Last Friday, my invitation to graduation arrived in the mail. It seemed rather premature as I am but a fraction of the way through researching and writing my final dissertation, but it was also rather fitting since the MA program at The Courtauld is one of the shortest Master’s degrees in Art History around: a [...]

The London gallery Haunch of Venison, currently housed in the back of the Royal Academy, would seem to be out of place. While its main location undergoes renovation, the contemporary art gallery is running its shows in the cavernous spaces of the eighteenth-century museum. Upon first impression, however, the sculpture (a polychrome fragment of Roman [...]

With the taught portion of my Courtauld MA degree in Art History concluded (the final exam completed last week), it’s now time to start thinking of dissertation topics and plunge into the final 10,000 words and final three months of my graduate degree. With this last stage at hand, I have had much time to [...]

Whenever I tell someone I am studying for my Master’s at The Courtauld, I get one of two reactions. “The what?” is the first, spoken by those who aren’t in the art loop. And the second is a response of excitement and praise, spoken by those working in the arts and knowing full well the [...]

My mother’s desire to retrieve the vestiges of invisible human history is tinged with a certain melancholy. She manages, with only her small digital camera – and no PhotoShop distortions – to make the invisible visible. Water threatens to swallow the city of Venice in arrival (seen after the jump), the cityscape smeared with the [...]

British film director Peter Greenaway interpreting Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper seemed a compelling combination. At least it piqued my curiosity. While the exhibited video work concluded its run at The Armory in NYC on January 6, I have been struggling to find the words to describe my disappointment and dissatisfaction (to put it [...]

Glasgow-native Susan Philipsz was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Britain earlier tonight for Lowlands, a sound installation featured at the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. The fourth woman to win the illustrious Turner Prize, Philipsz is also the first ever artist to have her sound piece garner the accolade recognizing the [...]

The captivating and skillful paintings of GL Brierley are appropriately exhibited at Madder139, located at the fore of Vyner Street. This street in east London is one of many avenues with a concentration of galleries that, every first Thursday of the month, hosts a free late night open-gallery event. GL Brierley served as a beacon [...]

Last August, Travel+Leisure ran the article Magnificent Montreal, in which Adam Sachs attempted to sum up Montreal, saying “it’s a college town, a dump, a city of art, placid parks, islands rigged for play and diversions, gray insular urban neighborhoods, and colorful suburbs. It is tiny by megacity standards but world-class in its weirdness, in [...]

Mexican-born electronics artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer creates installations that could not exist without the participation of the public. His art, fueled by human energy, ranges from one-room displays to city-square-scale manifestations. Commissions for his work have included the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the 50th Anniversary [...]

Vida Simon enters her work. The Montreal-based artist creates gentle, introspective drawing installation/performances where we witness her artistic process live and in progress. She literally embodies her own art, working with practices of drawing, writing, object making, movement, and sound. Her often contemplative creations have been shared through performances and residencies across Canada, in the [...]

Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) #2 from Adad Hannah on Vimeo. Adad Hannah’s videos are moving pieces of work. And they move, just barely. What started as a curiosity to see what happens to video when you strip it of all its defining characteristics – more closely reverting back to photography – has [...]

Adad Hannah’s videos are moving pieces of work. And they move, just barely. What started as a curiosity to see what happens to video when you strip it of all its defining characteristics – more closely reverting back to photography – has inspired a career full of artistic exploration. Featured in the Quebec Triennale in [...]

Over the past eight years, New York-based artist Stephen Talasnik has been working to perfect his sculpture Nimbus (2002-2010), conceived specifically for the Battat Contemporary. While looming large over the rest of the pieces in his first Canadian show, the massive 25-foot-long (and sometimes 9-foot-high) sculpture equally embodies the ideas explored in the other sculptures [...]

Trying to explain GAMMA is kind of like trying to describe Burning Man. The members of Kokoromi Collective best described their annual showcase for game creation and art as a “curated live game event organized in a party-like atmosphere complete with music, DJs, and VJs.” It all began because of a request for an interactive [...]

Jenny Schade thinks she was born in the wrong century. The 25-year-old Montreal-born artist has devoted herself fully to painting — pure oil-on-canvas painting. Her large works depict abstract landscapes always populated by a face or a figure. Her paintings are charged with a Beckmann-like intensity. A promising young artist, she has been featured in [...]

A former commercial photographer, Yves Médam has only recently made the shift to fine art in the last 3 years. The French-born artist constructs large format photographic re-inventions of reality, creating a collage of multiple images. It is almost a cubist reinvention in its form. Médam, represented by Galerie Dominique Bouffard, was recently featured in [...]

Paul Warne doesn’t consider himself so much an artist as a designer. While trained in animation and film at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Warne found himself immersed in video game design, video installation and, most recently, creations of “Augmented Reality” (the interstitial space where virtual and the real worlds meet).  An artistic mind with [...]

Shelley Miller creates exquisite, intricate artworks out of sugar. In 2009, her mural installation, Cargo, won the People’s Choice award at Montreal’s Mois de la Photo (Montreal’s biennale for contemporary photography). A collaboration between the artist and the Darling Foundry (a factory turned art center), the mural captured the public’s imagination. Referencing the azulejo ceramic [...]

With the daily iterations of war, security, terror, violence and privacy in the media, stories relating such content have started to fade from focus over the past 9 years. I, for one, have noticed that I’ve stopped listening, stopped reading, stopped caring. Yet, a well curated Jenny Holzer show at DHC/ART in Montreal (co-organized by [...]