Reading Room: No. 101 – fall 2012
The Great and the LITTLE World: On the Scale of Excessive
Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.1 – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels Endlessly amassed, the dwarves, midgets, small things, miniatures and other diminutives have yet to reach the level of his shins, and for good reason. The GIANT is MORE than the…
The Call of Excessiveness. On the Works of Jérôme Fortin and Guy Laramée
Guy Laramée, Guan Yin Galerie d’Art d’Outremont May 3—27, 2012 The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea. –Rainer Maria Rilke Art sometimes may be created through excessiveness. But how do we measure the “excessive”? How does the work make us see the refusal of limits that it implies?…
The Miniature and the Boundless
An Era of the Boundless? Defining the boundless is not an easy task—actually, it is almost as dizzying to think about it as it is to experience it. One can sometimes grasp it as the infinite (literally without bounds) sometimes as excess (implying the overstepping of whatever limit), and sometimes as the incommensurable. It is…
Megalomanias: Architecture, Urbanism and Their Fictions
Since it was uploaded last summer Jonathan Gales’ short film Megalomania 1 has aroused fascination with its protagonists, a city and its architecture portrayed as an incommensurable and immobile construction site. A truly post-humanist product, Megalomania’s unfurling of Piranesian scenes allows one to grasp the failure of a certain form of contemporary architecture to serve the…
Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison: How Big is Here?
Leading pioneers of the Eco-Art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as “the Harrisons”) have worked for over forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions, which support biodiversity and community wellbeing. The Harrison’s concept…
Greg Payce: Illusions
Greg Payce: Illusions
The Raphael Yu Centre of Canadian
Ceramics, Gardiner Museum
The Passion of the Patenteux
Peter Alexander Pór, Tribute to
the Cathars Persona Non Grata
–The Veil of History Exhibition
Bezpala Brown Gallery, Toronto
February 5—25, 2011
Selected titles
Eco-Art. Pori Art Museum 2011. 221 pages. www.poriartmuseum.fi This beautifully illustrated book (English, Finnish) preserves the memory of the Eco-Art exhibition, which was held from February to March 2011 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Pori Art Museum, Finland. The curator Pia Hovi-Assad was assisted by the invited curators John K. Grande and Peter Selz…