MEGAN KAMMERER
Curator, Writer, Researcher
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Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan became the talk of Miami Beach—and soon of the international arts community—when he stuck a ripe banana to the wall of Gallerie Perrotin’s exhibition booth at Art Basel in December of 2019. With a single strip of standard issue hardware store duct tape and a piece of fruit plucked from the local supermarket, Cattelan sparked a discussion that led art lovers and haters the world over to question the fundamentals of contemporary art. Though it may prove impossible to reconcile with critical discourses lofted against this work, this paper aims to deconstruct its denigrations through connections to modern art histories.
Behind the rolling doors of Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto stands one of the west end’s newest pools, although I wouldn’t recommend a swim. The sensorially-immersive exhibition is the brainchild of Montreal-born artist Miles Greenberg. This review navigates the installation’s pearly pools as a reflecting pond for durational performance and new treatments of the body as sculptural material.
We spend our lives collecting memories, packing layer upon layer into the construction of a lifetime. Over time, our memories shift and change. Relationships that once felt familiar become strange. Recollections become inconsistent and fleeting. Our bodies our stationed upon the earth, fuelled by its lands and resources. Yet, how can we preserve the everyday moments of our lives as we contend with the flawed abstraction of our memory?
Toronto-based artist Heather Nicol's newest audio work positions itself at both extremes of the human life cycle. Built upon songs for lulling infants to sleep or easing passage into a final resting place, the immersive sound installation uses multichannel audio and light to encourage introspection across oral cultures. This essay navigates the work's twenty-minute audio score, exploring the sounds that console us while commemorating the aural stories that ease us through fundamental transitions.
Wolfgang Ernst argues that the archive is a metaphor for all forms of memory and storage— it is a state of classifying, sorting, and storing human data. Yet, we so easily project our mundane compulsions onto archival collections. Jackson Klie explores these forces in his image-based practice. He queers our understanding of historical collections and cultural holdings by creating ineffable gestures through misalignment and photographic error.
