The Editorial Magazine

Grounded only by virtue of the ample cerulean blue smears at its top, Cruel Deceptive Empire, a painting by Ida Ekblad, feels at once static and full of velocity. Refracted yet thoughtfully rendered shapes embody the predicament of isolating a point of focus amid movement, like flipping through a Manga in search of a specific panel, or holding one’s gaze while speeding past them on a subway car. Ekblad’s exhibition, A Deep Medicine, in Paris at Galerie Max Hetzler, features works that unpack the graphic aesthetics of her 80s upbringing, without the saccharine of cliches.

“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.

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. 

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.