Rewind: Dalek

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Winter 2005 Review of exhibibition at both le. gallery and Magic Pony Gallery, Toronto Dalek’s first solo exhibition in Canada introduced Toronto audiences to a Brooklyn-based member of a large underground urban art movement that is attracting attention in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. While the group is still effectively unnamed, the members of this loose affiliation—Shepard Fairey, KAWS, Twist (Barry McGee), Phil Frost, Evan Hecox, Ryan McGinness and others—have exhibited together on many...

Kristine Moran: Dissolution Plan at Ange...

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 the social interactions of their...

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...

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...

Richard Stipl at Daniel Silverstein Gall...

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...

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...