Reflections: Reviewers (Part One)
Akimbo is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year with a monthly series that draws on our rich archive of clients, critics, and contributors. For our summer installments, we are checking in with some of the more than fifty former Review writers who have covered the Canadian and international art scene for Akimblog since its inception in 2006. We asked everyone the same two questions:
- What are you up to now?
- What have you seen lately that you’ve loved?Â
Isa Tousignant
Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Les arbres communiquent entre eux Ă 220 hertz, 2024, video installation
1. I’ve segued out of art writing proper over the years to lean into writing and editing in the lifestyle sphere, both because it actually pays my bills, and because art has always been a core component of my rudimentary, mundane life – along with other sensual forms of expression like food and design. I grew up running around my dad’s studio, playing with paint and soaking up a revolving roster of his and his friends’ art on the walls, so it’s always just been there. And it still is. Whether at home, in the street, in friends’ art spaces, or in my own jewelry studio, I’m surrounded by messy creativity on the daily. My time in art institutions, however, is limited these days.
2. That said, the last work I saw that really knocked my socks off was at the MusĂ©e d’art contemporain de MontrĂ©al in their current femmes volcans forĂŞts torrents exhibition featuring women artists and their take on nature. The work is an all-enveloping three-channel video installation by local artist Nelly-Eve Rajotte, titled Les arbres communiquent entre eux Ă 220 Hertz, which, through the power of millions of small floating dots, has the uncanny effect of engendering the bliss of forest bathing. Or an eerie digital experience akin to it, at any rate. Her artificial reproduction of forest scenes is totally mesmerizing and seductive, nearly soporifically comforting, though also inspiring of all sorts of fear for the future and digital-era dread. Exactly the type of tension that gets me jazzed.
Aaron Peck
Eli Bornowsky, Ammann_A4_patch, 2023, egg tempera, gesso, hardboard, wood, aluminum
1. Still writing! A long-suffering book project that I hope to finish soon, and I also contribute to magazines – Aperture and the TLS in particular. I occasionally write essays for artists too.
2. Two things come to mind: First, a collaborative performance by the artist-writer-musician Jean-Philippe Antoine and the musician Palix at a small studio in Paris a few months ago. Improvised musique concrete. It was fascinating to listen to how they were responding to each other’s material, and the sounds themselves were quite moving. Second, I also had the pleasure of seeing some of Eli Bornowsky’s new paintings at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver this past February.
Luther Konadu
Sylvia Plimack Mangold, January 1977, 1977, acrylic on canvas
1. I’m currently the director and curator of the Centre for Cultural and Artist Practices (aka C’cap). We currently have an exhibition by Olivia Whetung. You can read my exhibition essay here. I run the arts and culture publication Public Parking. I’m a studio-based artist and am currently working toward an exhibition in November at two seven two gallery in Toronto.
2. I recently saw a painting by Sylvia Plimack Mangold titled January 1977. I didn’t know her work before this, and I was taken by it. It’s unassuming, curious, and processual – the way I like my art. Also, Iyunade Judah‘s Alara, which I recently organized at C’cap, had a really great video by the artist.
Deborah Margo
Deborah Margo, Necklace, 2023, sugar balls and cord, part of Art School Confidential at the Ottawa Art Gallery (photo: Rémi Thériault)
1. As usual, I find writing hard but worthwhile. Recently, Drain, an online journal, published an essay I wrote about my recent work: Pieces of Eden: Making Gardens – Where Gardening and Installation Practices Meet. In June I packed up my studio of twenty years and moved into a new space – it will be great once I figure out where everything goes! As for exhibitions, I currently have a sculpture made out of sugar balls included in Art School Confidential at the Ottawa Art Gallery. To be honest, I am not wild about the exhibition’s title, but curator Penny Cousineau has done a wonderful job of including fifty artists’ works, which makes for a terrific exhibition of contemporary Canadian art by graduate students, as well as past and present professors, from the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts. I continue to be an adjunct professor at the University, teaching undergraduate and graduate students.
Other projects include collaborating with multi-media artist Annette Hegel on a new outdoor installation at Kinburn, Ontario’s Smith/Payne Family Farm, entitled Refuge, as well as preparing a new sculpture, to be shown with weaver Alison Forrest, at the Huntingdon Public Library in Vermont this fall.
2. Not a single work of art, but a group exhibition. I saw When Forms Come Alive in May at the Hayward Gallery in London. It was an unsettlingly joyful experience highlighting contemporary sculptures drawing “…on familiar experiences of movement, flux and organic growth.”
Charlene K. Lau
Isaac Julien, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022; In back: Richmond Barthé, African Dancer, 1933; Matthew Angelo Harrison, Dark Silhouette: Borrowed Inlets – Dogon, 2018. Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024 (photo: Ron Amstutz)
1. My art criticism writing habit is ongoing and now supported by my job as Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto. Sometimes I also teach and do my own independent curatorial and publication projects, most notably LE SIGH, a multilingual online exhibition space and art magazine that presents creative conversations on time-based contemporary art practices, which I co-founded with the artist, writer, and curator Didier Morelli. But the thing that is most important to me now during the summer is getting ice cream with friends. It’s my love language.
2. I was in New York last month and loved Isaac Julien’s Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) as part of the Whitney Biennial. While I found the Biennial itself to be uneven, this work stood out to me. Normally, big name artists have so much farther to fall from their pedestals, but Julien expertly delivers an engulfing five-channel video installation that examines the life of Alain Locke (1885–1954), writer, philosopher, educator, and “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. Laid out so that the viewer can walk between the screens, the space also includes sculptures by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) and Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1985), examining in situ how institutions have collected works of African art and how Black artists across time reclaim their cultural heritage and continue this legacy today.
Gil McElroy
Amanda McCavour, Pink Field Blue Fog, 2016 – ongoing, thread and machine embroidery (photo: Toni Hafkenscheid)
1. After spending four years writing a monthly blog for Sculpture magazine’s on-line series re:sculpt, I took a break from curating and critical writing, and made some life changes, culminating in marriage and a relocation to Northern Ontario. In 2020, I published my most recent book of poetry, Long Division, with the University of Calgary Press. I’m currently working on a book of literary non-fiction based on the life and career of my late paternal grandfather, an architect whose claim to fame was designing the Canadian Kresge’s stores from the 1930s to 1960s. I’m also doing critical writing again.
2. I was especially taken with the series of textile-based installations Amanda McCavour mounted with Cambridge Art Galleries late last year.