Imagine a Venn diagram in which one circle represents the set of all things photographic and the other circle the set of every human conflict, from limited regional insurrections to totalizing global wars, since the eruption of the Mexican- American war in 1846 to the Arab Spring of 2011.
While VOX has long been associated with the socially grounded photographic work of documentary, they have adopted for this occasion a more inclusive sense of documentary’s mis sion and its means. Instead of just the prosaic tone of “straight” photography, we have more lyricism, fiction, uncertainty, speculation and aestheticism.
Graham, Robert. (1994, March 24). Annie Liebovitz: Squint for effect. The Downtown Experience, Montreal.
In this book, Guilbaut spatializes art history and develops a geo-aesthetics which gave to location an importance not only as the background source of art but also representing a strategic position in art. The ways in which art and artists are placed and circulated matter.
There are many reasons why the Canadian Government’s proposed anti-pornography legislation, as tabled in Bill C-54, will make for bad law. In attempting to do too much at once, and to satisfy simultaneously too many constituencies, the government is creating for itself new powers in the control of discourse which are not only potentially abusive, but even as presently composed and intended contain reprehensible notions of state authority.
As is now well known, when the Canadian government originally announced its intention to abandon and effectively destroy the activities and collection of the Stills division of the National Film Board, the ensuing protest of the photographic community was sufficient to cause the authorities to reconsider.
As has been said of the pyramids, that their construction is as much a monument to Egyptian administration as a triumph of ancient engineering, so does this show present both visual delight and a model of organizational innovation.
The exhibition of collections differs from other exhibitions in that rather than being organized by unities of origin — individuals, schools, periods, nations, etc. — a collection forms a group of works defined by their destination : the location of their arrival and reception. Collections of contemporary art differ, again, from those of past art by reason of the coextensivity of creation and receipt.
Perhaps in an unacknowledged celebration of Toronto’s sesquicentennial, Montreal, late this winter, saw an uncommon host of contemporary Toronto painting.
The development of artists often resembles the motion of nautical tacking: establishing direction, reversing, adjusting, correcting, repeating paths and avoiding dangers. In such ways artists chart courses which come to represent their unique concerns, investigations and discoveries within the regions they navigate.