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May 7, 2015

May is like a door opening to the pleasures of summer. May! April is so last month.

Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

Photographic images are so utterly ubiquitous in art — and everywhere — and so wildly diverse in their intent and content that I just don’t think of photography as a singular medium with a singular historical trajectory. However, since the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, on from May 1 to 31, declares itself a “celebration of photography” I am playing along and thinking photography first, art second.

Ryerson Image Center

At the Ryerson Image Center I was transfixed before Phil Solomon’s eight channel piece called Empire X 8. All eight screens of the Salah J. Bashir New Media Wall display the same direct view of the Empire State Building, but the time of day is different, and evolving, on each. The continually changing environments — inky night where the building glitters like a jewel in the black sky, desperate grey dawn where scraps of garbage flutter on updrafts around the famous icon, rippling sunsets of orange and pink backlighting the building — play off one another, within the sleek matte grid of images.

Installation shot of Empire x 8 by Phil Solomon

The static shots are from uptown, facing toward lower Manhattan, but the peripheral landmarks seem wrong. The World Trade Center is gone and there is no sign of the Freedom Tower — so we have a time frame — but gone too is the World Financial Center, and hmmm, instead of the Hudson River banked by the shores of New Jersey, there appears to be a hulking military bargelike installation floating near the west side of the island. Small planes and choppers roam the sky. The soundtrack is weather only: wind, rain, rumbling thunder.

Still of single channel of Empire x 8 by Phil Solomon

For anyone who has been even mildly hooked on Grand Theft Auto this is familiar terrain; it’s a real (unreal) image, manufactured in some digital sweatshop somewhere, from one of the Liberty City Series. The images are so smooth, dense and controlled, endlessly fascinating to view, and like Andy Warhol’s famous 8 hour Empire movie of 1964, are a blank slate upon which so much meaning can be heaped.

Still from Empire 16 mm film by Andy Warhol

Also at the Ryerson Image Center are the photographs of Mark Rowedel, this year’s winner of the Scotiabank photography award. At first look the photographs of Mark Rowedel appear to be traditional fine art photography in the style of maybe Ansell Adams: technically masterful, documenting nature’s grandeur, black and white (mostly), devoid of humans or animals, deep, meditative.

Photograph by Mark Rowedel

Coming a little closer and the formal and compositional elements are seen to be bold and radical, particularly the use of deep black swaths of shadow enveloping the foreground, dramatic arcs, gaps and crosses.

Nevada Test Site Aluminum Bunker by Mark Rowedel

Closer still and these photographs release their emotional impact; often creating a sense of folly, loneliness, despair.

Oh-My-God Hot Springs #6 by Mark Rowedel

Central Pacific #18 from the Series “Westward the Course of Empire”

The stylized titled printed in pencil are sometimes hilarious. Could there really be a churned up expanse of desert known as ” The Devil’s Golf Course?”

The Devil’s Golf Course by Mark Rowedel

In other works Mark Rowedel gives a nod to Robert Smithson and Ed Ruscha adding another layer of interest to these intense photographs. They are in dialogue with important art of the recent past.

April 28, 2015

The Power Plant – John Akomfrah

The Unfinished Conversation, the three channel video installation by John Akomfrah, is so dense with ideas and images that I was obliged to make a return trip to The Power Plant and watch it multiple times. Projected in a hushed room, on massive screens, and featuring a sound track that is at least as rich and layered as the visual component, I found every viewing of this artwork a rewarding experience.

Installation view of The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall is the ostensible subject of the piece and his personal and professional life is effectively traced within it. Visually and structurally, Stuart Hall functions as a fulcrum – around which a kaleidoscope of images swirl – illuminating societal and cultural forces at work, first in his home country of Jamaica, and then in Britain in the 50s, 60s and 70s. John Akomfrah seemed to have access to the BBC archives as these distant eras are brought to life with so much fascinating material, including TV programming from the time, news footage, photographs and sound recordings.

Installation view of The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah

Stuart Hall came to the UK as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951. He produced important academic writings, particularly theories of mass communications and he expanded the idea of cultural studies in the academic world. But he hardly confined his activities to academia. He was also a prolific journalist, television personality, champion of the arts, and is often referred to as the “Godfather of Multi-Culturalism” for his work in these various media on immigration, race and the politics of power. Stuart Hall died in 2014.

Stills from The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah

“Identity is an ever unfinished, endless conversation” is a (paraphrased) statement made by Stuart Hall in the video. His own identity was shaped in the intensely race conscious Jamaica in which he felt an outsider even in his own family. He longed to be part of the modern world and for West Indians of that era the UK was an escape and a second “home,” to which, he decided soon after his arrival there, he would never belong.

The sixties in the UK were not just about mini skirts, the Beatles and Mandy Rice Davies!

Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler

With a focus on the impact of British colonialism around the world a steady drumbeat of upheaval is referenced in the artwork: Conflicts like the Soviet Invasion of Hungary and the Suez Crisis; social movements like the protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, natural disasters of every kind, the 1963 Profumo scandal, workers strikes, the beginning of the wars in Asia, mass immigrations, the travails of the poor in Northern England, Civil Rights demonstrations, the rise of consumerism are all depicted in this piece. These events affected and changed the individual known as Stuart Hall, along with millions of other individuals.

Installation shot of The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah

Readings from William Blake, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Mervyn Peake and others, lectures and personal reminiscences by Stuart Hall, and music, particularly jazz of the era, along with sounds of all kinds are woven together to add much of the emotional resonance of the artwork. The audio reaches a kind of crescendo at the point where Mahalia Jackson sings an extraordinary version of Silent Night, tears streaming down her face, within a melange of images including an actual birth.

Mahalia Jackson in still from The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah

Below is an (incomplete) list of countries and the dates they achieved independence from the United Kingdom.

1922 – Egypt
1932 – Iraq
1947 – India
1956 – Sudan
1957 – Ghana
1958 – Sierra Leone
1960 – Nigeria
1961 – Tanzania
1962 – Uganda, Jamaica
1963 – Kenya
1964 – Zambia, Malawi
1966 – Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados
1967 – Yemen
1970 – Fiji
1971 – Qatar, Bahrain
1974 – The Bahamas
1980 – Zimbabwe

April 19, 2015

A Space Gallery

Hermann Nitsch, the Austrian artist, born in 1938, and famous for his bloody “Aktions,” recently had a planned exhibition in Mexico City cancelled because of the protests of animal rights activists. Torn apart animal carcasses, buckets of blood and offal, fake crucifixions, ritual animal slaughter are all part of Hermann Nitsch’s performance art. Numerous volunteers assist in these events which are described as “life affirming mass intoxications.” Old Hermann Nitsch began to do this work in the 60s as the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries. “Splatter paintings” by Hermann Nitsch are exhibited at the Saatchi Galleries in London.

Hermann Nitsch

Here in Toronto’s A Space, in an exhibition titled A Non-Space at A Space, by the Art Collective Postcommodity, video documentation of the slaughter of a single sheep is on display. Relative to a Hermann Nitsch bacchanalia, and its bloody methaphoric stew including the Catholic Church as well as Broadway, this is a simple act. The sheep is butchered in the bathtub of the Gallup Motel by an attractive woman identified only as a former Miss Navajo beauty contestant. We see Miss Navajo lead the docile animal from the sunny, southwestern exterior to the motel’s bathtub. The animal’s throat is slit. It quickly dies. The carcass is expertly skinned and the body is rendered into meat.

Stills from Gallup Motel Butchering by Postcommodity

Butchering of livestock is routine and takes place around the world in factories, farms and probably bathtubs. Ms. Navajo’s ancestors in Gallup, would have been slaughtering animals for many thousands of years in this region. But not sheep. Sheep are European imports. Sheep arrived in North America around 1600. (I wrongly identified the animal as a goat in my original post.) It would have been an entirely different kind of video – more action and adventure – if, for example, an antelope (actually a Pronghorn), indigenous to North America, were brought back to the Gallup Motel.

Pronghorn (North American antelope)

The event in the motel room was recorded at various angles by at least four cameras. The images are projected big and on every wall of the rather small space. It’s oppressive, even alarming. The viewer is hemmed in by the flashing knife, the gore, the tugging and snapping of bones, tendons, vertebrae as the blood circles the tub’s drain. It struck me that this profound act, performed in a spirit of cultural empowerment, within the down market motel room, is enough. The fast edits and multiple supersized screens are superfluous.

Stills from video installation by Postcommodity Art Collective

In the room next door the Postcommodity Art Collective presents a two channel surveillance video of residences of the affluent middle class in the Santa Fe area called My Second Home, But I Have a Very Spiritual Connection With This Place. (I love surveillance video and the quiet dark room was a relief after all the slaughter in the bathtub.) I guess the point is the houses have that adobe look in historical accord with the surroundings. I have never been to Santa Fe but oddly enough you can see the adobe look in some of the suburbs of Winnipeg, which takes appropriation to a whole other level.

Winnipeg interpretation of the Santa Fe style

In the writing that accompanies the exhibition the terms “settlers” and “colonizers” are used. The show’s curator, Ellyn Walker, in a short bio, is compelled to identify herself as a “settler” of Scottish and Italian descent. What does this racial identification by the curator mean? Is this the politically correct end game in which ancestry must be declared and then judgement is passed? I find this a depressing trend.

April 18, 2015

All over the city today I am seeing tank tops, patios at capacity, flip-flops, Daisy Dukes. The rush to embrace summer is irresistible. We are in love.

Images Festival

Casey Wei presents Chinatown Center Mall Happenings!

How often have I walk down Spadina, past the Chinatown Center, and barely registered it is there? Thanks to Casey Wei I have now visited this mall, twice.

Chinatown Center, 222 Spadina

The mall is packed with glittering things but short on shoppers. There is a drowsy atmosphere. Could be the weather is to blame.

Jewelry store in Chinatown Center

Like the larger, newer Pacific Mall in Markham, Chinatown Center ostensibly caters to ethnic Chinese who want the feel and products of a Hong Kong shopping center.

Casey Wei set up shop on the ground floor where occasional passers by gaze down from the upper galleries.

Chinatown Center

There are a handful of artists around and a few members of the local community. As an art piece it is shapeless, open ended and slowed down, stretching out to nine days. It feels good: relaxed, friendly, natural. There is playful banter. The Karaoke is at times quite accomplished. (I was almost ready to sing “You’re So Vain” but backed out.) The mahjong tiles clatter in the corner. The shop owners don’t seem to have much expectation of customers.

Snapshots of Casey Wei presents: Chinatown Center Mall Happenings!

One of the organizers mentioned the piece is about “engagement”. It worked for me. I have a new familiar stop in Chinatown. For Casey Wei I think engagement means something different and here is where ancestry comes into play. (If Casey Wei did this in the PATH for instance, around King and Bay, it would be a wholly different kind of engagement.)

Chinatown Center Mall Happenings! by Casey Wei

Here is not so much a place to shop as a place to catch a mood. At least I don’t think anyone goes to Chinatown Center to buy a smartphone, or a pair of jeans. My sense of the virtually deserted Chinatown Center is that it is a sentimental destination, one that evokes a life left behind on the other side of the world. Casey Wei, a young woman with an Asian face and name, but whose bio suggests she grew up in this country, may be trying to plumb that sentimentality towards greater self understanding.

I’m thinking about a friend whose parents are Chinese and who was born and raised in Scarborough. He got into Eastern philosophy, not through his parents, but via Western culture at a particular moment. Later he and his wife adopted a Chinese baby. They raised their daughter in the USA and then they all went on an extended trip to China to try to understand, well, themselves.

March 28, 2015

March marches on: cold, windy, glare, barren.

Clint Roenisch Gallery – Eli Langer and Jennifer Murphy

Caravansary Of Joy is the title of a joint exhibition by Eli Langer and Jennifer Murphy at the capacious Clint Roenisch Gallery on St. Helen’s Avenue. The two artists are a couple. Other than that fact, the exhibition is composed of two separate and distinct shows.

The paintings by Eli Langer, occupying the front of the gallery, are a pleasure to look at mainly because they are so uncomplicated. This artist is pushing paint around in a serious way but anything external to that activity is irrelevant. There is no agenda, narrative, political pitch, intellectual or iconoclastic posture. I like this feeling of having nothing between the paintings and me; nothing I have to sort out or disagree or agree with. Its relaxing and calming to look at these paintings and there is a crystalline lightness to them that makes it hard to look away.

Winter Flowers by Eli Langer

The Three Sisters by Eli Langer

Eli Langer did provide a sheet of notes available for viewers of the paintings. They reinforce the calm, open, meditative qualities the art works possess. A few lines from the notes are excerpted below:

Painting is experimental. I want to get lost. Turn off the logocentric mind. Trip up purposeful reflex that seeks familiarity in recognizances.

I work without plans. I want the painting to surprise me with its directness.

Painting is truly free of its history in 2015.

Her Cabinet by Eli Langer

Eli Langer is talking about getting into the zone where creativity is effortless and assured. It’s exciting and mysterious to see how that Zen-like stillness comes through in the work. Also in the notes Eli Langer writes about the idyllic, creative period he recently experienced, in a supportive relationship with his partner, Jennifer Murphy.

Jennifer Murphy’s work occupies the back of the gallery space.

Installation of art work by Jennifer Murphy

A polished granite platform holds sculptural works in the center of the room and around the walls the artist’s collage pieces are pinned, at varying heights.

Who among us has not, at one time or another, cut pictures out of a magazine and glued them down to make something new? Jennifer Murphy has the uncanny ability to create art works using this technique. Suspended on long pins, like insect specimens, a parade of beast portraits, interspersed with somewhat more conventional portraits of women, are displayed.

Art works by Jennifer Murphy

As varied as the animal kingdom itself the pieces share a fragile spindly-ness and jewel-like allure. I recall certain aunts of mine wearing brooches like this: a leopard with an “emerald” eye for instance. The frankencat, shown below, has such a coquettish pose, but maybe that’s just something about cats.

Art work by Jennifer Murphy

The sculptural pieces in the exhibition have the look of a surrealist’s garden: weird, ungainly, texturally patchworked and punctuated with fizzing colour.

Sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

One of the tiniest pieces has a wonderful “Twilight Zone” sensibility. It’s as if the doe-eyed ingenue is trapped in another dimension.

Detail of sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

Details of sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

In fact all the objects by Jennifer Murphy – composed of humble materials, found objects, scraps of fabric and various castoff print media – evoke an alternate universe. It’s similar to this universe, but adjusted a bit, for private aesthetic purposes.

Daniel Faria Gallery – Valerie Blass

Just next door, at the Daniel Faria Gallery: A glittering arm holds aloft a crack pipe, miniature figures melt together in lurid sexual embrace, whacked together scrap wood has an anthropomorphic expressiveness, a life-size sculpture of cliched female desirability studies “herself” in a distorting mirror. These are some of the pieces constituting an exhibition by Valerie Blass. Exploring notions of identity, objectification and self-delusion, Valerie Blass adds an ambiguous overlay of autobiography by titling the exhibition My Life.

Art work by Valerie Blass

Detail of Sois gentille by Valerie Blass

The technical virtuosity and versatility of the artist is impressive. She boldly takes on all media to trawl the psycho sexual depths.

Dr. Marbuse Psychoanalyst by Valerie Blass

Dr. Marbuse was a fictional hypnotist and criminal who featured in Fritz Lang movies. Is the artist suggesting that hypnotic self absorption is implicated in the fracturing of identify?

Details of Dr. Marbuse Psychoanalyst by Valerie Blass

A grinning homunculus, looking like something out of a medieval relief, inhabits the “face” of the mirror gazer above.

Artwork by Valerie Blass

In another piece, the same curtain of silky blond hair is present. This time the hair is out of context, set in a provocative display with a hand, a foot and pale pink panties. Parts only, no woman required. It’s the definition of fetish.

Something about the piece made me think of Andrea Dworkin and the feminist sexual wars of the eighties. At that time feminists defined themselves as either sex-positive or sex-negative. This was mainly because of the theories of Andrea Dworkin which condemned all objectification of women and all pornographic imagery. She was truly a crusader and was famous for saying things like “Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior [and is] the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” That kind of talk turned a lot of her feminist, lefty allies against her. Today, pornography has won. It’s everywhere. Andrea Dworkin was the hardest of the hard-line feminists and the strange upshot of her ideas is that the Christian Right championed then and they still do today.

March 21, 2014

Knots of people loitered on the street like teenagers as the sun started to have some real meaning. It was an afternoon to saunter.

Trinity Square Video

The work on display at Trinity Square Video, called The Cloud of Unknowing, by Ho Tzu Neyen, put me off lunch. The camera lingered over plates of rotting food and maggots, appalling skin diseases, obese half naked people, fetid water and a heavy set man wearing a Depend.

Still from The Cloud of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Neyen

The soundtrack could be described as ambient metal or dark ambient with an overlay of heavy breathing and occasional bursts of quite good drumming. There is no dialogue. A collection of vaguely surrealistic and improbable tableau vivant were linked with a cloud/steam/fog image. At the conclusion of the presentation a fan switches on somewhere and a steamy vaporous cloud wafts into the dark viewing room as the screen fades to a blinding white. It’s disorienting.

Showing video in art galleries has always been challenging. On this Saturday afternoon I became aware of an apparent new trend in the medium: a material manifestation (literal fog or cloud in this case) of the onscreen work.

(Fog was one of the key components of a memorable art piece I saw in London by Olaf Elliason called The Weather Project. In that case viewers in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall became so spaced out they lay on the floor, staring up at the fog shrouding a dim sun in the mirrored ceiling far above. The fog created a dreamlike atmosphere and seemed to release all kinds of inhibitions. )

The Weather Project by Olaf Elliason

Ten minutes away from Trinity Square Video, at the Georgia Scherman Project, there is an anything goes atmosphere as an art installation/perfume launch is underway. The space is very dark and very fragrant. A short black and white video loop is playing is which a model clomps up a circular stairway in what appears to be a dank cave or grotto of some sort. The soundtrack is ambient metal. No dialogue. The floor is littered with black confetti which has been heavily doused in the fragrance. The artist wants to create a particular atmosphere. At the counter – I mean desk – sachets of Andrea Maack’s upcoming fragrance “Dual” are handed out.

The gallery staff mentioned the plan for the video to go viral. You never know what’s going to catch on. More than 40 million people have watched: Double Rainbow.

Samples of the fragrance “Dual” by Andrea Maacke

The idea for the black confetti underfoot – more material manifestation – is that the public will inadvertently track it out into the neighbourhood and disperse the olfactory offering up and down Tecumseh Street and beyond.

Susan Hobbs – Krista Buecking

Next door at Susan Hobbs I thought I was in more conventional terrain. Big, beautiful framed art pieces hung on the walls. But at the moment of entering the gallery a soundtrack is triggered: swelling violins and “This Magic Moment’ by the Drifters spills into the space.

In the exhibition, titled Matters of Fact, Krista Buecking creates exquisitely subdued atmospheric fades and then suspends hard edged graphics above them on the encasing glass.

For me, although the music was an endearing touch, the art pieces could totally stand alone. It did strike me as amusing, that whereas the media artists want some ambient element scattered about, the painter selects an old school emotional torch song to create an atmosphere.

codified form B by Krista Buecking

Mist, fog, dreaminess, atmosphere. Those seems to be the themes for this beautiful sunny afternoon.

March 7, 2014

Today a 25 year old man was rescued by the authorities as he tried to walk from Detroit to Toronto on the ice of Lake St. Claire. He had been on the ice for a couple of days when found, improperly dressed and without a cell phone or life jacket. “He was in the beginning stages of hypothermia,” said the commander of the Coast Guard cutter who spotted him, “It took him a long time to formulate his thoughts.” This guy could not have been thinking clearly from the start. It’s March now. The sun has a new strength. Soon all this ice and snow will disappear and be forgotten.

Barbara Edwards Contemporary Art – Medrie MacPhee

The oil paintings by Medrie MacPhee, on display at the Barbara Edwards Contemporary Art, point to a cycle of change. Awakening, destruction and renewal are quite literally the subject matter of this work, as embodied in that epic domestic event: the home renovation.

The Force of Things by Medrie MacPhee

Openings are excavated as layers of surface are ripped away. Heaps of material lie in ruins, shredded, frayed and broken. Orientation is subjective as up or down could be anywhere.

Bayou II by Medrie MacPhee

In most of the painting familiar building materials are rendered: lathing, flashing, duct work, sheet rock, even bits of copper pipe.

Detail from painting by Medrie MacPhee

These paintings of a domestic interior in upheaval bring up lots of ideas: the mayhem of war zone collateral damage, the destruction of security and relationships, psychological states of painful renewal, transition, damage, change.

I haven’t gone through a homeowner renovation but I notice that when people talk about these traumatizing experiences they invariably use the word “nightmare.” I imagine it could be nightmarish to witness the demolition phase. In most of the paintings a looming black void is present. Maybe its about a feeling of dread that must occur when the sledgehammers come out and you know there is no turning back.

The New House by Medrie MacPhee

The Look by Medrie MacPhee

Formally these paintings are so interesting to look at. They have churning quality which somehow emerges through the compositional elements being strung together with attenuated shadows, cracks and slab-like edges. In some pieces it appears the artist has used canvas like paper collage, adhering layers like a construction site patch job that adds to the sense of heaving movement.

One of the most absorbing pieces is in fact a paper collage. It has a lightness and freshness that is very appealing.

Rummage by Medrie MacPhee

There is a Portuguese bakery a couple of doors up Bathurst from Barbara Edwards Contemporary Art. We dropped in after the show and totally obliterated some flakey, cream filled confections.

February 28, 2015

The Dufferin bus was suddenly drenched in a unfamiliar phenomenon: Sunshine! We looked around, stunned, and blinked weakly.

MKG127 – Liza Eurich

What initially attracted me to drop by MKG127 and take in an exhibition by Liza Eurich was the appealing artist’s statement on the Gallery website. See below (reproduced in its entirety):

Eurich will be presenting work that: emphasizes negative space, is hollow, has a faceted surface, contains other work(s), is concealed, is layered, has multiple components, is not a multiple, is like a drawing, incorporates text, is stationary, has reticent characteristics, is monochromatic, uses straight lines only, references Agnes Martin, is fragile, consists of more than three materials, is made of ceramic, was built, is freestanding, requires a plinth, uses keyholes, uses a French cleat, is in its third iteration, is in a series of three, is positioned adjacently, is architectural, references something from an Ikea catalogue, is functional, is recognizable, does not resemble an animal, was almost omitted.

Based on this text I anticipated hardcore post-conceptual, neo-minimalist works but something about the slightly off-kilter, cannily understated writing assured me it would be fresh, distinctive and droll.

Installation view of Liza Eurich exhibition

Just as the writing suggests, the exhibition, titled Either a New or Existing Character, is a collection of unique items with various attributes: is wood, is thin, is freestanding, hangs on the wall, painted white, stained and…. so on. The art works are diverse but nearly all could be described as spare, restrained, subtle, precise and strangely reminiscent of some carefully crafted maquette or fragment of a maddening Ikea puzzle that just will not fit together.

The delicate piece below is fitted with what could possibly be a tantalizing scrap from an instruction manual.

Eeeee: not for placing by Liza Eurich

I really liked the cool, deadpan industrial look of Liza Eurich’s larger sculptures. They are so perfectly suited for some mysterious function. Are they a tribute to the Scandanavian juggernaut on the Queensway?

Freestanding two sided rack by Liza Eurich

Shelving: six additions by Liza Eurich

Occasionally Liza Eurich adheres some murky graphics to her sculptures. Apparently these images are from a single book found by the artist. Possibly medical or antique technological illustrations, these random bits of imagery, placed with such constraint and exactitude, add to the sense of an architectural model but one that references time and atmosphere as well as structure.

3 levels, pedestal base by Liza Eurich

Two components, layered rectangle by Liza Eurich

Resting on a pedestal is an artpiece initally reminiscent of a vessel of some kind. It’s made of deep black broken tiles which dip and swerve to encase a naturalistic form. Mishapen, gnarly, almost expressive, the soft black tiles absorb and reflect light like a big lump of bitumen.

Facets by Liza Eurich

Liza Eurich keeps her ideas on simmer and doesn’t give away too much. I left the gallery with an appreciation for the subtle feeling of hesitancy and tension that was created.

February 20, 2015

How about those grimy ice hillocks that are lining the streets of Toronto?

I have to keep reminding myself that civilization is not breaking down. It’s just winter.

Koffler Gallery – Kriistina Lahde

The Koffler Gallery, located in Artscape Youngplace, is the site of an exhibition by Kriistina Lahde titled ULTRA-PARALLEL.

I arrived to see the show in a completely winterized getup. The young woman at the desk immediately sprang into action and rushed up to meet me as I entered the gallery space. It took me a few minutes to figure out why this woman – charming and erudite – was so intent on guiding me around the show. The fact is that much of the work is delicately balanced and perishable. It could be easily destroyed by an unruly toddler ….or a viewer with fogged up dark glasses and a puffer coat. She didn’t want me to accidently wreck something.

It’s always so satisfying to see an art piece right in the middle of a gallery space. This show has a spectacular sculpture front and center. As light and airy as a dandelion puff ball the work is also structurally engrossing and culturally loaded.

From a straight line to a curve by Kriistina Lahde

Details of From a straight line to a curve by Kriistina Lahde

Geodesic domes must have been around forever but for me they are associated with Buckminster Fuller. He discovered that triangles arranged into a sphere create structures of incomparable strength. He tried to market geodesic domes as dwellings but they did not catch on. (Civilization is not breaking down!)

The sculpture is made of vintage yardsticks. Each has a glowing patina and is emblazoned with the name of a long gone hardware store or house paint purveyor. Even the name “yardstick” is an anachronism and the use of these appealing objects, once so common as to be nearly invisible, softens the piece and adds a melancholy dimension.

Yardsticks are the raw material for another sculpture in the exhibition. This one, depicted below, glows in a delicious curve as the wooden sticks are arrayed according to hue and balanced in a swoop.

Slide Rule by Kriistina Ladhe

Detail of Slide Rule by Kriistina Ladhe

In fact, most of the pieces in the show are created from measuring devices: A chalk reel, surveyors tape measure, vellum, sewer’s measuring tape, and the yardsticks. Routine, utilitarian, mundane could all be used to describe these objects. Kriistina Ladhe uses them with grace and wit not so much to transform them as to allow their brilliant versatility and simplicity to be evident in a new context.

Detail of Parallel Lines by Kriistina Lahde

Detail of String and a Box by Kriistina Lahde

Detail of Tool for Making by Kriistina Lahde

Greater than, less than by Kriistina Lahde

Near the entrance to the exhibition is a mysterious circular piece of steel. It is a depiction of a meter. The phrase “Meter: one forty millionth of the circumference of the Earth” is etched along the bottom rim of the object. This piece has all the marks of serious tool but it is delightfully useless.

One forty millionth of the circumference of the Earth by Kriistina Lahde

The concept of the meter goes back to the 18th century. After the French Revolution the French Academy of Science selected this as the standard measurement unit in the new Republic. It was believed to be one ten-millionth of the length of the meridian through Paris from pole to the equator. Actually they were a bit off, which is explained in an essay accompanying the exhibition. Currently, somewhere in Geneva, the meter is defined as “the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1/299,792,458 seconds with time measured by a cesium-133 atomic clock which emits pulses of radiation at very rapid, regular intervals.” Progress, not perfection.

February 12, 2015

I blame Stephen Harper for the punishing Alberta Clipper sweeping down Bloor Street as, gingerly avoiding black ice patches, I hustle toward the ROM.

Royal Ontario Museum – Douglas Coupland

At the last July 1st fireworks display I attended something weird was going on. I noticed that possibly 60% of the viewers gazed at the brief spectacle through their smart phone screens. Apparently tons of gun powder exploding in the summer night sky is no longer the pure experiential draw it once was. For many it must be mediated through a screen. A sense of mediation through technology is one idea Douglas Coupland is getting at in his exhibition at the ROM titled everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything.

Installation view of Douglas Coupland exhibition at the ROM

The title of the exhibit suggests depersonalization, corporatization and content flattening as it raises questions about a new way to experience the world: in comfort and safety through our irresistible, glittering toys.

Some of the paintings don’t make sense at all unless they are viewed through a screen. The painting below, if viewed without mediation, i.e. IRL (in real life!), is an awkward abstraction. Through the phone it morphs into the familiar visage of Osama bin Laben.

Bogeyman by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s paintings of the World Trade Center disaster, and another of a drone in flight, below, work the same way.

Poet by Douglas Coupland

Drone Attack by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland points to the terrorism threat as one of society’s drivers but one that is in low-gear, moving us steathily to somewhere. Where? His sculptural replication of the World Trade center is so banal it is shocking.

Artwork by Douglas Coupland

References to pop art and media devices are everywhere. Big, colourful paintings ressurects Ben-Day dots with a Microsoft logo update and Quick Response bar codes that can be read by a smart phone.

Better Living Through Windows by Douglas Coupland

I Wait and I Wait for God to Appear by Douglas Coupland

There is a Warholian coolness and disconnection through much of the show. Douglas Coupland acknowledges his debt to Andy Warhol with a piece containing wigs flattened under glass. The artwork has the same disturbing creepiness as the famous 1936 Meret Oppenheim fur lined coffee cup.

Detail of Wigs in the Style of Andy Warhol by Douglas Coupland

Object by Meret Oppenheim

Douglas Coupland mines the Internet for pithy quotes, advertising hooks and memes of all kinds to create a wall of sentiments about what’s going on right now. Strangely some of it already seems dated.

Details from Slogans for the 21st Century

For example I happen to know that right now there is nothing more coveted, among the truly style conscious, than a vintage flip phone.

The work also owes a lot to a certain Japanese aesthetic. Cheerful, cute, bright and shiny with a dark undertow. Think of Takashi Murakami who switches between designing bags for Louis Vuitton and creating apocalyptic visions of technological blowback.

The piece depicted below, featuring dozens of Japanese cleaning products, contains a Murakami-like ambivalence. Douglas Coupland explains in the title card blurb that he collected the containers in a Japanese department store and dumped the contents down a drain before returning to Canada. He then draws a link between subsequent oil spills and the Tsunami and debris from Japan washing up on the BC coast.

Details from Tokyo Harbor by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s concrete poetry pieces are also transcultural. Although mostly in English they have a haiku-like feel and contain a sprinkling of Japanese words. Shinhatsubai means “new product or new model” in Japanese.

Artwork by Douglas Coupland

A sculptural artwork sits on a large platform and is encased in glass like an architectural model. It’s a metropolis right out of Sim City, where for every step forward a price is paid. It is an immensely intricate piece, glittering, lively and vigorous, but of course the sheen comes from chemicals and oil and the city is dying.

Details from The World by Douglas Coupland

The exhibition is full of thought provoking work about the past and the future and that awkward spot, the present, in which Douglas Coupland, just like all of us, is stuck. Perhaps that fact makes us myopic, alarmist or both. Once in a while I like to drop by the Castle Board Games on Spadina, just below College, to get enthused and optimistic about the under 20 set and about how all this will play out. One of the entrance conditions for this cafe is that you have to turn your phone off.

Meanwhile I slowly make my way to the ROM exit. There are many distractions.

Tyrannosaurus

Sea life

Bird

Shrunken head (eyes and lips sewn shut)