Mark Mann

Remember the “long tail”? It was the theory that digital technology would redistribute demand for cultural products, away from a few empowered hit-makers and toward a vast array of niche creators. Thanks to the democratizing force of the internet, a…

Gazing out from a large photograph on the second floor of Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto, Althea Thauberger wears a yellow dress, pearl earrings, and the look of someone who’s just committed the prank of the century. The Vancouver-based artist is…

Maria Hupfield is a Brooklyn-based artist from Wasauksing First Nation, an Anishinabek community on Parry Island, five hours north of Toronto along Georgian Bay. It’s watery country out there. If you look down from the Google satellite, you’ll see…

Joseph Tisiga paints people in odd situations, and I keep wondering, how do they feel? The Yukon artist’s characters rarely show much emotion, even when they are being eaten by a giant worm, or interacting (in the nude, wearing a candelabra) with a…

Dancing in Sylvain Émard’s Le Super Méga Continental

It doesn’t matter what you think you know about Divya Mehra’s You have to tell Them, i’m not a Racist, currently at Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto: the immediate impact of entering the gallery dismantles your preparations. Rather than the usual…

One The first threatens all artists, and everyone else too: simple disregard. The viewer makes a rolling stop at each frame, not accelerating past, but not quite willing to press the brake all the way down, either. To conserve momentum, each region…

The person sitting in front of me at the opening day performance of Cas Public’s new work, 9, brought a bear to the theatre. It sat quietly on her lap and did not seem out of place, as she was no older than ten, and the bear was stuffed. Here is the…

Guy Maddin’s latest exhibition finds the artist in a splendid mood, if preoccupied by the subtle, inescapable persistence of his loneliness. Maddin and his life/art partner Julia Anne Leach have taken to collaging together – as much as they can and…

Louise Lecavalier and Robert Abubo in Mille batailles by Lecavalier / Photo courtesy by Andre Cornellier Louise Lecavalier and Robert Abubo in Mille batailles by Lecavalier / Photo courtesy by Andre Cornellier “Dance is physical combat most of the…

When the lights go down at the beginning of The Black Piece by Ann Van den Broek, they stay down. True to the title, the Dutch choreographer plunges both the audience and the performers into obscurity and leaves us there. The darkness isn’t perfect —…

Purity doesn’t exist, but it persists as a question in art. Performance descends from inspiration, and every step that a work takes toward its audience — passing through formulation, rehearsal, staging and so on — compels the artist to negotiate with…

When a contemporary performance artist adopts religion in general as the theme of a work, a few things are likely to occur: the work will be funny, the work will be angry, and the work will betray an unnameable sense of existential bereavement and…

The story of gentrification is both too complicated and too simple to be told well. There’s no proper shape for it, nothing to support its weight, and no good ending. For though the details call urgently to be remembered – what’s changed, what’s lost…

Love makes love, hate makes hate, and disdain has a strange way of eliciting both. Brad Phillips’s show I Didn’t Retire, I Surrendered, a cynical collection of one-liners tossed off in thin watercolor on paper, inspires the sort of pensive confusion…