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Essays

Nobuo Kubota in Conversation with W. Mark Sutherland 

Nobuo Kubota left his career as an architect in the 1960s, to eventually become one of Canada’s preeminent inter-media artists. For the past forty years, Kubota has performed, recorded, published, and exhibited internationally. He has produced an astonishingly dazzling array of artistic hybrids including sound sculptures, video installations, three-dimensional poems, improvisational art-music, and mouth mechanics. He is a founding member of The Artists’ Jazz Band (1962), CCMC (1974), and the Music Gallery (1974) in Toronto. Kubota is also the recipient of the 2009 Governor General Arts Award, Canada’s most prestigious arts prize.

Essays

“The Ambiguities”: Toronto’s Pictures Generation by Adam Lauder 

The early 1980s were a time when a war of images played across battle lines defined by identity and representation. Artists and critics fiercely debatedoften in the turgid jargon of French Theorythe return of the image following more than a decade of militant dematerialization. In some ways, this crisis was sparked by artists’ new flirtation with the mainstreamparticularly the aesthetics of movies and TVfollowing conceptualism’s prohibitions on visual pleasure.

Essays

Seripop by Emma Balkind 

Looming. Defined as:

A shadowy form that is large and probably threatening.
An event, which is threatening to happen.
A (maybe) exaggerated, vague first vision of an object in darkness.
A distant dim reflection barely visible.
Origins in Low German or Dutch such as lomen – move slowly.
Or lemenbe weary.