Tantalizingly visible in quarantine, through floor to ceiling windows on Avenue du Parc, Hotel Emerald is populated with enamel and plush sculpture and paintings fluctuating from jewel-toned to muted pop. These are the works of the twelve artists Jaber invited to produce freely around the concept of play. Several artworks pose in a sand-box, roughly centre, and child-like vitality runs throughout the show.
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Before I met Katya Zelenstova her work was already alluring to me. I was like, “Who is this girl making sexy knitwear?” She asked me to fit model for her a couple of times and I ended up walking her BA collection at the Central Saint Martins show. Her clothing puts me out of my element, but somehow I feel powerful and confident in her designs. Perhaps this is the future of fashion editorials now, but the concept for this zine came before everything changed, when we decided to just have fun and shoot her collection around her flat in London.
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If gleaning involves ascertaining, or, more literally, collecting information or materials, gleaning ozone, an unstable gas, seems hella scary. Ironic, then, that Tiziana La Melia and geetha thurairajah’s show “Ozone Gleaners,” at Montreal’s Projet Pangée, produces an atmosphere of pastel repose. In the press release, an excerpt from La Melia’s OAKWALKDRONE poem refers to “gamma rays on everyone’s marigolds,” and indeed a slippery proximity between twee habitats (two paintings are even shaped like gable-roofed houses) and sinister, electromagnetic undertones permeates the show.
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“Cruelty has a Human Heart,” reads the first line of William Blake’s, A Divine Image. The poem, originally published in 1789, is unsurprisingly still poignant today, and in its entirety appears almost super-imposed over an ethereal white horse and its passenger in Srijon Chowdhury’s expansive painting, Pale Rider. Featured in an eponymous solo exhibition at Foxy Production in New York City, Chowdhury’s works reinterpret traditional approaches to painting by subverting genre, medium, and mythology.
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Cole Kush’s new artist-run platform Eternal Family, offers a Netflix-style model that profits the artists first. Eternal Family is a video membership experience that spotlights TV-series and one-off episodes that are self-produced, and often too experimental to make it to mainstream channels. Kush, a filmmaker and animator whose works tend towards absurd, unsettling comedy, sets the tone for a collection of innovative visual works that promise laughter, education and inspiration.
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Susan Cianciolo has been looking inside herself, searching for the joy and humanity in the quotidian, long before a time when we were all at home, driven by stress and confusion to get crafty and spiritual. And the fruits of her work are collected here, in her decade-spanning survey, “Spirit Guides: Paintings 1990 – 2020,” at Bridget Donahue. With works that are experienced like diary entries or scrapbook pages, corkboard collections of memories and moments, Cianciolo offers sketches of everyday divinity, of small joys and moments of peaceful self-exploration.
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Like an ouroboric daisy chain, with no clear beginning or end beyond the mouth through which one enters, Sistergarden, Ellen Berkenblit’s latest exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, features eleven large-scale works. Each piece depicts the cropped side-profile of a sister, rendered in murky melancholic hues, though punctuated with fluorescent embellishments. Pop ciphers—a richly lacquered nail, a CD-rom iris, a velvet bow, a scrappy corsage. Mouths agape in a soundless gasp, or reticent in firm-lipped contemplation, Berkenblit’s sisters echo our present moment of isolation. Here we are, all together; here we are, all alone.
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The etymology of “spouse” comes from the verb “to bind.” In Spanish, the word for wife is the same as handcuff. In Katja Farin’s “Lines from Arguments,” currently on view at Lubov NYC, ropes and nets function as both boundaries and tethers between two people in close proximity. Catatonic, anonymous figures are rendered in a colour palette of decomposing fruit, closed in by flat patterns and blocks of dullness.
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Canadian house and ambient producer Khotin releases his newest project Area 3, available for digital listening today. Area 3 is a sprawling, meditative collection of ambient tracks, modular synth sketches, and outtakes. The 10-minute opener track “Bubble” is a slow burn, designed to lower heart…
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Editorial Mag is spotlighting artists’ exhibitions that have been impacted by the pandemic. See our other reviews here. Today we enter Montreal’s artist-run space Family Exhibitions to view four shows, two from New York galleries, Marvin Gardens and Grifter Space. As the case with most…
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On view now at her debut solo exhibition at King’s Leap in New York City, Sharona Franklin’s work discloses a sacred perspective on bio-ethics, our ontological perception of disabilities, and society’s subsequent lack of engagement in this dialogue. By unpacking the histories of her own disabilities, methods of pain management, rituals of comfort, and her experiences of the capitalist framework of care, she illuminates the chronic lack of cultural acceptance—from a neglect of social responsibility, to the perpetual ouroboros of biopharmaceutical industries that provide sustenance as much as they are both financially and physically debilitating.
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Swedish-Canadian artist Sara Anstis’s exhibition, “Discrete” currently on view at Nevven Gallery, is full of private parts. Looking at Anstis’s nude, solitary women is akin to the feeling of being a child, stumbling upon a poster of a naked lady. A blonde woman, bonded at her feet, bends over to breastfeed a blue-tongued rodent; she looks back at us, asking us to shield our eyes. Anstis’s otherworldly, almost cartoonish depictions of elongated breasts, and swollen labia suggest a dream world, where women are unburdened by their sensuality.
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Shannon Cartier Lucy’s paintings seem to happen in slow motion. A tulip balancing on a finger, a potted geranium poised on a foot—moments that suggest action to come, accident, or tragedy. What Lucy paints is measured, junctures are captured with intention and detail. There is no freedom of brushstroke in these frames. This format lends a cinematic quality: there is a director behind the scenes, a sense of foreshadow and narrative. Looking at Lucy’s work, I thought of Chantal Akerman’s arthouse classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film chronicling a mother/sex worker’s regimented schedule of cooking and cleaning, until subtle slip-ups lead to the character’s violent psychological break.
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We’re excited to premiere The Creatrix’s track off the inaugural compilation from Orbit’s Spell, a new techno label based in Oakland. With Orbit’s Spell Volume One, the label brings together a fresh and diverse crop of techno producers for eager listeners on dance floors and underground…
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Today we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at Austra’s latest video shoot for her track “Anywayz.” Filmed over the course of a weekend, the singer-songwriter behind Austra, Katie Stelmanis, and director Jasmin Mozzafari, along with a full crew, transformed a dilapidated suburban home into a sci-fi fantasy film-set.
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If smoke from a large fire on Earth contains particles of just the right size, these particles, when released into the atmosphere, can advantageously scatter red light—giving the illusion of a blue moon. “Blue moon” is also a term used to refer to the phenomenon of an extra full moon in an annual cycle, in both occasions a term harnessed to refer to a rare occurrence.
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Mother’s Magazines is Danielle Orchard’s second solo show with New York’s Jack Hanley Gallery. Orchard’s large-scale canvases, some eight-feet wide, reveal a confident painter who’s recently made the switch from small detail brushes to large brushes (the symbol of courage in the studio.) There’s something inherently late-90s about Orchard’s style, as though I could imagine Charlotte, Samantha, and Carrie attending her opening in Sex and the City. Orchard’s playfulness with art history, Cubism and Picasso-like compositions, paired with her re-appropriation of the female form, are nostalgic of an art and fashion world where self-reflectivity was once novel.
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Born in Seattle, Washington, artist Aidan Koch’s work explores our human tendency for anthropomorphism, focusing on its inherent potential rather than its more obvious shortcomings. On view at Paul Soto until March 28, Always Put the Rock Back is Koch’s latest exhibition, inspired by a small note she observed left at a Nature Reserve urging visitors to leave the environment as they found it. Running the gamut from pastels and gouache illustrations, to small-scale sculptures, Koch’s multiple mediums accommodate the myriad gestures through which we bear an allegiance to nature.
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