Smarter than you

Goodbye, Alberta

I ought to have posted this when it was published—the day I left for Glasgow. My last piece for Vue, a review of the Alberta Biennial:

…but by the time you get there you’ve already walked right past Kris Lindskoog’s amazing middle finger to the inattentive, a small circle of painty bottles of water on a low pedestal with a tiny, scratchy background soundtrack which most gallery visitors—especially the frantic masses of new members on opening night—never notice. That’s Alberta art. You’ll find gold in the big works too, among Walter May’s monuments and unfortunate decisions made by Kristin Ivey and Chris Willard. This is Alberta too: Rita McKeough, Paul Bernhardt and Ron Moppett take up the drive for bigness and the province’s strange architectures in crowd-pleasing and funny work.

Back in the first room, despite the press, the real action is in two places: The Cedar Tavern Singers’ sharp but underproduced songs grounded in a bogus conviction that they aren’t actually musicians, and John Will’s huge, ridiculous wall of ugly hyper-masculine paint reaching beyond the province while stuck in its insidery local jokes and paired, self-consciously, with a poster of “NOTHING.”

It originally ended with “I’ll miss you, Alberta” which I think makes me look like less of a jerk. But I will.

  1. smarterthanyou posted this