David Hoffos
Another City
Neutral Ground, Regina, Saskatchewan (May 15 - June 18, 2004)

Lethbridge artist David Hoffo’s installation is a chamber of desires constructed by a child with a man’s means. It is sentimental, romantic and completely effective in its ability to charm and transport the viewer to Another City.
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Frank Shebageget: Quantification
[Written for Tribe, Saskatoon, 2003]

Frank Shebageget’s exhibition, Quantification, uses dominant culture modes—repetition and Minimalism from Modernist art, and lists from Statistics—to demonstrate how people are made into colonized subjects. But his work is not dispassionate or burdened by black and white moralizing. Shebageget, an Ottawa-based Ojibway artist, translates these rather cool methodologies into handmade poems that resonate with hearts as well as minds. He presents facts and images, he hints, but leaves conclusions to us.
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Daring Confessions: Romance and the Modern-day Girl
I blushed more than once while walking through “Daring Confessions: Romance and the Modern-day Girl.” Tetyana Gershuni’s luscious painting of hypertrophic chicken parts arranged with robust gynecological intent did it. Calculating how often Risa Horowitz had bowel movements and orgasms during her thirtieth year also warmed my cheek.
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Abattoirs by Artists
Sigrid Dahle’s Abattoirs by Artists (September 14 to November 18) is an elaboration of the 1970s conceptual art strategy of creating an installation that critiques the institution that hosts it. This could be old hat, but under Dahle’s inventive and thorough direction, and provided with a site with such a provocative provenance, Abattoirs is in turn ingenious, informative, touching, funny and macabre....
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Enlightenment in the Suburbs: Michael Cambell
Michael Cambell is emerging as newest member of the Lethbridge School. Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, David Hoffos and, now, Campbell have sprung from their incubation in this small southern Alberta city to return magic to the art world....
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Dana Claxton
Since 1997 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, has attracted tourists to its prohibition-era Tunnels tour. Costumed actors lead visitors from basement to basement under the historic and well-preserved downtown while regaling listeners with tales of smuggling and a rather sketchy link to Chicago’s Al Capone. It’s a neat idea, but after seeing Dana Claxton’s Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux (September 9 to October 24) at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, it is clear that a more dramatic regional story has been overshadowed by a near-fiction....
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Douglas Gordon
At the Vancouver Art Gallery
March 9 to June 16, 2002

A little square of light levitates at eye-level before a black wall. Moving closer, the beam resolves into an image of an inverted housefly. Even before considering the picture, the viewer will be amazed by this spare illusion. While touch reveals the image to be flush with the wall, the eye remains unconvinced: the glowing square seems to hover at least four inches into space. The second surprise is a sudden movement—the work is not a miniature light box but a tiny video monitor—every few seconds, in a futile attempt to right itself, the fly kicks furiously, then, just as suddenly, stops. That the struggle in this animated still life has no effect suggests that the insect is glued to the table....
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