Accelerated ruins

Discusses the Canadian photographer Greg Girard's photographic book 'Phantom Shanghai' (2007; col. illus) depicting the contrasts between the old and the new in the cityscape of Shaghai, China. The author describes how economic development has led to the large-scale demolition of old buildings and neighbourhoods to make way for modernist architecture and districts. He considers Girard's documentation of this transition and the conflicting imagery, value systems and lifestyles represented, describing his use of juxtaposition as a strategy to depict the passage of time through the medium of photography, with reference to the ideas of the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin. He comments on Girard's use of light to evoke aura and compares his work to the photographs taken by the French photographer Eugène Atget of Paris during the early 20th century

Review of David Hoffos [Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Two. Gallery TPW. Toronto]

There are at least two technical antecedents to this work: the phantasmagoric lantern shows of the 18th and igth centuries, which created moving, ghost-like illusions that were often accompanied by sound effects or music; and the 19th-century miniature dioramic tableaux that were viewed through an aperture. Unlike these early forms of parlour entertainment, Scenes from The House Dream reveals how the illusion operates, and in this is the secret of its success. At an earlier show by David Hoffos, Another City, exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2002, audience members actually entered the dioramic space. In the darkened room there was a projection of a couple making out, oblivious to the people around them. The illusion was so convincing that viewers were afraid to disturb them. In Scenes from The House Dream, the illusion is more transparent

Review of The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

Eileen Myles begins The Importance of Being Iceland with an account of being invited by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to participate in the exhibition Do it, held in Reykjavik in 1996. As she explains, she came to know Obrist through a mutual interest in the 19th century Swiss writer Robert Walser, whose writing often described what he saw while on long walks. Walser, who sometimes undertook these excursions at night, wrote in microscopic script, and in his written descriptions abandoned himself to his surroundings in a way that gave equal attention to the most spectacular and the most ordinary of details. This practice, a form of literary modernism that combined elements of popular fiction, literature, and personal reflection, sets the stage for The Importance of Being Iceland. Through her own peripatetic method, Myles brings together ideas and experiences from vastly disparate realms, describing them in ways that shifts the reader's sense of their scale and significance