To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the[.....]

#Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture #Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com. “Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan[.....]

I must admit I am often plagued by skepticism walking into ‘best of’ exhibitions – the ones, like  the recent Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence, that promise to clairvoyantly open up a window onto the future of contemporary art. Often, these group exhibitions seem plagued by too many artists, who are represented by a single work, thrust together in a curatorial jumble that[.....]

On the surface, Judy Fiskin’s tiny photographs of stucco apartment buildings (Stucco, 1973-6) and Southern California architecture (31 Views of San Bernadino, 1974) belong to a subset of works by artists obsessed with the typography of architecture, à la Bernd and Hilla Becher, or even Ed Ruscha. Each of these artists has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of images of buildings, usually in black-and-white.  The[.....]

Grasping the nebulous zone of art and politics can be arduous at best. The curatorial project of Agitated Histories attempts to do just that by compartmentalizing the political narrative. The Re-enactment, The Archive, The Persona, and The Intervention give some scaffolding from which the viewer can approach the work. The artists in this exhibition engage with the political, the social, and the personal through formal[.....]

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral. Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová[.....]

Today’s feature is brought to you by our friends at Flavorwire, where Marina Galperina speaks to Richard Mosse about his infrared photographs of war-torn Congo. A military village emerges from the hills of hot pink. A soldier lurks in a crimson jungle. A man with a face erupted in scar tissue from a war trauma pauses for a portrait. Photographer Richard Mosse has captured the[.....]