Working Backwards and Forwards

Ted Gahl in Coversation with Brad Hajzak

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Encompassing elements of pop culture, art history, as well as his day-to-day lived experience, Ted Gahl's drawings span the humorous and irreverent, to the deeply earnest and sincere. There is an immediacy and a poignancy to these works, regardless of medium or subject matter. Whether it be a quick observational sketch of a family member, or a layered painting, Gahl's deep appreciation and reverence for the act of constructing an image, as well his mastery of the pictorial elements of surface, line, form, and colour, is always present. Read More

The Collapsing of Space

Shunsuke Kano in conversation with Towards

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Contemporary photography often plays a paradoxical role — simultaneously highlighting one thing, while obscuring another. Shunsuke Kano is a Kyoto—based artist who embraces this paradox. Originally trained as a printmaker, he uses a combination of photography, sculpture, and film to question the relationship between image and object. Read More

Flattening, Flipping, Inverting

Nadia Belerique in conversation with Aryen Hoekstra

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In its contemporary manifestation the photographic image is most commonly understood as that ubiquitous descriptor, re-presenting representations in a correlationist’s house of mirrors. Alternatively though, if one begins simply with the photograph, its analysis reveals that it is itself a component of the world, and not merely some scaled representation. Read More

A Stand In For The Thing

In Conversation with Liam Crockard

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Over the past year towards has been working in collaboration with Liam Crockard on an ongoing project. Through a series of informal meetings, we've explored a number of topics, from scraper bikes and blue collar aesthetics, to dematerialised labour and the role of humour in a contemporary art practice. Read More

Shifting Concerns

A portfolio by Sky Glabush

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In a conversation between Sky Glabush and Robert Enright, the journalist and Border Crossing’s founder remarked that Sky was one of the few artists he knew who is constantly in the process of re-examining his own practice. Over the past 15 years, he’s done this many times, moving from realist landscape paintings, to water colours, to collage and sculpture. Read More

The Terrorist and the Rhetorician

An Interview with Hadley+Maxwell

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Towards is pleased to present a new interview with Berlin based artists Hadley+Maxwell. The interview was conducted by Toronto based “FRIENDS” (Aryen Hoekstra and Jenine Marsh) in fall 2012 as part of the University of Guelph’s visiting artist lecture series. Read More

The Correct Intention

A Film by Matin Zad

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We are very pleased to be featuring this new video by longtime friend and contributor Matin Zad. Zad is a New York based photographer who recently teamed up with menswear label Duckie Brown to create the short film The Correct Intention. Read More

Material Absurdity

An interview with Martha Friedman

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Nicki Bahrampour: I came across the Waffle piece you did for the Public Art Fund several months ago. It’s directly in front of a building who shares a very similar grid pattern. Was that intentional or did it happen by chance? Martha Friedman: Yeah that was very intentional. One of the reasons I actually did a whole... Read More

afloat

A project by Anne Neukamp

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Comprised of two main components, afloat encompassed a month long installation at Jr. Projects, as well as a publication by the same name. Both the installation and the publication can be viewed as a continuation of Neukamp’s exploration of strategies to destabilize the image. Read More

The Sointula Art Shed

Colleen Heslin & Les Ramsay

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I was first introduced to Colleen Heslin’s work by a mutual friend last spring. Upon visiting her Montreal studio, I was immediatly taken by her large, collage—like canvases. Her attention to detail and the interplay between process, material, and surface was quite striking. Read More

Abstract Languages

An Interview with Lina Viste Grønli

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Language is something we are surrounded by at almost all times in our everyday lives. Because of its ubiquity, we often forget its unique ability to clarify or obfuscate meaning depending on how it’s employed. Lina Viste Grønli has a long standing fascination with language. Through performance and sculpture, she explores its structures, framework, and materialization. Read More

213 to 1024

Erika Jacobs with Georgia Dickie

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When writing about the photographs of Paul Strand, John Berger remarked that “His best photographs are unusually dense – not in the sense of being overburdened or obscure, but in the sense of being filled with an unusual amount of substance per square inch.” There is a similar density in the practice of Georgia Dickie. Read More

Examining Truth in Materiality

An interview with Elaine Cameron-Weir

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Elaine Cameron-Weir is a New York based artist whose work explores the tension between surface and meaning. Read More