Border Crossings Magazine

Beholdering: The Subject of Beauty

Meeka Walsh

My intense dislike of institutions, my impatience with bureaucracies that in their extreme carefulness produce very little, my hostility to visible signs of authority so acute that I bristle at the cardboard-peaked cap of a...

Threads of Meaning: Richard Boulet

The autobiographical impulse has long been an accepted convention of artistic practice. So it is not surprising that the quilts, fibre sculptures and works on paper by Edmonton-based artist, Richard Boulet, draw on his personal...

Lady Maximus: Allyson Mitchell

“I call myself a maximalist because I use maximum materials, maximum emotion, maximum politics and maximum space.” Toronto-based sculptor, performance artist and activist Allyson Mitchell is talking about her work with characteristic gusto. Her current...

Making Angels Weep: End of the Line, directed by Rupert Murray

Robert Enright

In Rupert Murray’s devastating documentary about the fate of the world’s oceans, a pair of observations made by two fisherman encapsulate the problem outlined by the film. In the first, Adama Mbergaul, a member of...

The Thread of Painting: An Interview with Ghada Amer

Introduction by Meeka Walsh, Interview by Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh

There’s something about thread that’s as effective in reducing male assertions as Delilah’s scissors were on Samson’s hair. I think of British artist Anna Hunt who rendered iconic modernist architecture in six-by-eight inch satin-stitch embroideries,...

The Visual Gate: Entering the Place of Painting: An Interview with Will Gorlitz

Robert Enright

Will Gorlitz doesn’t make anything easy, on himself or the viewer; nor does he make anything easily. One of the surprises in the following conversation is the ongoing uncertainty he experiences in a painting’s manufacture....

Introduction by Robert Enright, Interview by Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh

Robert Enright

Tributary Art: A Conversation with Andre Ethier

Robert Enright

In 2007 artist André Ethier, former lead singer of the Toronto-based indie band The Deadly Snakes and now a solo performer, painted an Untitled work showing a fleshy, dirty blonde entangled in the fluffy embrace...

Sylvia Curtis-Norcross

Natalka Husar: The Implication of Painting

Meeka Walsh

Natalka Husar talked to Border Crossings in July of 2009 about her earliest work with something short of complete satisfaction in the recollection and reiterated what fellow artists, senior and acclaimed painters among them, say....

Joseph Plaskett: Paris's Moveable Feast

Gary Pearson

In the opening scenes of director Vincente Minnelli’s award-winning film An American in Paris, ex-gi Jerry Mulligan (played by Gene Kelly) tells us that he stayed on in Paris after the war because he was...

The Tumult of Landscape: Michael Smith's Painted World

James D Campbell

I am standing on the threshold of a vast aqueous space. The horizon line between sea and sky is smudged with off-white and mauve wisps of smoke. That fluid line also stands for the ground...

Painting in the Interrogative Vein: The Recent Work of Sue Williams

Barry Schwabsky

On the eve of the last us election—the one we can only hope will turn out to have changed things in ways that still remain unpredictable—Sue Williams was still dissatisfied, to say the least: still...

Reconciling with the Ex: "A Pictures Generation" Confessional

John Kissick

I’ve had a great time, but this wasn’t it. Groucho Marx I considered myself adequately prepared for the “Pictures Generation, 1974–1984” show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—and a prophylactic two beers in advance were to...

Gary Michael Dault

Iain Baxter&

Meredith Dault

Iain Baxter&’s photograph of a New York City street at dusk (Dusk, New York, New York, 1971) is about as eerie as they come these days. The scene is hemmed in on one side by...

Lee Henderson

Kevin Rodgers

Gary Pearson

Nadja Sayej

Richard Holden

Alexander Kauffman

Michael Harris

Susan Emerling

Meira Cook

Robert Youds

John Luna

A year and a half ago when reviewing Robert Youds’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, “beautifulbeautiful artificial field,” a phrase popped into my head: “commercial commons.” I found myself comparing the tug-of-war...

Ian Wallace

E.C. Woodley

Mondrian banned “the natural” from his painting, but there are rural views from Dutch trains that always remind me of the “abstract reality” of his later works. Looking out at the primary colours of tulips,...

Mary Reid

David Garneau