Antler River Art Review
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Softfest 2024 brings softness to the London heatwave
Softfest 2024, organized by Soft Flirt, brings events scattered around London Ontario all weekend. The festival opened at Palasad on Thursday the 20th, with local shoegaze band Status Non-Status as the headliners. Friday’s Movie Night and Workshop took place at Hello Maker. If you missed it, there’s still time to participate in Softfest with a…
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Landscape conversations at the Westland Gallery’s Near and Far
The Westland Gallery’s commitment to providing an ongoing exhibition space in Wortley Village has given many local landscape artists a platform to contribute to the artistic conversation on settler colonial landscape art which can be seen in exhibition Near and Far. Tracy Bultje conveys depth of space and varying forest light through strips and rectangles…
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A cultural detour to the Benz Gallery
If you peel off from a leisurely stroll downtown, and head over to Adelaide and Cheapside, you can find another local culture spot. Between the Metro supermarket and Churis Bread, you can find The Benz Gallery. Independently run by its namesake Greg Benz, his coastal landscape paintings take prominence. Richly panoramic, Benz captures the pallid…
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The Biomorphic Ecstasy of Margeaux Collyer
TAP wrapped up Margeaux Collyer’s solo exhibition Doodles this past weekend. Collyer’s psychedelic perspective on the human body explores the strangeness of flesh, of life, and of our city. Penises, breasts, grotesque faces are all rendered in the fine squirming line of pencil, filled in with busy hypercolour. Collyer rose to local prominence in 2016…
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Chippewar has Museum London Seeing Red
Jay Soule, aka Chippewar brings a sense of humour and wit to his pop culture paintings. His Indigenized movie posters suggest an alternate reality where white settlers do not dominate pop culture. They’re loaded with Indigenous in-jokes, using hot neon colours in soft airbrush strokes. Chippewar came to prominence in 2018 when Soule rented a…
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A little tenderness with Soft Body, Hard Gaze
Do we exist if we don’t generate internet content? Soft Body, Hard Gaze asks difficult questions of living as a human in a digital age. When even human tenderness is performative for the algorithm, what is real? Two artists are featured in Soft Body, Hard Gaze: Jeremie Rose Winbrow, and Pascale Jean. Winbrow’s contributions to the exhibition consist of a series of…
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Etienne Zeke’s perceptual interiors: Mind Pictures
The controversy of AI art is alive and well. Artists and content creators alike are asking what the future of art looks like, and how well collaborate with AI. Etienne Zeke’s answer is in Mind Pictures, at the Michael Gibson Gallery. These painterly, ephemeral sceneries are interior rooms and city landscapes, gleaned and sorted from…
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Tingfest 2024 –
Tingfest 2024 highlights the work of local underground zine artists while also looking back fondly on the meaning-making cartoons of Merle Tingley, London Free Press Cartoonist. Tingley’s acerbic commentary, including the mischievous teasing of London’s overdevelopment and limping bureaucracy,remains relevant today — in fact, little has changed. We have more closed store fronts than ever, our heritage properties are moldering, and yet we push out at…
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The Inaugural Blog Post
The focus of this blog is primarily London, Ontario’s art, culture and politics, with a focus on contemporary London regionalism. This blog’s purpose is to provide a space to critique London, Ontario’s artists, architecture, music, and events. This may broaden or narrow with time.
Antler River Art Review 