Ricarda Roggan is decidedly different from the current crop of young artists from Leipzig, who favor a decoratively painted amalgamation of Photoshop realism and sampled figures. Roggan’s photographs, which were included in last year’s Berlin Biennial, are characterized by a brittle reductionism close to the documentary style of the ’70s. She studied at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig with Timm Rautert, whose photographic reportage of factories beginning in the ’60s greatly influenced the way that daily life was presented artistically in West Germany.

Born in Dresden in 1972, Roggan

An exhibition about the north seems like a timely event, as global warming alters the nature of the Arctic. But if guest curator Dieter Roelstraete hoped to challenge rustic, romantic fantasies about northernness, he should have used a compass, if not a reality check. The group show of Canadian artists featured Allison Hrabluik, Zin Taylor, and Ron Terada. By attributing special insight about the north to Canadians—80 percent of whom live within 150 miles of the country’s southern border with the United States, which is to say, not very far north—Roelstraete offered a symptom of the fantasy he