Ontario College of Art & Design’s professional gallery space, Onsite [at] OCAD U, is raw and industrial. Its warehouse-like ambiance is enhanced by the cinder block walls, industrial piping crisscrossing the ceiling, and bank of floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. These features present a number of restrictions when mounting an exhibition, a challenge for artists and curators in this unconventional gallery setting. In No Dull[…..]

The artist’s hand is evident from the moment you walk into BUSTER SIMPSON // SURVEYOR, the first comprehensive survey of the Seattle-based artist’s forty-year career, now on view at the Frye Museum of Art. Simpson has chiseled the exhibition title’s two parallel lines into the gallery wall (on which the rest of the title is painted), like a giant trail marker or series of bite[…..]

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. It’s dim and dank in here, despite the warmth of the Venetian summer. A long, gnarled mass lies sprawled across the length of the floor; in the gloom of the pavilion its flesh seems luminous. In places, its limbs are bound with rags. Sometimes they rest on threadbare cushions. It’s a fallen tree, but it seems[…..]

The contrast between established arts institutions and alternative spaces is often stark—different areas of town, different audiences in attendance, different coverage (if any) from very different publications. Artforum has a ten-page spread on the latest from Martin Kippenberger, while the arts and culture section of a local blog has two hundred words on an emerging artist. But the rare moments when the two worlds collide[…..]

#institutions #representation #access #sustainability #visibility #regionalism #globalism Two shows at San Francisco museums this past July proposed to reconcile gaps between local and global concerns. For Proximities I: What Time Is It There? at the Asian Art Museum, guest curator Glen Helfand asked a group of Bay Area artists to consider the concept of Asia from the perspective of the culturally uninitiated. Migrating Identities, at Yerba[…..]

Three years ago, artist David Jelinek and his wife decided to get a divorce. That very weekend, a car slammed into him as he attempted to hail a cab. He flew ten feet into the air and spent ten days in a trauma unit at Bellevue Hospital. He lost all hearing in his right ear as well as a large amount of spinal fluid. But trauma[…..]

In 2007 young artist Zhang Rui, then newly graduated from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, was one of 1001 Chinese citizens selected by Ai Weiwei through his blog to participate in his project Fairytale for Documenta 12. The experience proved to be a transformative one. Her body of work One Year is showing at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Small works, painted with[…..]