Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i C Magazine

Pine Point, Northwest Territories – the town and its accompanying mine site – is named after the tamarack tree, a pine tree masquerading as coniferous. In late September, the tamarack’s needles fade to an autumnal hue, creating a jarring visual as vast fields of short, stocky pines appear to be wilting or dying rather than hibernating. Before the first snowfall, these tamaracks stand as bare as the skeletal remains of a carcass. Another mark of another summer past. I fell gracelessly for the abandoned terrain surrounding Pine Point. Scattered rubble and condensed crushed rock litter the earth like a floppy area rug disguising something subtly conspicuous. It was nearly three years ago that I ventured north alone, and my strongest memories pertain to my sonic relation to that place. There…

In February, my partner and I scoured the rocky beaches of Vancouver Island for a perfectly smooth stone. We sifted through countless contenders, debating the merits and demerits of each, gradually distilling the parameters of the prize. One tempting find was a smooth rock with a perfectly round hole neatly bored into the top, its deceptive lightness revealing a hollow interior. We briefly considered taking it home before returning it to the ocean to serve, we imagined, as a home to another inhabitant. Beachcombing is a popular activity, evocative of summer vacations and communal gatherings. But artist Kelly Jazvac’s beachcombing excursions in Hawaii have yielded another, more tragic, invocation in the form of the plastiglomerate. The name designates a type of aggregate in which plastic waste has bonded with a…

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York March 17 – June 11, 2017 by Rose Bouthillie There’s a thrumming pulse to the Whitney Biennial 2017 – a lucid, bodily insistence. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, the exhibition skews decidedly younger and more diverse than recent iterations.1 Many of the 63 featured artists and collectives have been given substantial amounts of space in the museum’s new building, with the exhibition stretching across two entire floors, the theatre, terraces and interstitial spaces throughout. Individual subjectivity, conflict and community are major threads, all pointing to larger questions about how we know (and create and fail and deny) one another and ourselves. This Biennial was developed during a protracted period of civil unrest and political hysteria, and opened during the first…

Leonard & Ellen Bina Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal January 21 – April 1, 2017 by Genevieve Flavelle If you are a settler on this land, as I am, you may not have had to consider the ways in which you personally constitute and perform Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous artists however, often contend with the violent erasure of Indigenous history and culture upon which Canada’s sovereignty is founded. Focusing on performative “acts,” Sovereign Acts II at Concordia University’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery deals with the legacy of colonial representations of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island through the work of seven contemporary artists. Sovereign Acts II is a revisiting by curator Wanda Nanibush of her 2012 exhibition Sovereign Acts at the University of Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. Opening this…

UNIT/PITT Projects, Vancouver January 27 – March 11, 2017 by D’Arcy Blake As I approach the entrance to Juan Cisneros Neumann’s first solo exhibition, I am greeted by the swelling sound of a live mariachi band and by the musky smell of dyed fabric and chilies simmering in a crockpot. With cardboard cut-outs of cacti hung from the ceiling, an ad hoc partition made from brightly coloured, striped sarapes (Mexican blankets) draped over a clothesline and a sombrero-clad quintet belting out “Cielito Lindo,” I feel as though I’m stepping into a barrio. Sprawling across the two main walls is a mural Cisneros Neumann has drawn with handmade crayons fashioned from beeswax and the earthy pigments of crushed green, orange and red chilies. Third World Problems is at once comical and…

Postcommodity is a transdisciplinary art collective that consists of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. The three artists live and work in the American Southwest and, in addition to their work together as Postcommodity, have individual art practices as well as careers in fields ranging from music to public policy to education. Chacon, Martínez and Twist generously spoke to me the day before the opening of their solo show Coyotaje at Art in General and then responded to a set of questions by email in between travelling to present their work at documenta14. Over Skype the artists described their individual practices as well as the intentionality that coheres them within the collective. In response to a question about working together, Twist observed: “I think that has been very,…

Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin February 4 – March 5, 2017 by Alex Turgeon Blue, the last film ever produced by the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, depicts a single blue screen for the duration of one hour and 19 minutes. Soundscapes produced and narrated by Jarman, describing the director’s process of dying from AIDS, are overlaid onto the blue field of the screen. Blue in all dimensions, without horizon, without beginning or end, the colour engulfs the narrator and the viewer in a complete world of mourning. The film thus operates as a death mask, portraying the colour as a spiritual threshold between the transition from life into death by stating that “blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.”1 A colour, as the film proposes, is used here as a tool…

PROYECTOSMONCLOVA, Mexico City February – March 11, 2017 by Su-Ying Lee During my weeks in Mexico City, I saw several exhibitions about socio-political conditions and the structures that uphold them. As is my tendency, I looked for indications of what art in the context of its presentation platform is able to achieve. Tercerunquinto is a collective of two Mexican artists, Gabriel Cázares and Rolando Flores, who describe their practice as “institutional critique-driven” and “dedicated to investigative explorations into the dynamics of public and private spaces.” Their work is produced through analysis of and intervention into architecture and sculpture in urban environments and gallery spaces. For their exhibition Doble fondo (False Bottom) at the commercial gallery PROYECTOSMONCLOVA, the artists continued their reflection on social and political commentary found painted onto public…

Mare Liberum is a collective of visual artists, designers and writers who formed around a shared engagement with New York’s waterways in 2007. As part of a mobile, interdisciplinary and pedagogical practice, the collective has designed and built boats; published broadsides, essays and books; invented water-related art and educational forums; and collaborated with diverse institutions to produce public talks , collaborative exhibitions, participatory works and voyages. Mare Liberum (ML) is made up of Jean Barberis, Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen, Sunita Prasad and Kendra Sullivan. ML’s work bridges dialogues in art, activism and science by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry and the polis. The collective’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the…

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto March 24 – April 8, 2017 by Coman Poon presence implicates that absence is channelling the ephemeral all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum was an exhibition of performance-installations at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery curated by Jenn Goodwin in collaboration with artists Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary. Pairing a visual and dance artist, the evolving exhibition hosted and unseated the temporary togetherness of the performing and witnessing bodies through a refracting query of what is traced/traceable in the tasks of living and processing embodiment. Tapping into the etymological origins of curating (curatus Latin, “caring for” or “curing”), Goodwin chose to work with artists whose sculptural/choreographic art practices varyingly position the body as a site for creating knowledge and surfacing history…

Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, Newfoundland September 9 – Oct. 18, 2016 by Mary MacDonald As I enter the Afronautic Research Lab, two otherworldly beings smile and gesture for me to sit. I am to read with the others. As the lights shift from red to green, we pour over 18th-century ads for slaves from Canadian newspapers and other texts. A voiceover and magnifying glasses help us to enlarge the details: 1734 – a Montreal slave Marie-Joseph Angélique is accused of starting a fire that burns down 46 houses in Montreal; 1791 – Black Loyalists flee Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone out of fear of recapture and sale into slavery. Our guides are descendants of the Dogon, a West African people whose advanced knowledge of the stars has led them…

In Present Past: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen argues that Western contemporary life hasbecome “saturated” with memory. This phenomenon is read as a response to a growing obsession with a (potential) forgetfulness, which he sees as emerging from the temporal and spatial fracturing of globalization processes. The desire to forget always seems to grow in proportion to the desire to remember, especially when problematic aspects of a nation’s past are at stake… Memory and amnesia always exist side by side and remain part of a political struggle.1 Camille Turner is an artist and researcher whose activist and transmediapractice moves through the various realms of the local, global, the diasporic and transnational to consider how Canada is spatially produced and narrativized by its forgotten histories. By excavating…