I started a newsletter on Substack. Here’s an excerpt from the first post. Read in full (and subscribe for free) here.
I moved away from NYC over two years ago, a reality that was almost completely obfuscated by the sweeping global pandemic that arrived mere months after I landed in Vancouver, where I’d graduated from art school nearly a decade and a half previously. Aside from being one of the bigger cities in Canada, Vancouver holds, or at some point held, the status of “third most important art scene in North America.” As Scott Watson, art historian and director/curator of the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Art Gallery, describes it in the 2017 documentary Is There a Picture (directed by Harry Killas): “Recently I was in Los Angeles, and an important curator, a director of an art school, said to me, Well, I guess Vancouver is the third most important art scene in North America. The first two would be New York and Los Angeles. And I said, well, I guess that’s the case, but in fact it’s really more the 13th most important, it’s just the positions from three to twelve are vacant. I mean, it’s ludicrous to compare Vancouver to Los Angeles or New York. It’s absolutely ludicrous. But on the other hand, it makes you wonder why Vancouver’s art world is probably weightier than the art world of, say, Chicago. Why is that?” The importance of Vancouver on the international (art) stage was a familiar refrain during my years at the local art school. It was what kept me from transferring to university in Montreal to pursue textile art halfway through my undergrad degree. I was accepted to the school, and went to Montreal to visit that summer and decide whether or not to transfer. I partied my 19-year-old ass off: drank Don du Dieu, Fin du Monde, and Maudite from the dépanneur until I passed out on a couch; crowd-surfed and made out at an after-hours; ate bagels at dawn. And then I boarded a bus to NYC for a few days. It was 2005, and cell phones weren’t much use, so I made a list of galleries from the back pages of Artforum and toured Chelsea and Soho with the help of subway maps and Time Out New York. After a few years of art school in Vancouver, where my teachers – many of them former students of arch-photo-conceptualist patriarch Jeff Wall – had preached the imperative of deeply-researched criticality and icy, airtight conceptual logic, I was astonished by what I saw in New York galleries. Read the rest (and subscribe) here.