Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, May 20, 2024
Contributed by Dion Kliner / Situated in Vancouvers original Chinatown, the Sun Wah Center has been an artistic hub housing a diverse cross section of the cultural community since 2016. In the Centers windowless basement, the Canton-sardine Gallery is isolated from street noise and has no natural light. For Kristin Mans, A-MARE to love-to sea, the gallery had been submerged in a deep violet-blue light and the sound of water that spilled into the hallway….
Contributed by Dion Kliner / Looking from painting to painting at “The Course of a Distant Empire,� Jay Senetchko�s fine solo exhibition at Windsor Gallery in Vancouver,�you might begin to recall�the distinctly dissonant percussion in�Tom Waits�s cheerfully ominous�song as he plaintively asks, �What�s he building in there?� And then, �Where […]
Contributed by Dion Kliner / A preamble: An elephant in a living room, as unlikely as it is to find one there, would never be mistaken for a couch. That is something of the situation that Jeremy Hof’s work puts one in; forcing the unfortunate necessity of bringing up the question of a particular piece being either painting or sculpture when an answer should be obvious and unnecessary. At this date the general question of something being either painting or sculpture is about as interesting as the question of whether something is art or not, and as equally productive (which is to say not at all). And yet here the question sits (I imagine it grinning), persistent and unavoidable.
Contributed by Dion Kliner / Over the course of more than five decades as a non-representational painter Pierre Coupey has deliberately avoided settling into a signature style. His pursuit is the presentation of a material and its range of application. An explorer�s zeal for discovery is only half the explanation. […]
Guest Contributor Dion Kliner (Vancouver, BC) / John Singer Sargent enigmatically said, “A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth.” Was he simply making a neutral observation, or was he talking about their relative value as art? Was it that a portrait is a slightly […]
Guest contributor Dion Kliner / All history is redacted history (Papers I, image posted above), which is to say that all history is manufactured history (Classified). This is as true of objects as it is for events. Some things survive, others don’t; at least as far as our knowledge […]
Guest contributor: Dion Kliner / Vancouver BC / The German author Goethe wrote, �Men must retire from the world from time to time, for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best.� The site of that retreat is the wilderness; desert, ocean, but […]
