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[…..]

It has been a big year for Nottingham Contemporary. After receiving a boost of notoriety by way of Mark Leckey’s The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, the recently rechristened museum and its director, Alex Farquharson, immediately launched their most ambitious curatorial project to date: a traveling exhibition titled Aquatopia. Organized with partner institution Tate St. Ives, the exhibition comprises more than 150 artworks as well as performances,[…..]

Llyn Foulkes ranks among that rare cadre of artists for whom fame is an optional extra. Over the course of his fifty-year career, the Los Angeles–based multimedia artist and musician has experienced periods of success—for his monumental Pop-influenced paintings of rocks and, decades later, for his zany, large-scale narrative tableaux. But much of his work has been met with silence from critics and buyers, allowing[…..]

In 1776 Benjamin Franklin was a celebrity in France. In a series of portraits made during that year, Franklin was depicted wearing a fur hat, the same chapeau that French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was known for wearing. According to the French, this made Franklin an enlightened thinker, like Rousseau. In his painting A Momentary Enlightenment (2010), Philadelphia artist Alexander Rosenberg depicts himself in the same[…..]

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[…..]

Yael Kanarek is interested in the signs and systems that we use to quantify and communicate knowledge, specifically words and numbers. She focuses on the spaces where meaning is conveyed or lost as it passes through cultural and disciplinary frameworks, while her work fluctuates between painting, sculpture, and time-based interactivity. She has exhibited at The Drawing Center and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and has received numerous awards,[…..]

Upon entering Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery to see Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, the viewer is immediately confronted by a raucous wash of sonorous elements. Over fifty artists and conceptual writers occupy the gallery space; canonical works from Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Marcel Broodthaers, Carl Andre, and Dan Graham are nestled among pieces by contemporary practitioners, contributing to the sense of saturation. Originally curated[…..]