Sarah Milroy

When you enter the Art Gallery of Ontario’s current exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental, you’ll become aware of a disturbing background soundtrack to your looking. It’s the voice of the artist, but this is no gentle murmuring. Rather it’s the raw, torn-from-the-gut screaming incantation of  women’s names—Angela, Catherine, Elaine, and 57 others—all of them drawn from the 2010 Vancouver Police task force report into missing and murdered women on Vancouver’s notorious Downtown…

Repair is the theme of Kader Attia’s current exhibition, The Field of Emotion, at the Power Plant in Toronto, an exhibition that comes to Canada not a moment too soon. A deep-diving meditation by a leading French-Algerian artist, it gathers new thinking about physical, emotional, and societal repair, extending to us a treasure house of new tools with which to think about trauma both individual and…

In the late fall of 1918, David Milne found himself in London on soldier’s leave. What to do next? The Armistice had been declared just weeks before, but his training had ended too late for him to see active duty. Another opportunity, however, was soon to present itself; while walking in Mayfair he chanced upon a presentation of paintings commissioned by the Canadian War Records…

Is there more to say about Lawren Harris? One can be forgiven for saying no, as Harris has for decades been a steady source of lore for lovers of Canadian art: the pipe-smoking, tweed-clad scion of the crusty Harris clan (made rich through farm machinery manufacturing), majordomo of Toronto’s all-male Arts & Letters Club, patron of the Studio Building (a modernist artist commune of sorts that he commissioned and erected in…