top of page
True north compass True North compass logo with a bold, stylized north arrow pointing upwards.

C A N N O P Y

Art is True North

  • image_processing20210629-17620-1uwdtt3
  • Instagram
Hubs & Huddles column of Cannopy Magazine, which focuses on multi-purpose performance centres
Ensemble column, which highlights classical artists and ensen, which highlights classical artists and ensembles
Ellington column, which features jazz vocalists and instrumentalists
Studio Sessions column, which focuses on in-depth artist profiles — particularly visual artists in their creative spaces
Materials column, which focuses on artists working across various creative media; Profiling Various Creative Media
Spaces column, which highlights galleries anSpaces column, which highlights galleries and exhibit venuesd exhibit venues
Fourth Wall column, which focuses on the global theatre industry
 In Motion column, which focuses on the global dance industry
In Focus column, which highlights the global film industry
Alt.itude column, which focuses on global alternative music
Homegrown column, which highlights Canadian alternative music
Arts & Letters column, which focuses on essays, opinions, and ideas related to the arts

Mining Minimalism

Illustration By Xiaotian Wang

Ecocriticism meets a revisionist history of minimalism

WORDS BY NICOLAS HOLT | ARTS & LETTERS

FEB 28, 2023 | ISSUE 11

During the 1960s, the glossy surfaces and industrial fabrication of minimalist painting and sculpture heralded a radical new approach to the usage of materials in art. What’s been left unsaid in the history of minimalism – and is an increasingly pressing concern today — are the extractive processes that produced many of minimalism’s iconic materials, such as aluminum and the crude oil byproduct, Plexiglas. There are two contemporaneous pieces that can help excavate the ways the process of extraction has materially informed minimalist art, and point towards an ecocritical revision of its history.

The first is Frank Stella’s Avicenna, first exhibited in 1960 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Technically a dodecagon (a twelve-sided shape), this painting had one notch in each of its four corners. The apexes of those notches point diagonally to a cavity in the center of the canvas itself, exposing the wall upon which it is hung, thus creating a continuity with its exhibition space. Compositionally, the painting is nothing...

bottom of page