MOMUS

I have not missed visiting museums, writes Catherine G. Wagley in this sweeping feature of the museum crisis. Largely because I, like so many others, have kept abreast of their increasingly blatant dysfunction. Wagley considers the efforts of unionizing leaders and advocates for change, those who have made lateral, supportive solidarity feel more alive than any idealized notion of ‘museum’, and leaves many of us who have supported, worked with, or written about museums in the past but can no longer look past their behavior, with questions.

The artist Walter Scott has born out one of the most beloved and iconic projects to emerge from the Canadian art scene over the last decade, and for good reason, writes Saelan Twerdy, of his iconic ‘Wendy’. However Scott has a larger art practice that until now has received scant critical attention, despite its growing visibility. In this feature-level analysis of Scott’s autofictional universe, and on the occasion of recent shows across Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, and Berlin, Twerdy writes, Scott’s not going to give you the breathless, ethnocultural ‘I’ both because it doesn’t exist and because it serves the wrong myths.

In its earliest iteration, the memory theater is predicated on a loss, or rather, a fractured throughline between recollection and experience, writes Helen Lee in her first piece for Momus. Reviewing Robin Cameron’s Memory Palace at Toronto’s Franz Kaka, an exhibition well-suited to a moment in which we’re all picturing the places we’ve been and were meant to go, the artist’s conceptual process come full circle, the echoey objects of her memory rematerialized into the inchoate objects of art.

There’s been much talk of Ambera Wellmann’s show Logic of Ghosts at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, but not much talk of her paintings, writes Kristian Vistrup Madsen of Wellmann’s big swing in Berlin, where she wraps the gallery in a checkerboard. Though perfect for our new age of PDF art commerce, the design effects a drastic intervention that is, in fact, a private, theoretical exercise on the part of the artist. Madsen writes, at her best, Wellmann asks serious questions about painting simply by making a great painting.

Dora Garcia, "I Remember Miami," 2020 (screenshot). Commissioned by MOAD, Miami. Courtesy the artist. https://momus.ca/dora-garcia-has-many-names-three-revoluti/