Art

Ian Johnston, Between the Lines (Light) (detail), 2010

Hybrid Sculptor Ian Johnston (Un)Covers Waste with Clay

As Mike Ashby, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, has explained, “entire industries (brick-making, pottery, china, and porcelain) have grown up around (clay)” and “few other materials are as versatile.” Ceramics have been crucial in the design of functional, innovative and exploratory design solutions […]

All is Lost film review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

All is Lost

In the aftermath of the 2014 Oscars, this review focuses on one film that was overlooked by the Academy and, to an extent, by popular culture at large. All is Lost tells the story of an aged man (Robert Redford) who finds himself shipwrecked on a solo voyage in the vast […]

Ecotopia art exhibit review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

Ecotopia

We tend to section nature into neat grids with roads and fences. We wrap it up into little parcels of parks surrounded by pavement. Forests are cleared for farms. This interaction between the natural and the constructed is the subject of Ecotopia, a diverse collection of multimedia artwork currently making […]

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth book review A\J AlternativesJournal.ca

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

Chris Hadfield, perhaps the first out-of-this- world rock star, wastes no time before waxing poetic in his book about the bounteous beauty of space and our planet. “The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles,” he writes in the opening paragraph of his introduction. “Every 92 minutes, another sunrise [because […]

A scene from the Beehive Collective's Mesoamerica Resiste poster.

The Art of Organizing

In the latest issue, I profile the Beehive Design Collective, a group of volunteer activist-artists based in Maine, and their latest project, the epic three-by-six-foot double-sided poster, Mesoamérica Resiste. The poster depicts both the projects in a major Mesoamerican development plan and the many resistance movements springing up against it.

Kim Ondaatje's Steetly on Highway #5. Reviewed by A\J.

Kim Ondaatje

Kim Ondaatje’s current exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, ON surveys a career spanning over fifty years, and in doing so, serves to entrench the artist within the canon of the Canadian landscape tradition.

Margaret Clegg, Toll Bar Village near Doncaster, UK  (from Drowning World series

Carbon 14: Climate is Culture

The Cape Farewell Foundation has an ambitious mission: to bring artists and scientists together to explore the impact and future of climate change. Just as ambitious is the wide-ranging exhibition curated by David Buckland and Claire L. Sykes and headquartered at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Centre for Contemporary Culture until […]