Fiona Tan

Philip Monk

Edited by Michael Maranda. Text by Philip Monk.

Disassembling the Archive

Joslyn Art Museum

Stan Douglas

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Sven Lütticken

Picture a six-minute conversation filmed by 20 cameras, then sliced, diced and reshuffled by computer into a film that's 157-hours long. (Yes, that's more than a week, but you don't have to watch the whole thing at once.) It's the essence of Stan Douglas, who "witholds the artificial neatness of conclusion and gives us instead a sense of the interminable," as one admiring critic wrote. In Inconsolable Memories, Douglas uses photos he took in Cuba as the base for his unique approach to narrative, putting together a look at exile and identity against the backdrop of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. Includes essays by Svon Luttiken and Phillip Monk, the lavishly illustrated screenplay, and 40 color plates of recent photographs.

Inconsolable Memories

York University (Toronto, Ont.). Art Gallery

Richard Murray Vaughan

Sally McKay

What it Feels Like for a Girl

Power Plant (Art gallery)

Aernout Mik

With a nod to the 1960s Light and Space movement, Dutch installation artist Aernout Mik's disorienting Reversal Room consists of 10 video projections manipulating the exhibition space and dramatically altering the spectator's perception of space and time. It's another great catalog from another edgy exhibit at Toronto's Power Plant. Also featured are Mik's recent installations Middlemen (2001), Glutinosity (2001) and Organic Escalator (2000).

Reversal Room

Jeremy Blake

The Haunting of American Culture by Myths of Violence : Speculations on Jeremy Blake's Winchester Trilogy

Spirit Hunter

Since 2009, Iris Haussler has produced the complete oeuvre of unknown and fictitious French painter Sophie La Rosiere, who died in 1948. Furthermore, she has created an artistic persona--a heteronym--through which to channel this invented artist's secrets. In this wonderful fictional account of an artist's life, Haussler fabricates a biography for La Rosiere as well as an elaborate back story of a hidden erotic liaison that intersects with real people, historical events and actual artistic movements. This project includes the recreation of La Rosiere's life circumstances, studio, its products and detritus, and the elements of a forensic investigation that tries to answer the questions, after the paintings' discovery, of why these paintings were abandoned and what secrets they conceal. Iris Haussler is a German-born conceptual and installation artist, who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She consistently works with immersive installations that revolve around fictitious stories. Beginning with detailed biographies of invented characters, she builds the material evidence of their obsessive lives and works. This results in unsettling site-specific environments in domestic dwellings, historical houses and museum spaces. The book includes a catalogue raisonne of all Sophie La Rosiere's 293 works, forensic evidence, expert analyses and official reports.

Philip Monk

Books

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