Contamination and Reclamation: Robert Houle’s Paris/Ojibwa
29 Dec 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 1 Comments
Paris/Ojibwa is the latest multimedia installation by world-renowned Anishinabeg (Ojibwa) [1] artist Robert Houle. The installation is a time portal to 1845, when a troupe of Ojibwa dancers lead by a man named Maungwudaus travelled to Paris to dance for King Louis-Phillipe of France and a public of 4,000 French ladies and gentlemen. They were part of American painter George Catlin’s “Indian Museum,” [2] presented as living exhibits of an ancient culture.
Continue Reading...The Migrating Sound Scape: Dipna Horra’s Avaaz
29 Dec 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 0 Comments
Sound artist Dipna Horra uses field and voice recordings to create aural environments that simultaneously present a sense of location and dislocation. With Avaaz, Horra recounts a narrative of migration from India to Africa and then Canada, a narrative that undergoes translation and transposition. Horra’s sound installation consists of a central table set for tea, a wheeled tea trolley in the corner, a suspended window pane on the left of the gallery space and an unobtrusive air vent at our feet. Simple furniture, understated architectural features and fine china are the conduits through which the sound artefacts, that tell the artist’s story are emitted. Horra’s kitchen installation is a theatrical space in which the continuity of ancestral memory both reassures and unsettles.
Continue Reading...Foiled Islands: Abbas Akhavan’s Islands
27 Sep 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 1 Comments
You are standing underneath a palm tree looking up. The tree’s wide fronds extend out like an umbrella above your head. The sky is clear. It is sunny. Instead of protecting you from the sun, however, the tree glares back at you with its golden leaves. The trunk of the tree is solid black, but it’s flat fronds have been meticulously layered with sheets of 22-carat gold. The palm tree appears on a regular Xeroxed sheet of paper. It is a grainy black and white image, except that the palm leaves are highlighted with thin layers of gold.
Continue Reading...Modern Metaphors: Frank Shebageget’s Light Industry
27 Sep 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 0 Comments
In Light Industry, Frank Shebageget’s collection of work operates across cultural categories. Applying both narrative devices and perceptual strategies, Native handcraft traditions and Modernist practices, his work defies easy classification, and in the process articulates certain sympathies between two divergent modes of representation.
Continue Reading...Undoing Identities: Brendan Fernandes’ Haraka Haraka
25 Sep 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 0 Comments
The centerpiece of Brendan Fernandes’ exhibition Haraka Haraka is Nyumba ata Choma, a makeshift hunting village composed of six camouflage sniper tents, each housing a small television screen that plays a looped video of a Yule log superimposed on an archival news still from the torching of three million dollars worth of illegal ivory seized by the Kenyan government in 1989.
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