Author Archives: stefan zebrowski-rubin

Extreme Painting at Joyce Yahouda

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | July 25, 2010 | 0 Comments

Extreme Painting has taken over Montreal. Sixteen galleries across the city have adopted the theme for the summer of 2010. While Division, Orange and Donald Browne galleries (among others) have opted for monumental proportions and excessive applications of paint, guest curator Nicolas Mavrikakis at Joyce Yahouda gallery has chosen a different route. Highlighting the work [...]

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Alex Marsolais at KAI Design Studio

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | July 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

The unveiling of Celsius, Alex Marsolais’s first collection of paintings, could not have been timed any better. Set in a cool refuge of KAI Design Studio, away from the sweltering heat wave of Montreal, some of the vividly textured canvases seemed to be melting. The untrained local artist presents a series of portraits of his [...]

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Nadia Myre at the NMAI

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | June 15, 2010 | 0 Comments

[While I haven't seen this show in New York, I know the artist's work through her representation at local gallery Art Mûr in Montreal. She's a wonderful artist doing thoughtful work that both has contemporary and historic relevance; it's so great to see her getting attention in NYC] Recognizing the depth of her practice and [...]

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Nigel Helyer Resurrects the Past in Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | May 25, 2010 | 0 Comments

Every day at one o’clock, a locomotive, heard but not seen, makes its way through the lobby of CarriageWorks, an old Sydney rail yard recently transformed into a performing arts center. The sound sculpture by Nigel Helyer, called GhosTrain, haunts the space it runs through. While the installation presented by Performance Space only sounds for [...]

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Fiona Tan in Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | March 26, 2010 | 0 Comments

I experienced Fiona Tan’s work over two days – not because it was an extended durational work but because her show, Coming Home, was being presented at both the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the National Art School Gallery. The fact that the experience of the video works was a journey was the perfect mode [...]

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Melanie Boreham in Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | March 18, 2010 | 0 Comments

When I entered the solo show of Melanie Boreham at Hardware Gallery, I entered a forest. Suspended from different heights from the ceiling were forty bonsai-sized trees. These floating trees captivated me immediately because of their defiance of gravity, floating in a dream-like constellation. But the trees captivated me more because they were woven and [...]

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A Celebration of the Visual Arts: Art Month Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | March 12, 2010 | 0 Comments

On a cool overcast March morning, I navigated the streets of the heavily residential Elizabeth Bay neighborhood to find Michael Reid’s gallery and talk to the owner about his role as co-creator (with Vasili Kaliman of Kaliman Gallery) of Art Month Sydney. The initiative, now in its first year, celebrates the visual arts in Sydney [...]

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Scott Elk in Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | March 6, 2010 | 0 Comments

Billowing on banners, printed on posters and featured in multiple venues around Sydney, the artwork of Scott Elk is enjoying great exposure, and for good reason. The Sydney-born artist’s illustrations mix media from photography to screen prints, from design elements to typography. The modern amalgams instantly come across as multi-layered works reflecting a depth of [...]

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Showcasing Talent at the Australian Centre for Photography

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | February 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

Since I arrived in Sydney, arts-minded people of all walks of life have been pointing me towards the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP). For over 37 years, the ACP has been exhibiting works of both Australian and international photographers. My expectations were thus set reasonably high when I visited for the first time, for the [...]

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Retelling Histories at Artspace in Sydney

By stefan zebrowski-rubin | February 12, 2010 | 0 Comments

Since the early 1980s, Artspace Visual Arts Centre has established itself as a centre for residency-based contemporary installation art both by Australian and international artists. The three installations currently on display at Artspace only reinforces that fact. Each of the works serves as a rich deconstruction of history, exposing multiple layers of events past. With [...]

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