Que Sera, Sera: It Is What It Is Preview

In advance of my moderation of a panel on "Canadian Art: Exhibiting and Disseminating" at the National Gallery on Friday, I've been trying to seek out reviews of the exhibition that has spurred the panel--It Is What It Is, which displays a selection of contemporary Canadian art acquired by the gallery over the past two years.

Here's what I've been able to dig up:

Andrew Wright's thumbs-up at Akimbo

Peter Simpson's exhibition highlights in the Ottawa Citizen, with more pics available on his blog

Notes on the exhibition's lessons for Parliament Hill from the blog of Toronto Star politics reporter Susan Delacourt

Maclean's capital-region reporter John Geddes' blog post on It Is What It Is, which to his mind is better than Pop Life

A slideshow at CBC.ca

And, more tangentially, the Telegraph Journal notes there's no New Brunswick artists in the show during an extended interview with gallery director Marc Mayer

Anyway, I do look forward to seeing the show myself—in that, y'know, conflict-of-interest-filled way. To recap, the panel I'm involved with features Barbara Fischer (Barnicke Gallery), Louise Dery (Galerie de l'UQAM), Scott McLeod (Prefix) and Reid Shier (Presentation House Gallery) and is prefaced by a morning panel on Canadian Artistic Practices at Home and Abroad. That morning panel features Adam Budak (Kunsthaus Graz), Josee Drouin-Brisebois (National Gallery), Ken Lum (Independent), Denise Markonish (MASS MoCA) and Ryan Rice (Museum of Contemporary Native Arts). Registration info for webcast and in-person can be found here.

(Image of Rodney Graham's The Gifted Amateur Nov. 10th, 1962, 2007 © the National Gallery of Canada)