found objects

You Are Not Here

Juan Ortiz-Apuy draws power through imitation

Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising. The dream is at its eeriest in a...

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Portable Culture: Soheila Esfahani

  Billions are said to be in global circulation. In the United States alone, five hundred million are manufactured every year. They are everywhere, including inside and outside of our large retail shops. Their ubiquity and number, however, do not guarantee their visibility. Few of us look at, let alone think about the wooden shipping...

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From the archives: Mathieu Léger transforms cultural detritus

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in the Fall 2014 issue of Visual Arts News. In Acadian author France Daigle’s 2012 novel Pour sûr, Antoinette opens a game of Scrabble against her husband, The Cripple, with a controversial 125 points. Her word, dialyse, she argued, to her husband’s chagrin, contained two vertical words—“y” and “a.” “It wasn’t the 21...

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Thinking Outside the White Cube

Eyelevel brings us portable galleries

In September 2012, Eyelevel Gallery, an artist-run centre in North End Halifax, was more than simply a venue to take in contemporary art. It transformed into the headquarters of the World Portable Gallery Convention, complete with a stately desk in the main space, a row of wristwatch faces on the wall displaying international time zones,...

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