“Iris Häussler: Archivio Milano 1991” at Daniel Faria Gallery

During one week in the autumn of 1991, Iris Häussler cut out photographs and articles from several European newspapers and then cast them, one by one, into small aluminum trays filled with hot wax salvaged from the used candles of Milan’s churches. This produced almost five hundred wax tablets, each [...]

Images Without End: Carlos Bunga’s at MOCA

“My first house was a woman”, writes Carlos Bunga in NOMAD (Documenta, 2019), a volume of notes and drawings about his childhood homes. “In 1975, one of the many people who escaped from the armed conflict of Angola’s independence struggle with Portugal was my eighteen-year-old mother, pregnant with me and trying to [...]

The Time and Place of an Exhibition: Gina Rorai at Corkin Gallery

Light moves imperceptibly eastward in wide, motley patches across the polished concrete floor of the main space at Corkin Gallery. As the day passes through four skylight casements, it mixes with the halogens hung high in the nineteenth-century industrial ironwork and illuminates Gina Rorai’s three-and-half-metre-wide painting “Infinity With the Mountain [...]

The Constellation of Hajra Waheed: Intimate Witness

Constellation art, a neologism that plays on the longer-standing term “installation art,” has its origins in the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin’s ideas about time, history, and objects of knowledge. Less site-specific than an installation and more discrete in its often- disparate parts, constellation art asks its viewers to make associations both broad and particular. It reflects the new [...]

A Fortieth-Anniversary Exhibition at the Corkin Gallery in Toronto

In a commercial gallery, an exhibition survives three or four weeks, but the longevity of the artworks it contains depends on materials, chance, and our collective will. The galleries themselves exist somewhere between the time of the exhibitions they stage and the time of the artworks they display. The galleries [...]

The Motion of the Imagination: Leopold Plotek at the Corkin Gallery

Because a painting is not an image, it asks things of us that Instagram does not. A painting is a physical object which you must face as if you were facing a human being, an embodied Other looked at with something like the vulnerable core of your being. And yet [...]