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“Untitled (new visions)”

“Untitled (new visions)” curated by executive director Tarin Hughes, is the second collaboration between artists Barbara Hobot and Maggie Groat. Their objects in the AKA exhibition space are generally small-scale works, brightly colored in rainbow or natural hues.

Sound Art at its Best: send + receive v16

Writing about send + receive, and sound art in general, creates a paradox, as one has to rely heavily on the left, quantitative, hemisphere of the brain, the one responsible for “visual space,” as it is the mind-space of civilization proceeding for the last four millennia of linearity, according to the Winnipeg-raised media prophet Marshall McLuhan.

Picturing Loss

“La longue nuit de Mégantic” is not merely the culmination of a year of travels to grieving Lac-Mégantic presenting the breadth of the loss, but also the latest installment of a serial exploring how societies overcome troubled pasts.

At the corner: Irene Bindi and Aston Coles

“At the corner” features new work by Winnipeg-based artists Irene Bindi and Aston Coles. The work in the exhibition considers the “behind the curtain” experience of the cinematic. By reinterpreting the fourth wall, the artists create works that suspend the viewer and eliminate reliance on traditional storytelling.

What Will Be: Christina Battle and Kristie MacDonald

Moving into a new house or apartment is typically welcomed like a new beginning: inviting the opportunity to restart a domestic life, new homes can temporarily obscure unhappy pasts and cushion against uncertain futures. Yet as the architectures pictured by Kristie MacDonald and Christina Battle at Gallery 44 indicate, a well-organized home can never fully protect us from the threats of the outside world, be they forces of nature or politics (or oftentimes both). Shown at the Toronto gallery this past January, MacDonald’s Mechanisms for Correcting the Past, 2013, and Battle’s dearfield, colorado, 2012, each challenge the function of the photograph as a straightforward archival document, instead proposing alternatives for how the medium can engage with histories obscured from view.

Marisa Portolese

Mystery pervades Marisa Portolese’s photographs. They tap into the depths of our inner self. Childhood and its scars lay at the heart of these works. They resonate with us by giving voice to the unutterable. A prolific artist since the 1990s, Portolese focuses on the personal realm. With disturbing realism she portrays the vulnerability of her subjects who are often members of her family. For all intents and purposes, they symbolize that search for identity that defines a person. Indeed, these family members seem to be proxies for an artistic undertaking seeking to engage the full complexity of the individual and their emotional underpinnings.

Geneviève Thauvette

By exposing the assembly of one’s own back story, the reorganized, the blended, Thauvette reminds us of the condition of history itself. Her willingness to engage with historical subjects and drop in a mixed bag of contemporary reference is both modern and vintage all at once—much like the medium in which she works.

“Ghost Dance” and the Crisis of Categorization in Indigenous Art

The critical approach in recent years to categorize contemporary Indigenous art and artists is of principle concern here; there is a danger of conflating aesthetic, cultural, and individual autonomy under the banner of partisanship. It seems to me, at least, that there is an underlying danger that when too many lines are drawn in the sand, there becomes no more room left to manoeuvre.