CORKIN GALLERY PRESS

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Ryoko Suzuki and Marc Séguin reviewed in current issue of BORDER CROSSINGS

...Suzuki cleverly turns a Japanese pop culture practice on its head and provides an interesting avenue into understanding the notion of manufactured desire in contemporary Japan. -- Carla Harms

Séguin's figuration broaches abstraction the way Jean-Paul Riopelle's abstraction always broached figuration ... Séguin paints the figure, but invokes and evokes registers of meaning that lie below, above or beyond the ground plane of representation. -- James D. Campbell

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Iain Baxter&.update.

Iain Baxter& has exhibited several new projects this summer in a number of exhibitions, including two European biennales, the Fifth TECOMAH Art Biennale in Jouy-en-Josas, France and Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d'art Contemporain in Rennes, France. At TECOMAH, a biennale that focuses on environmental issues, Baxter& was one of 10 international artists invited to create a site-specific piece in an outdoor park. Baxter&'s piece was a large ampersand, tilted on its side and camoflauged with grass. Read about it here: http://www.tecomah.fr/les-environnementales/les-artistes.asp

For Les Ateliers de Rennes, Baxter& worked with local school children and commercial sandwich company Daunat to create a series of installations based on the humble sandwich. The project, titled &WICHTIME, resulted in a humourous series of works that deconstruct the sandwich and re-insert it into unusual contexts. The sandwich becomes anything: a landscape, a bedroom, a piece of sports equipment, shoes. Find out more here: http://www.lesateliersderennes.fr/site/expositions_artistes.php?id=53&id_lieu=7&id_langue=2&PHPSESSID=216ff5fb3f042a64401a3f3342374013

Baxter& and the N.E. Thing Co., are the subject of a recent video discussion by Crown Point Press director Kathan Brown. In casual conversation with the viewer she discusses how artists often act as precursors to pop culture trends, even if the trends appear decades later. You can watch it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8196280233303142094&hl=en

Baxter&'s exhibition Passing Through continues to tour museums and art galleries throughout Canada with a recent stop at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. Passing Through contains early photographs and lightboxes from 1958 through to 1983. Revealing Baxter&'s ongoing interest in the everyday, these photographs also act as a unique document of North American culture in the last half of the 20th century.

For more information on Iain Baxter& please visit http://www.corkingallery.com/