Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
3 December 2019 Vol 4 No 25 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2019
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
Two recent Canadian movies about art – The Gift and There Are No Fakes – couldn't be more different.
The Gift, an idealistic vision of art as something to freely share, is Robin McKenna’s first feature documentary. She was influenced by American cultural critic Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.
Gentle and elliptical, the film interweaves four stories. A young Indigenous chief on the West Coast holds his first potlatch. An American woman builds a bumblebee art car for the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Taiwanese-born artist Mingwei Lee offers the gift of song. And, in Rome, artists turn an empty building slated for redevelopment into a gallery that also houses migrants. <more>
Meanwhile, There Are No Fakes, Jamie Kastner’s latest documentary, looks at the bitter struggle over the legacy of the late Norval Morrisseau, an Anishinaabe artist from northern Ontario.
The film follows Kevin Hearn, a member of the rock band Barenaked Ladies, as he launches a court battle against a Toronto gallery after buying a Morrisseau painting for $20,000, only to discover art experts consider it a fake.
The film journeys into the dark underbelly of Thunder Bay, Ont., to explore art forgery, drug dealing, money laundering, trauma, addiction and sexual abuse. The film is fascinating, but also deeply disturbing. Like a car accident, it’s hard to look away.
I saw both films a week ago and to say the juxtaposition put my head in a spin would be an understatement.
By chance, I was editing Doug Maclean’s story about the fall art auctions at the time. Doug, a staunch advocate of Canadian art, prides himself on looking beyond the top few sales “to find forgotten gems and stunning examples of undervalued art.”
In this issue, we also look at an Edmonton exhibition by the five finalists for the Sobey Art Award, the first time the show has been held in Western Canada. As well, we have stories about Abbas Akhavan, Curtis Cutshaw, Mitchell Wiebe and Dave More.
We’ll soon start posting one of our most popular projects, the annual art books issue, which will feature reviews of new books about Western Canadian artists E.J. Hughes, Walter J. Phillips, Carey Newman and others. Stay tuned!
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Susan Delaney, Paul Gessell, Douglas Maclean, Agnieszka Matejko, Lissa Robinson, Helena Wadsley