Aaron Peck

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  picks February 07, 2012

  Damian Moppett

  Call it a hometown coup for Damian Moppett. In the fall of 2009, Bob Rennie, a Vancouver-based collector, real estate marketer, and chair of the North American acquisitions committee for the Tate, opened the eponymous Rennie Collection in Vancouver’s Chinatown to display his private collection, one of the largest in North America. This fall, of the forty artists Rennie collects in depth, Moppett became the first Canadian artist to have an exhibition in the gallery.

  Moppett’s representational drawings and paintings are deceptive because the subject of his work is not what is depicted. Viewed all

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  interviews December 16, 2011

  Mark Lewis

  Mark Lewis is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in London. In 2009, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. Here he discusses the relationship the camera has to composition in his 2011 film Black Mirror at the National Gallery, which has screened at the Venice, Toronto, and Vancouver Film Festivals, and is currently featured in “No More Drawing” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show is on view until January 2.

  I’VE ALWAYS LOVED the following haiku by Garry Winogrand. When he was asked, “Why do you take the pictures of the things you do?” He said, “Simply to see what they look like

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  picks July 14, 2011

  Stephen Prina

  There is no such thing as a bad translation—at least, not in the case of Stephen Prina. The complex yet playful references in his works, such as a retooling of Glenn Gould’s recording of Arnold Schönberg’s complete music for solo piano, can leave one dizzy, even bewildered, but that discombobulation can be generative, creating the desire to figure out just what is going on. In other words, Prina presents a kind of semiotic puzzle.

  The works in “He was but a bad translation,” his latest solo show, fall into two categories: serial paintings (such as a few examples from the ongoing Exquisite Corpse:

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  interviews April 29, 2011

  Colter Jacobsen

  Colter Jacobsen is a San Francisco–based artist. Last year he was awarded SF MoMA’s 2010 SECA Art Award. Here, Jacobsen discusses his installation Take a Deep Breath . . . Hold It . . . Hold It (The Vancouver Sun) for “11 Lights on the Bay,” a group show at The Apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. The show closes on May 30.

  I’VE ALWAYS LIKED THE WORD WINDOW, because it means “wind” and “eye,” apparently. Once when I was reading the obituary page, I noticed the way the paper became transparent when I held it up to the sun. There was a woman, whose name was Wentworth, and on the other side of

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  picks February 05, 2011

  “The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea, Part I”

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  picks December 27, 2010

  Elizabeth McIntosh

  Elizabeth McIntosh’s paintings share an unexpected affinity with poetry. In poetics, a text is referred to as “open” when it is composed in such a way that one authoritative reading cannot hermeneutically “close” it. McIntosh’s latest exhibition, which consists of five canvases and two pieces that she refers to as collages, achieves this openness through a tension between apparently contradictory approaches. Whether by combining disparate painting techniques or by using installation-size collages to comment on compositional process, McIntosh’s work resists easy summary.

  On first glance the oil

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  picks November 28, 2010

  Stephen Waddell

  Stephen Waddell’s current exhibition, comprising seven pictures, examines the complexities of the photographic gaze. The most notable work, Wrestlers, 2010, presents an intricate series of sightlines. Measuring 96 by 119 inches, Wrestlers could very well be the only photograph of its size ever produced entirely by hand. In this work, a crowd of spectators in front of the Altes Museum in Berlin watches a Mongolian wresting match (in an allusion to Henri-Cartier Bresson’s Wrestlers on Independence Day, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1958). The two figures in the right-hand corner of the foreground observe

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  picks September 16, 2010

  Geoffrey Farmer

  Geoffrey Farmer’s yearlong project Every Letter in the Alphabet, 2009–10, examines two of his aesthetic preoccupations: language and performance. Farmer opened a storefront for the piece, which was commissioned by the city of Vancouver as part of a series of public artworks in conjunction with the 2010 Olympics. Farmer in turn commissioned twenty-six language-based works by twenty-six different artists, and the projects range from spoken-word performances to posters or signs, while the storefront acts as a public space and reading room. Each of these commissions, as one might have guessed, stands

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  picks June 23, 2010

  B. Wurtz

  The idea of shelter or cover has been a long-standing motif in B. Wurtz’s work, and so it seems only appropriate that his latest show has been installed in a gallery-cum–residential apartment. While the exhibition space––the bedroom––is modest in size, this modesty only augments Wurtz’s six pieces on view. Indeed, given the domestic nature of much of Wurtz’s practice, the part-home, part-gallery context here makes his art all the more resonant.

  Wurtz has an ambiguous relationship to traditional media. When asked by curator Lee Plested to classify his works, the artist said that he prefers not to