyable during the sweltering seven-week period last summer in which this ambitious show actually took place. Curated by Eileen Sommerman as a satellite project of the...

Green room of Millie Chen and Warren Quigley.
December 22, 1998... It's high autumn now, leaves beginning to fall, a rich golden slant to the sunlight. Greenroom, the outdoor installation by Millie Chen and Warren Quigley, placed in position at the Toronto Sculpture Garden last spring, has come to the end of...

Letter from Halifax.
December 22, 1998... November 1998 Living in Halifax, I see a lot of young artists, and I'm impressed with how tough-minded they are about launching viable careers and becoming art stars. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, with its international...

Letter from Toronto.
December 22, 1998... November 1998 Philip Monk's latest exhibition for the Power Plant takes a historicizing look at the Toronto art scene during the 1970s and 80s, and has longtime members of the local community either reminiscing or cringing (perhaps...

Georganne Deen (exhibition).
December 22, 1998... The Power Plant, Toronto Many of the best underground comics are simultaneously autobiography and allegory. In Maus, for instance, Art Spiegelman allegorizes autobiography by visually representing the characters (which, on the level of the...

Under construction (exhibition).
December 22, 1998... Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto The title of this show alludes to the fact that the photographs presented depict architectural facades or interior spaces: Bernd and Hilla Becher's water towers, Todd Hido's suburban houses and Lynne Cohen's...

Barbara Cooper (exhibition).
December 22, 1998... Fassbender Gallery, Chicago Barbara Cooper has been exhibiting her emotionally evocative sculptures in Chicago for slightly more than a decade. During this time her work has continued to grow and evolve, like the biological forms and...

Letter from Chicago.
December 22, 1998... November 1998 Painting asserted a strong presence this season, thumbing its nose at the adage that the medium is dead. Of particular note was the dominance of abstract, geometric and pattern painting practised by a number of women artists...

Letter from Calgary (art exhibitions in Western Canada).
December 22, 1998... November 1998 If the art world is anything to go by, the mood in the West this season is calm and meditative. At Banff's Walter Phillips Gallery, Zhu Jinshi (Beijing) has built a labyrinth with crumpled rice-paper walls (to Nov. 29)....

Letter from Montreal.
December 22, 1998... November 1998 In today's art climate, museums are finding themselves increasingly obliged to offer dynamic and relevant programming. One of the museums that has done this most successfully here in Quebec is the Canadian Centre for...

Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe (exhibition).
December 22, 1998... Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal Undertaking a museum exhibition of the collaborative works of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe might seem a bit strange to those familiar with the artists' oeuvre. First presented by curator Helga...

Letter from London (Eng).
December 22, 1998... November 1998 I have been spending far too much time of late wearing rubber gloves and wielding dust rags, and indeed have been wondering if my personality is being gradually siphoned down the kitchen-sink drain and into the vacuum tube....

Lari Pittman (exhibition).
December 22, 1998... Institute of Contemporary Art London Lari Pittman is a strange bird. His paintings are disjunctive and slightly horrifying - imagine an acid-trip through a comic-book, red-light district inhabited by superhero trapeze artists and mutant...

Letter from New York.
December 22, 1998... November 1998 Art scenes have their ups and downs, much like the stock market or a political party. And like the latter two forces, the art scene is motivated by psychological factors as much as by any tangible facts: it does well when...