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January 27, 2015

Biting cold…cruel gusts along Annette Street…broken down Dupont bus…one glove lost…not even February….but the days are getting longer.

Clint Enns, Leslie Supnet

I arrive just in time to catch the beginning of Adventures in Transgression, a screening of videos by Clint Enns and Leslie Supnet at Trinity Square Video. The mood of the crowd is that of cabin fever induced excitement and recklessness that make for an interesting evening, and, TSV has a capacious screening room with a sound system worthy of the ambient industrial tracks to come.

Some of the videos of Clint Enns have a tossed-off larkishness, like the short nostalgic clip called Freddie Mercury Sing-A-Long.

Still from Freddie Mercury Sing-A-Long by Clint Enns

Others are discomforting, like the superimposed close-ups of an ejaculating penis and vigorous teeth brushing in Gleem or the tight shot of cataract surgery called Botched Eyeball Operation which is more horrifying than any slasher movie. Let me ASMR you explores the perceptual phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response, which is evidently a popular youtube indulgence.

Still from Let me ASMR you by Clint Enns

Many of the works have a connection to some earlier film or technology or video art piece. They are remakes, tributes, recreations, remixes, variants of existing technology or artwork — some more obscure than others — which becomes clear in seeing Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, James Benning, Hans Richter, Chris Burden, Name June Paik and others referenced in the programme notes. Clint Enns is apparently a student and ardent fan of earlier achievements in moving imagery but he is definitely on his own path.

The videos that are truly spellbinding, for me, are those in which Clint Enns goes for pure image. Take as a starting point, for example, the scratchy, flaring, generally beat up look of a Guy Maddin film and keep going…and keep going… all the way. Clint Enns apparently sets outs out to degrade his images until they are virtually abstract.

Detail of still from Ten Skies by Clint Enns

What happens on the journey to total annihilation is really interesting: not only are the visuals often incidentally gorgeous but also the viewer is obliged to think about the phenomenon of seeing itself.

Stills from Spiderman vs. Macrovison by Clint Enns

In Spiderman vs. Macrovision the real time image decay is fast and unsettling. Macrovision’s “Ripguard” technology, was designed to prevent illegal copying. In the tape we see antique cartoons repeatedly churn, hesitate and dissolve into a froth of colour only to be reformed momentarily and dissolve again, like a babel of photons struggling for coherence.

Strangely, in these videotapes the emotional content is heightened with increasing abstraction. The sound design/music (frequently performed by Clint Enns) is a big factor. In winnipeg stories: sacrificial memories, composed of discarded footage, Clint Enns achieves a fitful, melancholy tone. The golden glow gives the tape a “trapped in amber” look and the music is wistful, haunting, emotive.

Still from winnipeg stories: sacrificial memories by Clint Enns

The Everden (which is my favourite) creates a sense of panic and paranoia as the viewer looks deeper and deeper into a bleak urban landscape. It’s like watching the famous “grassy knoll” footage from Dallas. Everything is so tantalizingly close, but the resolution just isn’t there and the image breaks up, becomes meaningless, closed and unknowable.

Still from The Everden by Clint Enns

The Everden also made me think of the Laura Poitras’ film Citizen Four, in its dark, brooding unease and revelations of betrayal and duplicity. The sound track of processed ambience and guitar, the unrelenting static, drop out, smear and interference all conspire to create a powerfully tense piece about extreme alienation in this: the age of surveillance.

Leslie Supnet’s work also has a “take no prisoners” approach to materials. She chooses to hand draw her animations, paint and cut out her sets (with scissors), and shoot in super 8 instead of HD.

Still from First Sun by Leslie Supnet

Capturing simple, graphic pictures with these erzats techniques Leslie Supnet’s work frequently achieves a sense of elemental imagery. In pieces like Sun Moon Stars Rain or First Sun the bold images, coupled with a boisterious percussive sound track results in wildly playful pagan joyfulness.

Leslie Supnet’s narrative animations explore themes of depression, anxiety, loss and redemption. Simple line drawings have an affecting emotive depth and nuance that seems precisely current.

Still from Fair Trade by Leslie Supnet

Her processed super 8 work also has complex results using simple imagery. Recurring themes include flocks of gulls, bizarre landscapes, cats, horses. Last Light Breaking has an other worldly, meditative dreaminess. Wind and Snow combines startling depictions of classic subjects in flaring, shimmering psychedelic colours. Less like a documenter of the natural world and more like poet, Leslie Supnet gets at the essence of what’s around her.

Stills from Wind and Snow by Leslie Supnet

January 22, 2015

The weather softened as I traversed Dundas Square and crowds spilled out of the Eaton Centre to mill about aimlessly in the late afternoon light. Rounding the corner, the approach to the Ryerson Image Centre has a gloomy, underpass feel and the clatter of hockey sticks and shouted taunts echoes up and down Gould Street.

Ryerson Image Centre

Even in the vestibule area of the Ryerson Image Centre glamour is front and center. The Salah J. Bachir Media Wall continuously plays a loop of thirteen vignettes by Alex Prager. The piece, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine and called A Touch of Evil, is all high production values and top shelf Hollywood talent as Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, George Clooney, Mara Rooney, Mia Wasikowski and others get all campy, ironic and self-referentially post modern to portray peak Noire moments. It’s kind of fun to take in the special effects, lavish colour and tension enducing music, like watching movie trailers or some patische put together for Oscar night, but I couldn’t help feeling that I’m tired of celebrities and their faces.

Stills from Alex Prager piece, A Touch of Evil

The world is the playpen of this gang of mega stars and now it seems they have insinuated themselves into every aspect of life; even romping into the art world with a knowing wink. (I wish Tilda Swinton would stop doing performance art too.)

Burn with Desire: Photography and Glamour

Thinking about the fire theme I recalled the Is Toronto Burning? show which opened in September of this year at the Art Gallery of York University. Whereas the York show, curated by Philip Monk, examined an intense period in the creative history of this city, the show at Ryerson Image Centre, curated by Gaëlle Morel, is a longing gaze mostly at Hollywood.

We all know the lovely goddesses of the past, with arched spines and eyebrows captured in satiny black and white, especially Marilyn Monroe. In this show there is definitely a surfeit of Marilyn pictures and yet somehow, new angles and unfamiliar expressions are revealed. How is that possible when the woman’s image is available in every cut-rate t-shirt shop on Yonge Street?

Manfred Linus, Untitled [Marilyn Monroe], date and location unknown. BS.2005.190119/113-1226. The Black Star Collection, Ryerson Image Centre.

We also see Brigette, Sofia, Natalie, Gloria and others, all swanning about in the glory of mid century USA. (Below is an incendiary Ava Gardner.)

Burn with Desire: Photography and Glamour (installation view), 2015 © Eugen Sakhnenko, Ryerson Image Centre

Vanity Fair’s celebrated pull-out covers by Annie Liebovitz work the time-tested glamour signals. With only minor adjustments to old Hollywood style the images capture throngs of interchangeable starlets with bare shoulders, limpid expressions and more satin.

Burn with Desire: Photography and Glamour (installation view), 2015 © Eugen Sakhnenko, Ryerson Image Centre

The show gets more interesting and the understanding of glamour broadens with the inclusion of a bit of authentic counter culture from the late sixties. The Kenneth Anger film Puce Moment is totally loopy and delightful. (Click on the link to view it on Vimeo.)

Burn with Desire: Photography and Glamour (installation view), 2015 © Eugen Sakhnenko, Ryerson Image Centre

There is also a hilarious Richard Avedon film from 1973, actually an ad for a Japanese Fragrance, in which Lauren Hutton, Anjelica Huston. Jean Shrimpton and Avedon himself send up the whole glamour enterprise. The short piece, which predates MTV by about ten years, has a frothy, giddy excitement to it that might be impossible to achieve in this more cynical era.

The giant colour portraits of black women by Mickalene Thomas add gravitas to the exhibition. One of the few that are not actual celebrities, the image below depicts an utterly self-absorbed beauty, shimmering and adorned and posed for maximum impact in a kind of trance of narcissism.

Burn with Desire: Photography and Glamour (installation view), 2015 © Eugen Sakhnenko, Ryerson Image Centre

There is picture of Kim Kardashian in the exhibition; nude shots with Barbara Kruger’s trademark red and black bands of confrontational texts strategically placed. What occurred to me was the following: Why do I know so much about Kim Kardashian? I have never watched her reality tv show nor really read anything about her and yet…and yet I possess numerous facts and impressions about the woman. Was it like this when Marilyn was ascendent? What about the future? Will the Google glass have a filter?

January 16, 2015

Villa Toronto

Villa Toronto kicked off this week with an opening in the great hall of Union Station. The exhibition was dimly lit and fraught with tripping hazards. The beauty of the space – the spectacular vaulted ceiling, clerestory windows, touches of Canadiana like the carved city names ringing the hall – was ignored. Instead a warren of tiny white galleries was installed, apparently in a rush. Unfortunately the place reeked of Cinnabon, which wafted up from the food court below.

On the positive side there was definitely some art to look at. There were hordes of people and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

My friends and I were puzzling over the sculptures and drawings by Joseph Wagenbach.

Sculpture by Joseph Wagenbach at Villa Toronto

A multi media kiosk told the story of this artist: his rural childhood near Hannover; the confusion and displacement of the war; some time spent in Paris where he may have met Brancusi; his reclusive life in Canada. In 2006 he suffered a stroke. His house was opened and a trove of art works was discovered.

Rabbit by Joseph Wagenbach

String Mouse by Joseph Wagenbach

Rabbit Skinned by Joseph Wagenbach

Initally we weren’t sure the object above represented a rabbit. Maybe it was a cat of some kind or a weasel? A particularly articulate and knowledgeable woman overheard our conversation and emerged from the crowd to explain that a particular rabbit was obtained from a Portuguese butcher and a cast was made of it and that is why this object exists.

Huh?

The woman then went on to introduce herself as Iris Haeussler and confessed that, yes, she created the sculpture and the drawings; dreamed up the biography, the stroke, the discovery and in fact the whole alter ego of fictitious Joseph Wagenbach.

Drawings by Joseph Wagenbach

Iris Haeussler went on to tell us how liberating it was to create this work for her alter ego. Self imposed inhibitions and doubts vanished and she enjoyed a truly creative period.

I mentioned the Scondi Collection and told her it would be interesting if Joseph Wagenbach had actually been acquainted with Isabella Scondi…but with the noise and the Cinnabon I don’t think it quite got through…

January 15, 2015

I walked north from Dupont on Osler and then veered left to take in some of the desolate, windswept beauty of the Junction. All was bathed in a high contrast glare on this bright afternoon in deep January.

Jessica Bradley Gallery

It was such a relief to be in the warm, friendly gallery space, filled with laconic poetry, as a succession of trains rumbled by outside. The show at Jessica Bradley is called Signs & Symbols.

Work by a dozen artists is on display. The delivery methods are diverse but there is a definite coherence to the show: high Concept Art, detached and cool.

Installation view of Signs & Symbols

The show got me thinking about the material manifestation of ideas and how far ranging that could be among the original Conceptual Artists: From the notion that “if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing,” (for example, Robert Smithson literally creating a new landscape) to instances whereby the object part of the art became less and less important until finally, poof!, it was gone (as in Sol LeWitt handing out some instructions).

In this exhibition, one end of the spectrum (the “less is more” end) might be occupied by Jason McLean who jots some practically illegible notes on nice thick paper and then frames them. It’s so deft and effortless, the way these particular text fragments powerfully capture some of the chaos and unmanageability of contemporary life.

Jan 2112 by Jason McLean

(Since it is a bit hard to read I’ve excerpted a particularly appealing section below:)

loose nuts in bowl
with kiwi &
    log on log off
      computer
         manual

Jason McLean’s poetry/sign works really well with a photograph by Geoffrey James which is hung next to it. The photograph documents a bit of signage on the exterior of The Matador. The bizarre concoction of letters on dense green paint is like a faint missive from another world, emphasizing the divide between the dull staid society where mail is delivered and the after hours parallel universe where vice and mayhem rule.

The entrance to the Matador by Geoffrey James

Some of the work seems to be getting at the ineffable. Like a thick black, manufactured oval with glowing white letters by Kelly Mark. It effectively reminds the viewer that life is short and eternity awaits.

Nothing is Larger than Everything by Kelly Mark

Yes, yes….there is no time like now! I should buy a Hyundai and some cheap gas!

A piece by Robert Fones, similarly manufactured and glowing, elevates a strangely awkward command.

What You Don’t See Displayed by Robert Fones

Tricia Middleton’s piece, painted in watery blues, is a quote from Nietzche. It has a plaintive tone and makes a link between the courage to live life deeply and the by-product of that, which is intense suffering.

The most spiritual human beings (Nietzshe) by Tricia Middleton

The artist Karl Holmqvist creates an ambitious installation work. Typewritten sheets completely cover one wall and climb over a platform. The texts share a visual similarity to the “typings” of Christopher Knowles but unlike that famous autistic artist whose pieces never waver from a single idea, this installation offers a roving commentary on such disparate topics as celebrity culture, advertising, politics, history, religion and so on. It’s not clear if these are found texts or compositions by the author. There are a couple of sets of headphone included as part of the installation where one can listen to what sounds like a computer with a deep, male, German accented voice reciting random words.

Untitled (MOMA) by Karl Holmqvist

Walking back down Miller Street I had a new appreciation of the workaday announcements plastered on plateglass all around me. What were the considerations that resulted in the final form?

January 3, 2015

The festive torpor has come to an end and the galleries along Tecumseh Street are now open.

Sleet.

Birch Contemporary – Janice Gurney, Renee Van Halm

Punctuation in Translation, (Marcus Aurelius meditation 10.17 translation by Meric Casaubon, 1634) by Janice Gurney

Artwork by Janice Gurney

The snapshot above actually functions as a continuation of the conceptual art piece, called Translations & Alliances, by Janice Gurney, on display at the Birch Gallery.

And now for the explanation:

Janice Gurney begins with an ancient text by Marcus Aurelius. She isolates the punctuation in various English translation of the text. She literally makes paintings of the punctuation marks. Then she lends the paintings, framed and under glass, to colleagues. The colleagues place the paintings in offices somewhere and Janice Gurney photographs the original paintings in their new context, including incidental reflections on the glass and adjacent objects. Then the photograph of one of the paintings is included in a show and Janice Gurney photographs the photograph of the original painting in a new context, including incidental reflections on the glass and adjacent objects…..and on and on, like a hall of mirrors.

Reflection: Production Still (ArtLAB Gallery, 2009) by Janice Gurney

Meditation in Your Office, (M. C.’s office, University of Toronto, 2006) by Janice Gurney

This piece is initially mystifying and would remain rather opaque without an understanding of the back story. For example, what are the numbers near the floor, beneath the paintings (and photographs of paintings)?

In fact 1634 is the date of the translation, the punctuation of which is depicted in the painting.

I found that putting the effort into figuring out this work is worthwhile. Through all the commotion with the photographs, punctuation marks, reflective glass and whatnot a real sense of this haunting piece of poetry and its journey through history emerges. The delicate idea of how a translator hundreds of years ago decides to place a comma stays with me. The words – a meditation – are about the brief and fleeting nature of any one thing. Paradoxically this one thing, an intangible idea, has endured.

The original 1634 translation of the Marcus Aurelius text is below:

XIX. Ever to represent unto thyself; and to set before thee, both the general age and time of the world, and the whole substance of it. And how all things particular in respect of these are for their substance, as one of the least seeds that is: and for their duration, as the turning of the pestle in the mortar once about.

In the handout that accompanies the show Janice Gurney provides complete texts of the subsequent translations through time. Excerpted below are a few examples of various translations of the original “turning of the pestle in the mortar” phrase:

1701 “turning of a Wimble”

1747 ‘”twinkling of an eye”

1862 “turning of a gimlet”

2002 “twist of a tendril”

2009 “one brief turning in air”

I wonder if the band Kansas was thinking about Marcus Aurelius when they wrote their 1978 hit “Dust in the Wind”?

Kansas, in the seventies

Concurrently on display at Birch Contemporary is a show of paintings, called Depth of Field, by Renee Van Halm.

It’s an interesting pairing of artists: Whereas Janice Gurney’s show explores elusive concepts of past and present Renee Van Halm’s paintings are all about the visual “now.”

Complex Curves by Renee Van Halm

Tongue & Groove by Renee Van Halm

The paintings consist of pure, intense swaths of colour enclosed in sensuous curves on a background of fragmented depictions of interiors. Renee Van Halm is on top of the language of desirable objects and she plays with the fracturing and recombining of those conventions with delicious success. In fact, I immediately wanted to take one home, hang it over a white Carrara marble fireplace…maybe there would be an Italian greyhound slumbering in front….I’d be wearing Prada and a vintage Jaguar would be parked out front…

Rose by Rene Van Halm

December 30, 2014

Clare Twomey at the Gardiner Museum

George Gardiner, a stockbroker and financier, adhered to the “buy low, sell high” principle in art collecting as well as business. He initially began collecting ceramics, with his wife Helen, as a hedge against inflation. The couple went on to amass a spectacular collection and together created the Gardiner Museum, which sits snugly across the street from the ROM at Bloor and Queen’s Park. Sumptuous, intelligent, preposessing, and optimally-sized are all adjectives that come to mind in thinking about the cultural edifice that is the Gardiner Museum.

Entrance to the Gardiner Museum with ceramic head by Jan Kaneko

On the third floor, in a very large, dimly lit room of the Museum is a current exhibition and ongoing performance, titled Piece by Piece, by British artist Clare Twomey.

Details of Piece by Piece by Clare Twomey

Over 2800 white ceramic figures, 2000 made by Clare Twomey in England and imported for the exhibition, and another roughly 800 produced over the duration of the exhibition by on-site “makers,” are arranged on the dark floor. This array of expressive figurines is bracketed by a spot-lit work table at one end; at the other stand the original 18th century commedia dell’arte figurines – vividly colored, glazed and brightly lit in vitrines – from which the 2800 ghostly replicas are cast.

Detail of Piece by Piece by Clare Twomey

My first impression of the art piece is of a swirling, emotive tableau, suggesting a replica of a battle or uprising like the dioramas at Gettysburg. The spotlights in the darkness create long shadows of the expressive objects on the gleaming floor, adding to the look of tangled narrative within which surely some monumental event is depicted.

Details from Piece by Piece by Clare Twomey

In fact Clare Twomey is not recreating an historical episode but is responding to a particular 18th century aesthetic as embodied in ceramic commedia del’arte figurines from the Museum’s collection and raising questions about the purpose of a museum and the difference between cranking out replicas and the exquisite perfection of a priceless original. The artist refers to this work as an “intervention.” This “intervention” is very well mannered indeed and functions not only as a striking visual work of art but also as an enhancer of the Museum’s role in society.

Clare Twomey has selected three figurines from the commedia del’arte pantheon: Scaramouch, the roguish clown; Harlequin, the witty acrobat; and Leda, the flighty love object.

On the second floor of the Museum a large collection of 18th porcelain commedia del’arte characters are on display including the following:

Pantalone and Dottore, c. 1740 Meissen, Gemany

In commedia del’arte performances intinerant acting troupes performed unscripted performances relying on their understanding of predictable character behaviour to progress the story line. This is similar to today’s soap opera actors who apparently are not given lines before the director yells “Action!” but are simply advised of what’s going on, for example: “Victor recovers from amnesia and turns up in Nikki’s bedroom.”

Victor and Nikki are reunited

The lower galleries at the Gardiner Museum were virtually deserted as closing time neared. It was a pleasure to stroll around and privately view these lovely objects made of clay.

Ballplayer from West Mexico, 500-300 BC

Apparently by Greg Payce, 1999

Dish commemorating John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, 1702

December 20, 2014

John Player at Pierre-Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain

Because of a trip west and the general nuttiness around this time of year I nearly missed seeing a show of paintings by Montreal artist John Player. Pierre-Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain is just a few blocks west of St. Lawrence Market, which had a raucous atmosphere on this sunny Saturday afternoon before Christmas, and I was able to slip in to see the show on the last day.

At Art Toronto (Toronto International Art Fair) I saw a couple of John Player’s art works. They stood out as not only visually startling but also loaded with frank, serious content. I was looking forward to coming across more of these paintings.

Listening Station

This artist has tapped into something entirely current, and that is the culture of surveillance. It’s a fact of life now that surveillance data is captured, stored, analyzed and traded. We all carry tracking devices (cell phones) with us. We identify all our friends and even acquaintances (Facebook) and offer up all there is to know about our habits, thoughts, opinions in texts, Instagram, Snapchats and email. Its accepted that while working, shopping, driving or just walking around the city we are all in somebody’s crosshairs. For the most part, we accept it all as an annoying requirement, like security screening at the airport.

Monitoring Room

Remand Center

John Player’s paintings make us consider the upshot of this obsessive documentation. His paintings explore fear and its manifestation as a powerful and cold bureaucracy in which listening devices are linked with incarceration structures and drone excursions.

Watch Floor

I recently saw Citizen Four by Laura Poitras and the paintings inspire the same kind of spine tingling unease as the movie. Whereas the film is shocking in its focus on the few pivotal days in which Edward Snowden “came out” and then fled, the paintings suggest something equally dark but more stable and entrenched; a sprawling, well funded set of infrastructures with their own expotentially expanding agendas.

Container

Frequently the mysterious structures, often in desert locales, reference architectural drawings in their replication of space and mass. The palette is often very subtle, as if the objects are sun-bleached and the viewer has caught the image from a distance, hastily and warily, like the scene of catastrophe or menace. Some of the interiors have a subterranean, over-lit feeling, as if there is no off switch for the flourescents. The installations appear deserted yet infused with paranoia and anxiety. Who exactly is the viewer? Is John Player trying to turn the tables on the surveillance establishment and watching the watchers?

Tactical System

John Player’s paintings also have a rich sensuality. The painting above, titled Tactical System, depicts some unknowable, militaristic hijinx from the night sky and the ominous view nearly disolves into just paint and colour and shape and light with appealing success.

Meanwhile, although Mr. Obama has assured Americans that the NSA is no longer listening in on their phone conversations (internet data continues to be collected even for US citizens) Canadians and the rest of the world might be interested to know we are still under full monitor. According to The Guardian that means all phone communication and includes: “a log of every communicative act that you make in cyberspace – where you went; who you emailed or texted; who emailed or texted you; the URL of every website you visited; a list of every web search you’ve ever made; and so on.” It’s sobering to think about all that scrutiny. Makes me want to detach from my gadgets and start writing letters again… in disappearing ink.

December 9, 2014

(Report from Winnipeg)

Bracing weather in Winnipeg this morning: -27 and gusty. Fortunately I have retained my childhood skill of running backward into the wind.

Sundogs were visible throughout the day and could be captured clearly with the camera as the sun began to set.

Winnipeg Art Gallery

The annual Sobey Award of $50,000 goes to a single Canadian artist under 40 years of age. Four runners up receive $5,000 each. This year the Winnipeg Art Gallery hosted an exhibition of the finalists and the ceremony in which this year’s winner, Nadia Myre of Quebec, was announced. Finalists include Evan Lee (West Coast and The Yukon), Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier (Prairies and the North), Chris Curreri (Ontario), and Atlantic (Graeme Patterson). I’ve never seen the country divided up quite that way. For me, the art on display is equally novel.

The work of Graeme Patterson is almost indescribably strange. The exhibition displays a half hour long, stop-motion animated film featuring two fur covered humanoid creatures: a bison/human and a lion/human. These two cavort, party, moonwalk, build furniture, chop wood, practice archery, light fires, watch sports, hunt and battle desperately with their fully animal counterparts, until finally, the bison/human gravely injures the lion/human.

Stills from The Secret Citadel by Craeme Patterson

It’s impossible to walk away from this film. It is so bizarre and original and at the same time has such engaging emotional nuance and a very solemn depth.

Another piece by Graeme Patterson, called Taming the Wild, is a kind of natural history diorama displaying a ragtag selection of roughly taxidermied animals. A sculpture of a man, possibly a self-portrait, is included in the tableau of delicately posed creatures on slender pedestals.

Details of Taming the Wild by Graeme Patterson

Two pieces by Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, members of Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge, are on display.

Library is a giant painting utterly stuffed with information. It consists of hundreds of tiny precise paintings of books, rendered in a flat, comic-book style. Their titles – always drole, sometimes ironic, sometimes fey – are visible.

Detail of Library by Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier

Another piece by the collaborating artists, Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, is sheer poetry. Dozens of epigrammatic phrases are displayed in a grid of framed pieces.

Here is one of the pithy texts:

“…and I started getting really

interested in eloquence and profundity.

There were just both so fucking awesome

and cool.”

– by Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier

I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at when it came to the photographs of Chris Curreri. Is this organic matter, closeups of a damp seaside grotto, body parts, melting ceramics or some kind of darkroom manipulation?

Untitled (Clay Portfolio) by Chris Curreri

Untitled (Clay Portfolio)

Technically masterful, this series of black and white prints lining a long hallway provide a intense visual experience. It is partially because of the ambiguity of the subject matter and too because they are so formally voluptuous.

A bust looking out over the gallery above eye level has a shocking quality. It is approached from the rear and it’s only on walking around it to see the front that the viewer is startled to find it has been violently defaced.

Views of Medusa by Chris Curreri

Work by Evan Lee has an urgent, contemporary political sense to it. It seems like the artist is trying to keep up with numerous ideas and social forces colliding and richochetting around his world. Black Bloc Abstraction, shown below, initially appears to be an abstract painting until it coheres into waves of black clad protestors, as per the infamous G-20 Summit, held in Toronto in 2010.

Black Bloc Abstraction by Evan Lee

Large, mostly black paintings consisting of rich fields of varying depth, reveal themselves to be depictions of masked or hooded youth. Are these guys violent thugs or idealistic protestors? Evan Lee raises ideas about anarchy, fraying social bonds and alienation in his portrayal of Black Bloc idealogues.

Black Blot 2 by Evan Lee

In an art piece using numerous different media the subject matter is the migrant to Canada. Darkly murky portraits attempt to celebrate the importance of an individual: unknown, far from home and alone.

Migrant Portrait by Evan Lee

The snapshots shown below, of young men nervously vamping for the camera, anxious about their chances for the future, are displayed in a vitrine, with other depictions of a migrant experience.

Art piece by Evan Lee

Nadia Myre’s work is a grand sociological effort to heal the wounded. Ongoing since 2005 The Scar Project is a the remarkable focusing of one individual’s compassion to engage numerous others (800 at last count) to participate in a healing action. Nadia Myre has travelled around the country convincing people to create a “canvas representation of a physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual scar they may have, and write out the accompanying narrative.”

Hand stitched on unbleached fabric, using humble tools and unsophisticated imagery, these artworks have a feeling of humility, earnestness and honesty. Nadia Myre is delving into profound subject matter: social change at the level of the individual, involving self reflection, pain and forgiveness.

December 5, 2014

Suzy Lake at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Walking up Beverley Street on the overcast, relatively mild December afternoon I saw the AGO in a whole new light. The big brilliant blue box was incandescent against stark black and white.

The exhibition I came to see – Introducing Suzy Lake – is on the fourth floor of the Gallery.

I’ve always associated Suzy Lake with Montreal: cool, remote, sophisticated, avant garde in a sort of unknowable way, so I was surprised to learn that she has been living right here in Toronto for the past more than thirty years.

Who is this woman with the magical name? Who is Suzy Lake?

At the AGO Suzy Lake is seen through the decades: the demure high school portraits altered with a sketched in older self; transforming, with hilarious effect, into local icons of the Montreal art scene; slathering on white face or makeup within a grid of images; adopting kittenish fashion poses of the era; homewrecker (with a sledge hammer); domestic drudge; aging Lothario; puppet, matron in haute couture…. On and on, Suzy Lake presents Suzy Lake, as art. That is the core of her work: the female persona that just happens to be her.

Detail of 16 over 28

Suzy Lake as Francois Sullivan

A Genuine Simulation of...

Suzy Lake creates a fascinating tension between the notion of Everywoman and her unique individual self. We see her again and again and again but we don’t get inside her head.

Peonies and the Lido #7

The coherence of this body of work, and the way it unfolds in the context of the exhibition, is truly impressive. Throughout it has a consistency and unwavering direction, no side trips or blind alleys here. She understands media – print, tv, film, music – and turns it back on itself through her own filter.

Choreographed Puppet

The name Travis Bickle will ring a bell with anyone who lived through the seventies. The protagonist of the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver famously asked “Are you talking to me?” in the 1976 movie view of a dystopic New York City. Suzy Lake spoke these words in a state of agitated confrontation and this massive photographic piece, recently recreated, documents the performance. In the movie Robert DeNiro was crazy; a Vietnam vet whose alienation led him to violence. To me Suzy Lake seems to speak about a different kind of alienation and frustration, that of the objectified woman who has had enough.

“Are You Talking to Me?”

One of my favourite pieces in the exhibition is Suzy Lake decked out in a Rei Kawakubo outfit. This work is powerful and playful at the same time. She looks directly at the viewer with startling confrontation daring them to insinuate that her getup is just verging on absurdity.

Performing Haute Couture

A film “Suzy Lake: Playing with Time”, by Annette Mangaard, was visible near the end of the exhibition. It provided a great deal of background about Suzy Lake’s life and influences. I was not prepared for the joyless tone taken in this movie. For example Lisa Steele and Martha Wilson, both extraordinary artists with histories rich in community and accomplishment, spoke with grim faces about loneliness and struggle in their early careers. Surely it must have been exhilarating, even fun, to take on the male dominated art world, push forward and thrive? Something about her expression in the Performing Haute Couture piece tells me that Suzy Lake is definitely enjoying the game.

November 30, 2014

The Aga Khan has bestowed his mythic glamour — which normally involves race horses, yachts, French chateaux and movie stars — onto the modest Toronto neighbourhood known as Flemingdon Park. There lies the site of the brand new Aga Khan Museum, which I glimpsed from the Eglington Avenue East exit of the Don Valley Parkway. On approach, through various off ramps and merges, the structure rises up, like some giant dazzling white envelope, or packing crate, elegantly unfolding in the late November chill.

Entrance of the Aga Khan Museum

Designed by Fumihiko Maki, the Aga Khan Museum is like a sundial in that light moves around a central open courtyard. Throughout the day the suns rays are cast through elaborately etched glass to create an ever changing panorama in the spacious multi storey structure.

Aga Khan Museum interior

Tracing the spread of the Islamic faith across the world, the Museum displays numerous exquisite objects from past centuries.

The Museum curators have used the contemporary world map to locate the physical origin of the collection. For example, Iraq was created only in 1958 but the watercolor shown below is identified as 13th century Iraqi.

Where does this beautiful artifact fit in?

According to Wikipedia, the area now called Iraq has been home to various cultures since 6th century BC and was “center of the Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires. It was also part of the Median, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.”

11th century Iranian flask

14th century gold leafed Egyptian Koran

This is a painting from Iraq in the 1800, when the East began to encounter the West.

The ground floor of the museum is devoted to display of historical objects and showcasing events and performances, many of which take place in a spectacular domed auditorium.

Take the staircase to the second floor to see the current show of contemporary art from Pakistan.

Lapis-blue plaster wall backs staircase to second floor

The exhibition of young Pakistani artists, titled The Garden of Ideas, immediately looks like present day art from anywhere and could have easily been covered in one of the links from Artsy that regularly floods my inbox. But looking a little closer this show is curated to link to the Islamic identify of the artists, using embroidery, textile and carpets, gold leaf miniatures, tiles and paving stones to create fresh interpretations with traditional materials.

Your Way Begins on the Other Side – Aisha Khalid (gold-plated and stainless pins on velvet and silk)

United Kingdoms – David Chalmers Alesworth (embroidery on antique carpet)

The Garden of Love – Mani Abidi

Details of works by Atif Khan

detail of painting by Aisha Khalid

The whole experience at the Aga Khan Museum was relaxing, enlightening, refreshing. It was like a trip to a distant spa.

On the way out we skipped the gift shop and had a beautiful view of the Ismaili Centre which sits across from the Museum separated by some celebrated gardens designed by Vladimir Djurovic, which I will look forward to seeing in April.

It would have been a perfect day except for a traffic jam of historic proportion on the DVP, which meant more than two hours later we were still in the Flemingdon Park neighborhood, trying to crawl back to Toronto.