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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Dressed head-to-toe in silver sequins and a lamé turban to match, famed beauty influencer Patrick Starr picked up a miniature, pink faux fur-adorned puppy and puckered for a photo. I ducked from the cameras aimed at an it-girl in front me and watched a kidfluencer in sunglasses take a seat in the first row. It was the middle of New York Fashion Week and I was at Spring Studios waiting for Kim Shui, a popular Instagram brand, to show.
Taylore Scarabelli reports on NYFW 2020
Gunderson harnesses ciphers from the collective visual vernacular to exemplify the potential and limits of identity and transformation of self, as dictated by the overbearing weight of preconceived socio-political frameworks. A self-portrait (and perhaps the catalyst for connecting the exhibition’s disparate heroes) It’s Hard to See from Where I Am Standing exists as a visual echoing of repeated selves, each figure’s vision obscured by another’s, though each ultimately bearing the same identity.
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Patterns & Rituals marks Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’ second solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene for the young British-Nigerian artist. Adeniyi-Jones’ work feels at once fluid and solid. Liquid-like figures move through a tornado of pink and purple foliage, yet the work is flat, authoritative. In a way Adeniyi-Jones’ work feels like music – pulsing, repeating, transporting us to another realm. The scale and uniformity of the paintings causes reverberations throughout the space. Visions of stain-glass come to mind, in this artist’s place of worship.
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In Christian theology, it connoted untethered passions, sin, anger, sexual passion, and the devil. It’s a carnal, somatic hue so synonymous with the life within us, though, that to see it as evil seems like a misunderstanding. This dichotomy is mirrored in Coniunctio—an alchemic term for the merging of two opposites—the title of Kyung-Me and Harry Gould Harvey’s two-person exhibition at Bureau, New York. The show features meticulous pen drawings by Kyung-Me, their intricacies executed over the course of hundreds of hours. Expansive interiors test the confines of the picture plane, featuring familiar furnishings that reference architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s obsessive design practice. This metaphorical pilgrimage across space and time is mirrored in Harvey’s slow-burning wax works—eloquent spires and ambiguous figures rendered with painstaking precision. Harvey’s illustrations also adorn the walls, their sacred geometries seemingly a metaphysical map of the viewing experience itself. The wax, red and dripping, seems almost a gothic ode to the passionate idiom of blood, sweat, and tears. We toil, we tire, and we evolve. Challenging the notion of secularity, Coniunctio invites us to speculate on the human desire for spiritual wholeness, outside of what we already thought we knew.
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Frequent Editorial Magazine contributor Maya Fuhr debuts her latest solo show Tec Style at new Toronto gallery 10 Years Ago. Pivoting from fashion photographer and brand ambassador for the likes of Chanel, Fuhr unpacks her career, and perceived culpability through sculptures, light-boxes and a pair of 3D-rendered boots. Tec Style is a meditation on the life of a garment; Fuhr walks us through the manufacturing process behind the clothes we wear. While the idea of environmental or resistance art can seem futile, sanctimonious, Tec Style comes across as a sincere effort. Fuhr worships her wardrobe, ritualizing the washing and caring for each item. Her simple “Washing” photographs are the stand-out works in the show, intimate, familiar, and mediative.
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Photos courtesy of the artist and Downs & Ross, New York Alan Belcher’s Friends, which recently closed at Downs & Ross, feels like a nursery for unreleased Pokemon mishaps, eulogized as misunderstood stuffies. Wishing to create a “very friendly object,” Belcher hand-stitched each sculpture from…
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Mike Kuchar’s work is a joyful blast of colour, sex and humour, in an art world that needs it. The first time I saw his drawings was after a long, jading day of Material Art Fair; they were a welcomed surprise – crass, playful, and funny. Mike says his aim is to put “a bit more fun to viewing pictures.” His latest exhibition Broken Gods, currently on view at Ghebaly Gallery, is invigorating, no holds barred. Mike and his twin brother George made their name as iconic figures of the burgeoning underground film community in 1960s New York. The twins’ over-the-top, Romance-sci-fi movies were shot on 8mm film with little to no budget. John Waters sources the Kuchar Brothers as a source of inspiration, calling them “complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension.”
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