C: International Contemporary Art articles from May 1999

C: International Contemporary Art archives from May 1999

Life inside life: on the recent paintings of Douglas Walker.
May 1, 1999... Dreams are formed by some other sleeper, as if in the night, they mistook the absent person. Paul Valery The average size of these diminutive oils is eight by ten inches. Their ordering palette is green-gold. The glazed surfaces are...

Neurotic realism (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Saatchi Gallery, London When art collector and advertising guru Charles Saatchi coined the phrase "Neurotic Realism" to label his latest exhibition of young, heretofore unknown British artists, the press, characteristically, went wild. "Is...

Letter from London (England - exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... May 1999 I enjoy contemporary art for the obvious reason: it sends my mind off on a magical mystery tour in that endless realm, the imagination. Which is why three solo shows took my fancy this season. All three artists rupture the...

Cultured tourist (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Carol Ehlers Gallery, Chicago The parallel rise of tourism and photography in the latter part of the 19th century laid the foundation for a symbiotic relationship that a century later seems indivisible. As Ingrid Schaffner, co-curator with...

Letter from Chicago (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... May 1999 Chicago, like most of the US, began the year frozen under several feet of snow. Judy Ledgerwood's new suite of paintings, "Cold Days," at the Renaissance Society (closed Feb. 21), offered a sensory experience that emphasized the...

Scapular Gallery Nomad: ... the artist as gallery.
May 1, 1999... Judy Freya Sibayan does not want me to write about her work. And why should she? I am hardly doing her a favour. In fact, the publication of this brief text may well reposition her performances within the powerful institutional nexus of the art...

Few of my favourite (David) Feher's.
May 1, 1999... Associated in the early 1990s with New York's short-lived "scatter-art," Tony Feher had by the middle of this decade earned a reputation for achieving great things by simple means. Part of the century-old tradition of transforming detritus into...

Letter from New York, May 1999 (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... "You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well." Although Wittgenstein delivered these words in 1938, it is now, in the...

Lynn Geesaman (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York If one word could convey the formal essence of Lynn Geesaman's large black-and-white photographs of cultivated landscapes, it would be "tension." Viewed up close, each image has a dreamy, pictorialist...

Letter from Calgary, May 1999 (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... Time to squeeze into your bell bottoms, tighten your head band and slip on the rose-coloured glasses. It's 60s flashback time in Banff and Calgary this summer. The trip begins at the Glenbow (Calgary) with "Making It New! The Big Sixties...

Todd Tedeschini (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver "Arena," Todd Tedeschini's recent exhibition at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, consisted of sixteen abstract paintings: twelve on paper roughly postcard size and four on panels about the size of...

Extremities: Tom Dean prepares for Venice.
May 1, 1999... Like mythological beings divinely formed from clay or like the bottled homunculi in Orson Welles's late, little-known film, Malpertuis, the casts scattered around Tom Dean's studio in March suggested the discard heap of a bored and impetuous...

Tom Dean at large.
May 1, 1999... In its latest tumble off the pedestal, art has fallen into the eager hands of retailers. The retailers in this case are art museums, which have been producing a range of consumer goods - cups, candles, placemats, T-shirts, magnets, stickers,...

Letter from Toronto, May 1999 (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... The winter blahs were much alleviated for me this year by two internationally renowned Toronto-based artists. John Massey showed three smart series of digitally manipulated photographs of an austere modernist waiting room with various...

Sandra Rechico (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Art Gallery of Mississauga, Toronto "gulp" opens with Sandra Rechico's 1995 Floor Show, a wall-to-wall installation of pinkish-painted floor tiles sporting cut-outs of the digestive tract that affectionately cluster together at the tiles'...

Letter from Montreal, May 1999 (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... There are some exhibitions that are not spectacular or impressive but linger in the mind because they raise questions that are relevant to contemporary culture. This was the case with "Memoire et antimemoire" (closed Feb. 20) at the art gallery...

Jacques Perron (exhibition).
May 1, 1999... Galerie Oboro, Montreal Landscape, visage, body, image. Or is it body-image? These have been recurring themes for Jacques Perron for several years. Figures appear as manifestations of the essence of earth (landscape) and being (face), all...

Letter from Halifax, May 1999 (exhibitions).
May 1, 1999... I wouldn't call Halifax a hardship post, but spring can find you nursing a bad case of cabin fever. Fortunately, there are lots of good excuses this summer to get outta town. Curtis Collins, curator of Fredericton's Beaverbrook Art...