These new works stand as part of a rich inquiry into the very elements of creating. Dil Hildebrand has not moved away from his studio as his source of inspiration; he has however mined further inside what the studio represents the space where the magic of painting occurs.

Mixed-media artist Annie Dunning has long explored the paradoxical terrain between culture and the natural world. Through a unique sense of humour and craft, her work emphasises overlooked creatures and aspects of our daily environment, infusing them with a sense of wonder and intrigue.

Greetings! Welcome! hails the over-eager head on a stick perched in the entranceway, tooth-grinned, immobile. Please come right in! Ironically, while this description might otherwise be read as a sarcastic chick lit account of the proverbial skinny shop-girl, it literally portrays Montreal-based artist Stphanie Chabot’s intervention for the YYZ vitrine.

Karen Henderson once told me that she thought her work was about the here and now. But I wonder now, if that now hasn’t become her real subject, eclipsing even the here that is still so crucial to her.

In the exhibition Sail Fast Cloud-Shadows and Sunbeams, Lauren Hall considers the industry of tourism and the experiences of the tourist as the foundational basis for her work.

For roughly a decade, Alexandre David has been conducting spatial experiments. His practice as a sculptor has led to a series of interventions in various locations, always producing slight perceptual changes minor yet potent modifications in how we relate to a given space thus raising the question of our relationship to spatiality in general and, more specifically, to the spaces of our daily lives, and to architecture.

Ashley Guindon’s video installation, A Great Mystery, turns the most pertinent of museum rulesdon’t touchon its head, while simultaneously willfully abiding by it.

Artforum |October 2010

My first inclination is to say something humourous, to deflect attention from the thing itself. I don’t want you to think it’s a matter of life and death, to use an overused expression, because it isn’t. Or if it does relate to life and death, then it’s about the space in which living and dying are so close as to be almost indistinguishable.

Barbara Balfour’s recent body of work haunted me in unusual ways since I began to contemplate its meaning for this essay. Memories of the era, of my own coming of age resurfaced and implicated themselves as part of the extended cognitive system I was drawing upon in order to consider these canny lithographs.