explorations in toronto art.

You might have noticed things look a little different around here.

As I’ve been meaning to do, I changed the appearance of my blog to better accommodate the longer posts I’ve been writing. This fixed a lot of formatting issues too. Phew!

I also added some info pages— you can find them on the sidebar. The new denizens of this blog are About, Statements, Archive, and Links; all pretty self-explanatory, I think. Check them out and tell me what you think!

The Statements page is something I’ve had planned for a while, but agonized over writing. I wrote it to guide myself while I write, and I shared it so you readers could find out a bit more. The writing I do here is part of my professional practice, so it only makes sense to treat it that way.

I really like Ciel Variable, an art/photo magazine produced in Montreal. They often cover work that I’m not familiar with, and present it in unconventional groupings that enrich my reading of it. Each issue is themed, not unlike Toronto’s own Prefix. I recently ordered some back issues, some that contained work by artists I was interested in, and others simply because the theme piqued my curiosity. They’re nice to read and were a total steal at $5 a pop!

So, imagine my delight when I received a message in my inbox, informing me that Ciel Variable’s entire catalog has recently been digitized and published online, in full text! That’s 90 issues over 20 years— it’s an incredible resource. Since I was so excited by this news, I immediately began to browse the online archive, and was engrossed for some time, reading and looking and thinking.

The archive is searchable by theme, artist, or writer, and tagged with regular categories like portrait, architecture, and public art; along with curious thematic headings like light-shadow, vision, and emotions. All this makes for a very functional, and strangely poetic, browsing experience.

I won’t waste much time being negative, but I think it’s important to mention that Prefix, considered by many to be the leader of the pack as far as Toronto art/photo magazines go, has some catching up to do where web development is concerned. It would be great for them to have an archive like this one!

A weakness of magazines like Prefix and Ciel Variable, as well as a handful of other semi-annually published magazines, is that they occupy a strange grey area between books and monthly magazines. By nature, they are not and cannot hope to be topical or timely with regards to current events like exhibitions— some still include reviews, but they’re often about to end by the time the magazine is on newsstands. Most publications seem to sidestep this problem by printing more thoughtful essays that, while they may be linked to something currently in the galleries, discusses broader issues and thus will still hold relevance after the exhibition comes down. As a result, these certainly merit revisiting, but reading back issues is counter-intuitive when there’s a glossier, newer magazine to read.

Which is why I think this is such an important resource. It pains me to imagine magazines’ back issues rotting in saggy boxes in a warehouse somewhere, so rescuing the content to an online archive is crucial. I’m hoping we’ll see more projects like this in the years to come.