Review of No Pandas at the Torontoist

Pandas is an odd name for anything, and more than a little disconcerting if you’re a fan of large, bamboo-eating quadripeds who don’t like to breed. Luckily for pandas and those who love them, the No Pandas gallery isn’t a radical anti-panda group dedicated to the final destruction of that most endangered of species. It’s [...]

BlogTO – The Best Contemporary Art Galleries for Emerging Artists in Toronto

Running a successful gallery in Toronto is like riding a bicycle backwards on a steep incline in the rain on a Sunday in church traffic hung-over. Not entirely impossible but an uphill battle of fierce proportions.

Review of Mis[placed] and interview with curator Elizabeth Underhill

XPACE is a student-run gallery that showcases works of many emerging artists, including OCAD undergraduates and recent graduates. They recently hosted an exhibition on furry little creatures, entitled Mis[place]d: Animals Lost and Found, which was curated by Elizabeth Underhill. This show focused on the relationship between humans and animals, the mistreatment and the “misplacement” of [...]

Article on MOTEL by Mike Landry in Things of Desire, Canada’s Alternative Art Weekly Blog

Akimblog – Office as Medium at XPACE

I started off my week sitting down with a journalism student doing a piece on art criticism in Canada for the Ryerson Review. The two prongs of her investigation were the question of negative reviews (that is, how come there aren’t any?) and the significance of art criticism in general (particularly in the here-and-now versus [...]

Akimblog – Confessions of Love at XPACE

Peter Schjeldahl condenses all art criticism into two lines in the current issue of the New Yorker: “successful paintings are interesting to the precise extent of our interest in them. They entertain and reward reveries.” Where does that leave us? I guess we still have to make sense of what we don’t like (which Schjeldahl [...]