A lively, critic-to-critic dialogue published recently in The New York Times[i] left me pondering over the persistently blinkered nature of so much “digital age” discourse on film.  Moving imagery has long been implicated and explored in and across myriad cultural and creative contexts, yet the breadth, depth, and diversity of filmic practice has been, and continues to be, belied by a narrow focus on commercial[.....]

Although difficult to generalize, a common theme ties together the exhibitions currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) and the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). “At the Far Edge of Words” and “Imaginary Homelands” engage on some level, with the complex reflections of the artists cultural identity in relation to their exchanges with western culture, concepts of otherness, and navigating the[.....]

It’s a rainy summer night in Guadalajara. Zooming through the dark, the jeep I’m riding in feels more like a powerboat as it leaves a black wake in the flooded streets. This ain’t no British rain – and thank God for that. (I’ve had enough drizzle for two lifetimes.) Palm fronds shake and the heavy rain suddenly turns to hail. The frothy water in the[.....]

Things are not quite what they seem in ‘Double Take’ at the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition presents some new works and others which have been seen before but deserve re-examination. A heap of porcelain sunflower seeds, a shiny Harley Davidson which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a bicycle, and the doorway of a Beijing apartment which reveals itself to be[.....]

Post-Fordlândia, the new exhibit at Good Children Gallery, is a palimpsest for modern times: it calls from faded pasts to warn us of an ill-advised future. A series of high-def videos and large format photographs, taken by Irish artists Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, depict the now defunct and abandoned town of Fordlândia, the mad brainchild of Henry Ford. This experiment in urban and cultural[.....]

A “Doing Nothing Garden” where grass grows freely over a pile of waste, an encased letter from artist Kai Althoff declaring why he will not be participating in the exhibition, and Ryan Gander’s invisible artwork, a breeze coming through an empty room.  The favored term of the dOCUMENTA (13) is “non-concept.” Accompanied by jargon such as “non-existing existence” and an education program named “Maybe Education,”[.....]

Even fanatic football fans would be hard-pressed to remember a Glaswegian football team called Partick Thistle, a perpetual underdog in First Division Scottish Football League that’s oft-joked about because of their non-winning ways. Getting behind a team that tries every week but gets nowhere requires no small measure of faith, an action probably synonymous with holding out hope in the long term for that which[.....]