From the Editor - November 1, 2022 Issue

October 31, 2022

9:30 PM

Western Canada's art magazine since 2002

Portia Priegert

From the Editor

If you look at the thumbnail images on our homepage, you might think this issue of Galleries West is themed around the human figure. But while each image includes a human form, the issue’s scope is far broader, ranging from the legendary to the futuristic, while also touching on current social issues, including racism, colonial wrongs and the toxic drug crisis.

Compelling questions come to the fore: Why are love and suffering so often entwined? How have cartoons influenced contemporary art? How would AI understand a divine epiphany? Can art make a difference when people are dying on the streets? Why do museums ignore Indigenous understandings of prehistoric times? What duty of care is owed to people whose snapshots are held in gallery collections without their permission?

But back to the visuals. It’s remarkable how many more images we have been able to feature since moving to a uniquely digital publishing model more than five years ago. Certainly, digital has drawbacks. Gone is the sense of permanence that comes with an identifiable, tactile object. Also lost is time for reflection between issues. Digital publishing is a gruelling marathon of unending deadlines. A hungry medium, it demands immediacy, and needs constant refreshing to remain relevant. While it’s easy to correct errors and digital analytics provide interesting insights into reader behaviours, people often have short attention spans and are easily distracted.

However, for a visual arts magazine, the number of images we can share is a compelling advantage. For example, in this issue, Zainub Verjee’s review of Being Legendary, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, includes eight images, providing a solid sense of Kent Monkman’s telescopic exhibition, which includes rainbow-hued pterodactyls and Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s fossilized shoe.

Seven images are featured with Lauren Fournier’s What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life, an exhibition of Polaroids now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. We thought about the ethics of publishing private images of unknown people, who, accordingly, have not consented to having them displayed publicly in either the gallery or this magazine. In the end, I chose images shot largely in the public sphere – in a cafe, on the beach, at a parade – from the selection provided by the gallery for publicity purposes, along with two shots that document the overall installation. But two other images are more intimate – one shows a man, his back turned to the camera, with a gurgling baby, and the other, which ably reflects the process of the picture-taking in the domestic sphere, presents five people at a table. If the photographers of any of these images come forward, we are happy to remove them from our website if that’s what they prefer.

We hope you enjoy images from other shows, all published with the artists’ approval: Lam Wong’s Ghosts from Underground Love, at Vancouver’s Canton-sardine; On the back of a cartoon coaster at Calgary’s Herringer Kiss Gallery, with paintings by Shelley Adler and Joe Fleming; and Mouthpiece, a three-person show at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, B.C. Our final offering is another video in Mark Mushet’s ongoing series about Vancouver artists. Beloved Ghosts looks at a street-art project by Lupo, an emerging artist responding to the deaths of people from suicide, drug overdoses and other violence.

Looking ahead, two highlights of our next issue are American art star Jean-Michel Basquiat’s musically themed solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and an exhibition by the five regional finalists for the Sobey Art Award at the National Gallery of Canada. And, of course, more great images.

Until next time,