Posted by Randy Gladman in Akrylic Exclusive on 05 9th, 2009 | 1 Comment
Posted by Randy Gladman in All Articles+Projects, Exhibition Catalogue Essays on 09 23rd, 2008 | 4 Comments
Sign Language: A Brief Explanation of the Work of Ryan McGinness
Exhibition Essay by Randy Gladman. Displayed as wall text as part of “Ryan McGinness: Aesthetic Comfort,” Artcore Gallery, Toronto, September 23 - November 15, 2008. Popular understanding of human history is often given chronological shape by dividing the time we have spent on this planet into various eras defined by our most significant technological innovations. The Stone Age, for instance, marks a broad prehistoric time when humans made their first technological advances, widely using stone for toolmaking. As our ancestors discovered the benefits of metal,...
Posted by Randy Gladman in All Articles+Projects, Events, Exhibition Press Releases on 09 17th, 2008 | No Comments
Ryan McGinness - Aesthetic Comfort
Ryan McGinness Aesthetic Comfort Curated by Randy Gladman September 27, 2008 – November 15, 2008 For Immediate Release Artcore / Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Ryan McGinness’s first solo exhibition in Canada. Aesthetic Comfort presents a major painting and sculpture installation by this internationally recognized, New York City-based artist. Ryan McGinness makes work that occupies the stylish space where art and graphic design collide. Influenced by Andy Warhol and mixing digital technologies with more traditional crafts like silk screening and painting,...
The Best Contemporary Art Galleries in Toronto
By Randy Gladman. Originally published on BlogTO.com, July 23, 2008 When it comes to the topic of Contemporary Art, it often seems there are only two kinds of Torontonians. There are the culture-junky downtowners who try to visit the galleries at least a couple times a year, in an effort to find unique gems for their collections and to remain cognizant of the heartbeat of the city. And then there is everyone else, the other 98% of our neighbours who don’t know that there are galleries in the city other than the ROM and AGO and wouldn’t have the faintest idea of...
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Text Art
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Contemporary, Text Art Special, vol.21, Issue 13, 2008 We interact with technology hundreds of times a day. We dial telephone numbers, scan our food through supermarket check-out lasers, change the television channel and move our mouse to surf to another web page. We click, slide, dial, push, swipe, turn and type on our machines to communicate our contextual commands, and we take for granted that the device will understand our desires and provide an expected result. The point of interface, where our bodies meet our machines, is at the...
Kristine Moran: Dissolution Plan at Angell Gallery
"Continual Drift by Kristine Moran" By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2005 In her second solo exhibition, Kristine Moran sharpens the focus in her sci-fi paintings, zeroing in on the ideas of utopian theorists from the 20th century—Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Buckminster Fuller—to present inner-city landscapes from an imagined alternative present. While still sprinkled with her signature airborne vehicles and extravagant explosions, these works ponder idealistic urban environments and...
Ryan McGinness; Art and Entertainment
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Strength: Skateboard Culture Magazine, January/February 2002 A small TV in a corner of the gallery projects a video of your worst nightmare. Office hell: A shallow space with white walls and whiter lighting, a nondescript table, and a generic clock, hung low on the wall so it appears in the tight camera angle view. The time is apparently twenty-one minutes past the hour and a skinny dude in a white business shirt sits at the table in obvious discomfort. He looks bad. Hurting bad. As he rubs his hand across his clean-shaven head,...
Nicholas di Genova at Le. Gallery
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 2004 ‘Street Art’ exists in heavily urbanized environments from Tokyo to Toronto. Much of it is ‘graffiti’, that pestilence of territorial pissing by visually impaired half-wits who have little creative output beyond barely-literate scratches of their own names. However, an informed eye notices that the seas of scribbled spray paint, stickers and wheat-pasted billboards polluting the sides of buildings are sometimes topped by a foamy sprinkling of intelligent work that competes...
Posted by Randy Gladman in All Articles+Projects, Interviews, Magazine Features on 07 26th, 2004 | 1 Comment
David Altmejd: 21st Century Werewolf Aesthetics
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in C International Contemporary Art, Issue 84, Summer 2004 21st Century Werewolf Aesthetics: An interview with David Altmejd Interview conducted in Istanbul, September 2003 Montreal born sculptor David Altmejd was the only Canadian artist at the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, curated by the New Museum’s Dan Cameron. Since graduating with an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 2001, he has taken part in high profile group shows at spaces as impressive as Artists Space and Deitch Projects, received glowing reviews...
Kristin Baker at Deitch Projects
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in NY Arts Magazine, March/April 2004 The crowd at Deitch Projects, one of the few vital galleries in SoHo to have resisted the exodus to Chelsea, had already spilled out onto Grand Street by the time I arrived. This was the first Friday of the 2003 art season and a grand tour of openings had lead me through scores of packed art houses further West. Deitch openings, of course, attract a different sort of crowd, one that has more to do with the pinnacle of youth style than contemporary art, and tonight was typical; hipsters with...
Richard Stipl at Daniel Silverstein Gallery
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2003 A spontaneous chain of personalities and events lead to Czech-born sculptor Richard Stipl’s debut solo show in New York. It started in 2001, at Art Forum Berlin, where the artist’s Toronto dealer, Christopher Cutts, was encouraged by the American collector Steve Shane to take part in the first Scope Art Fair, slated for spring 2002 in New York City. Only hours after selling out his entire installation at Scope, Stipl met David Hunt in the halls of the hotel where the fair was staged....
Royal Art Lodge at The Drawing Center
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2003 “I would like some bad-acting and wrong-thinking. I would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, that cannot be construed as anything else.” So wrote the art and culture critic Dave Hickey in an essay that appeared in Art issues during the summer of 1996. Though it is unlikely they were aware of this request, the young members of the Winnipeg-based drawing collective known as The Royal Art Lodge first formed in the same year and have worked collaboratively...
Tom Sachs; A Visit to Nutsy’s
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in C International Contemporary Art Magazine, Issue 77, Spring 2003. It’s a Tuesday night in Lower Manhattan. Race night. I’m at Tom Sachs’ production facility on Hester Street, three blocks from his studio, two blocks from his home. Chinatown. This giant factory is on the third floor of an ancient building that once housed the New York City Police Department’s mounted division. There’s even a horse elevator, which will soon be used to transport the components of Nutsy’s, Sachs’s newest installation and most ambitious project...
Posted by Randy Gladman in All Articles+Projects, Interviews, Magazine Features on 04 12th, 2002 | No Comments
Alexis Rockman: Fresh Kills
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in ArText Magazine, Spring 2002 Alexis Rockman sauntered up to our meeting spot on Canal Street, the sanguine spring in his step belying the bizarre state of Broadway, deserted except for about twenty police officers wearing flak jackets and carrying machine guns. The natural history painter’s studio is located in an area of Manhattan that was closed off to all nonresidents in the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11, Black Tuesday, and he arrived exactly on time to escort me into the war zone. Alexis Rockman sauntered up Broadway...
Ryan Humphrey’s Streets of Fire
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Smock Magazine, Winter, 2002 Space, Race, Time and Place Ryan Humphrey Streets of Fire at Caren Golden Fine Art Walking into Ryan Humphrey’s solo show at Caren Golden Fine Art was like walking into Valhalla; a place where the holy relics of my childhood heroes retired for eternity. I’ve searched and searched for this place — this garden of delights where my boyhood toys relocated after Mom trashed them when I moved to college. I’ve ransacked her house so many times, disbelieving the fact that she turned over my Millennium...
Posted by Randy Gladman in All Articles+Projects, Interviews, Magazine Features on 02 26th, 2002 | No Comments
Rafael Lozanon-Hemmer at ARS Electronica
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 2002 Body Movies: A Linz Ars Electronica Festival award winner on the State of Interactive Art Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Installing large scale interactive artworks in heavily trafficked and populated zones of cities around the world, Canadian/Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explores the intersection between new technologies, public space, active participation and ‘alien memory.’ As part of this year’s ARS Electronica festival of new media art in Linz, Austria, the...
Richard Kern at Feature, Inc.
By Randy Gladman. Originally published in NY Arts Magazine, July/August 2001 On a recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself standing in front of a series of framed photographs by Richard Kern, writing in my journal notes that seemed more like Penthouse letters than art criticism. “Staring wantonly into the camera lens, Lucy slides her delicate hand into her bikini bottom, daring the viewer to come to her with a glance impregnated with innocence and desire… Now taking a soothing post-coital haul from her Marlboro, the buxom blonde opens her legs to reveal the...
Randy Gladman is a Toronto-based art critic, curator and consultant. After completing a Masters degree in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2001, he worked as a registrar at Lehman Maupin Gallery and then as a curator at Mixed Greens Gallery, both in New York City, and as an independent art critic. His articles about art and culture have appeared in the pages of many magazines including Artforum, Contemporary, ArText, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Smock, NY Arts, Strength and others. He also contributed to Installationview, a monograph published by Rizzoli New York about the artist Ryan McGinness. His most recent curatorial project was “Aesthetic Comfort,” a solo exhibition by Ryan McGinness at Toronto’s Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini Gallery.
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