C: International Contemporary Art articles from March 1996

C: International Contemporary Art archives from March 1996

Bodies of theory: musings on a symposium (Modernist Utopias, Postformalism and Pure Visuality, Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal).
March 22, 1996... In this Dialogue, writers Petra Halkes and Gil McElroy report on two events. The events are linked by a word - symposium - and their subject - contemporary art. We publish the two stories in tandem not because the events should be compared but...

Passages in urban transit (Art en Direct '95, Galerie Sans Nom, Halifax).
March 22, 1996... In the tourist-free autumn, as another of the season's seemingly innumerable hurricanes churn up the north Atlantic, high winds and heavy rain lash at the Maritimes. I take a train from Halifax to Moncton, stuffed full of university students...

Turning the tables: recent work by Gordon Lebredt.
March 22, 1996... In 1922 the Russian artist, Lissitzky published a children's book entitled Suprematicheskii skaz pro dva kvadrata v 6ti postroikakh (Suprematist story of two squares in six constructions), a visual narrative in which two squares, one red and...

Conceptual bogeyman: art & the media in the city by the sea (Vancouver).
March 22, 1996... This fall and winter, Vancouver galleries hosted a number of important exhibitions that provoked and expanded the discussion of photography. "Photography and Beyond in Japan" opened in October at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Jerry Pethick...

Dia (Center for the Arts) and the dinosaur.
March 22, 1996... The spectatorship of sculpture is akin to a branch of Ichnology, the science of footprints. Text, in imitation of animal sign (derived from cuneiform trackways in mud and snow), is the memory of travel. The American Museum has a dinosaur...

How did you learn to be so smart? (Paulette Philips, "Controlling Interest").
March 22, 1996... Controlling Interest, like its title, is steeped in ambiguity and contradiction. Linda, the central character, is suspicious that her commitment to various artistic ideals has kept her and her work on the fringes of the mainstream. The play...

Aganetha Dyck (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... Perhaps the most spectacular piece in Aganetha Dyck's retrospective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery was Lady in Waiting. The artist installed hundreds of bees, a glass dress and a beehive inside a large plexiglas box. The bees, in turn, transformed...

Julie Arnold (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... Through the ironic and effective deployment of aphorisms, Julie Arnold develops allegories of labour, production and consumption in her installation "As Good As It Gets 'Til It's Gone." In The Idiomatic, a workplace clock with both twelve and...

Julia Fish (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... Just inside the entranceway to the gallery, hung a small 1981 Cyanotype titled Key. A ghostly array of imprints (from seeds placed atop a screen) emerge from the rich blue textured grid burnt into its surface. For Julia Fish, whose paintings...

Jessica Stockholder (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... Even though it is giant and sprawling, Jessica Stockholder's cumbersomely titled installation Your Skin In This Weather Bourne Eye-threads & Swollen Perfume is still just one sculpture. It contains all of the Stockholder trademarks: bright...

Western Canada in brief: spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... Traveling shows and institutional collaborations are attracting audiences and interest this season. Senior Winnipeg artist Aganetha Dyck's subtle meditations on domestic labour, especially her collaborations with honeybees, offer a haunting yet...

Chicago in brief: winter and spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... The opening season of 1996 featured several significant solo retrospectives. The poetics of nature are transformed into abstract visions in the paintings and drawings of Julia Fish, in her first American museum show at the Renaissance Society...

New York in brief: winter and spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... The winter months usually don't see such a large number of group exhibitions. Whether it was the case that many dealers, unable to gauge the season's mood, were playing it safe with group exhibits or that both dealers and curators were feeling...

Atlantic Canada in brief: winter and spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... Like an extended murder mystery, the winter season at Atlantic galleries exhibited much concern about the presence or absence of the body. Guest Curator Gil McElroy brought together work by Marlene Creates, Lauren Schaffer, Ruth Scheuing, Carl...

Montreal in brief: winter & spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... Montreal hosted no grand international events this winter (as was the case this past fall), but museums and galleries did not restrict themselves to local production and we were able to see (or in many cases see again) works of local artists...

Mary Catherine Newcomb (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... These ten untitled sculptures by Kitchener artist Mary Catherine Newcomb are powerful and beautiful. The demure but edgy wax and concrete casts of Newcomb's body, along with giant, perfectly crafted body parts, suggest a number of charged...

Ontario in brief: winter and spring 1996.
March 22, 1996... It's spring and we're all getting re-acquainted with the bodies we put under wraps for winter. Shed a few layers of clothing and there's your post-winter body staring back at you in the mirror. (Be brave - that sun-starved, fleshy thing is your...

Doug Buis (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... Doug Buis's show at the DeLeon White Gallery - like his concurrent exhibition (with Joanne Bristol) at A Space - is a full and mixed bag. Some of the works are effective, letting one's thoughts take flight, others never quite get off the...

Tim Jocelyn collection (exhibition).
March 22, 1996... This exhibition of the late Tim Jocelyn's work time-travels through the twentieth century. His appliqued and pieced textiles suggest a post-war euphoria of images from Kandinsky through Deco to Modern-Style and on to televisions, telephones,...

Reeling into the future.
March 22, 1996... The image that appears on the cover of this issue is from a film sequence in Paulette Phillips's recent play (see, page 36). In the film a woman quite literally bashes her head against a brick wall. It is the contradictions that coexist in this...