conceptual art – annetteandquebec

May 5, 2024

DECADE: 10 Years of Creation at Youngplace

Beleaguered, in decline, challenged, crumbling, struggling…. These are some of the words used in the local press and social media to describe the current state of the Toronto art scene. There are many reasons: the pandemic screwed everything up, capricious corporations pulled funding, everything is turned into a condo tower, money just keeps flowing upwards, and a glass of wine costs twenty dollars. But is there something more fundamental going on, could it be the nature of Late Stage Capitalism!?

Painting by Ruth Adler — Assemblage by Ruth Adler from “DECADE” at Koffler Centre for the Arts

In this context, seeing the exhibition at Koffler Center for the Arts was not just fun, uplifting and hopeful, but also illustrative of the importance of artist’s spaces in this city. The Koffler Center is housed in the Youngplace building, which opened as a cultural center in 2014 and is currently one of the Artscape facilities in Receivership. All the artists in the show are, or were, until recently, part of the Youngplace community.

The stated goal of the exhibition is to shine a light on Youngplace: “this iconic arts hub.”

Lining the wall of the entrance to DECADE are fabric and paint assemblages by Ruth Adler. This artwork strikes me as generous, open and approachable. It’s all about surface and shape, colour, pattern and movement. It feels light-hearted and celebratory, and I really like the way this artist repurposes materials.

Ruth Adler has had a studio at Youngplace for 10 years. This fact reminded me of the documentary about Brian Eno I saw this week, at the annual Hot Docs Film Festival. (Actually it was more of a film experience, created using generative technology.) Toward the conclusion of this event Brian Eno talked a lot about the importance of creative ecologies, as opposed to the myth of the solitary genius. I assume this idea of creative community applies to all the artists in this show.

Although she works with many different kinds of materials, Ruth Adler thinks of herself as a painter. Matthew Schofield is another painter in the show. Whenever I see paintings by this artist it feels like he’s tapping into my own memory banks. That’s because he delves into the arena of quirky personal snapshots, family pictures, keepsakes, memorials that are entirely personal, and yet, universal.

Paintings by Matthew Schofield — Painting and detail by Matthew Schofield

These beautiful paintings are tiny, some just 4″x 4.” They are identical in size to the original snapshots. They have a glittering, gemlike quality which is quite mesmerizing. I want to get closer and closer to them, and peer into the captured moments.

It was very exciting to see the work of Midi Onodera. This artist has some interesting relationships with machines.

Excerpt from Soliliquy bny Midi Onodera

The excerpt above is a hilarious interaction between the artist and a chatbot named Faux Midi.

There is a lot of literature on line these days about how chatbots and GPT entities are prone to all kinds of malfeasance. They are liars, people pleasers who will say anything just to keep talking. They are prone to hallucinations. They can easily be hypnotised to spout misinformation. In other words, these things can’t be trusted! Some of the exchanges between Midi Onodera and Faux Midi make this fact abundantly clear.

The other piece by Midi Onodera was produced especially for the exhibition and weaves together colorized, moving mages of the corridors and stairways of the Youngplace site at 180 Shaw Street. It was wonderful to look at until I started feeling seasick.

Excerpt of 2397 by Midi Onodera

Speaking of weaving, textiles played a big role in the DECADE show.

I was obliged to read the catalogue to know what I was looking at when I viewed the elegant, attenuated weavings by Shabnam K. Ghazi. In fact, these wall hangings are composed of shredded paper which has been woven into a fragile, delicate fabric. The recombined paper contains screenprinted depictions of the artist’s writings, describing her earliest memories.

Wall hangings — Artwork by Shabnam K. Ghazi

In this convoluted, painstaking process the artist has found a way to physically manifest her language and her earliest recollections.

Two pieces by Barbara Astman are in the show. One is a lovely tapestry in muted tones. It takes a while to recognize the fragments of contemporary glamour, fashion and advertising imagery in this piece. The form of tapestry, a traditionally female pursuit, originated in Ancient Egypt. Tapestry weave pieces, using linen, were found in the tombs of both Thutmose IV (d. 1391 or 1388 BC) and Tutankhamen (c. 1323 BC.)

The other piece by this artist is a collage using news feed type imagery. I really like the way Barbara Astman uses the pictures we are relentlessly bombarded with everyday and repurposes them for her own amusement.

Detail of “Daily Collage” by Barbara Astman

Massive quilts by Carolyn Murphy are on display. They take quilting, another so-called feminine art, into the realm of spare and airy abstraction. These quilts have a Russian Constructivist vibe. The very appealling texture is created by the dense stitching which ambles every which way in curving patterns. It was a good move by the Koffler gallery to place a large sign nearby, stating the obvious: Do Not Touch.

Among my favourite artworks in this show were the paintings by Gillian Iles. She has created a sprawling installation composed of about eight separate paintings, produced on Tyvek and other materials, tied and stretched haphazardly. The installation resembles a temporary dwelling or encampment, ramshackle, derelict and unsafe.

Within this structure, Gillian Iles has strewn intense images: Light blasts a tiny, vulnerable tent under the arch of a heavy black night sky; a wrecked, abandoned vehicle is overgrown with random vegetation; a fire nearly out of control towers over onlookers; and — is it dawn or more flames? — something is blazing fiercely through a hidden path in the woods.

Detail of “All and Nothing” by Gillian Iles

David Liss, the esteemed founder of MOCCA, curated the exhibition. In a video loop playing in the gallery he talks about how interacting with art — not on line but in real life — is essential to the human experience. He invites visitors to the show to celebrate Artscape Youngplace and the decade since it was founded, and to “consider and imagine what the next decade will look like.”

February 28, 2024

Judy Chicago: HERSTORY at the New Museum, NYC

In one of the pieces from her massive retrospective at the New Museum — covering sixty years of art making — Judy Chicago invites us to consider a simple question: What if Women Ruled the World? The responses are compiled in a sprawl of hopeful texts, manifest in needlework, that most feminine of forms.

“There would be no wars.” “The Earth would be saved by humanity instead of being destroyed by it.” “The first step would be to abolish gender norms and deconstruct the entire hetero-patriarchal, racist and classist system that surrounds us.” “Not one mass shooter in the US was female.” “There is no need for violence when we use our hearts.”

In anyone else’s hands this piece might come off as naive or reductive, but there is something about Judy Chicago’s method — what she refers to as “call and response” collaboration — through which she is able to harnass an outpouring of honesty from many participants. The result is that the artwork has a powerful impact. It is urgent and exciting.

Installation view of “What If Women Ruled the World” by Judy Chicago

Detail of “What if Women Ruled the World” by Judy Chicago

This is a big show, going all the way back to painted car hoods Judy Chicago produced in the mid sixties.

Installation view of Herstory by Judy Chicago

And then there were the wonderful smoke performances from the seventies.

But these early artworks are not the reason for Judy Chicago’s giant retrospective at the New Museum.

“Herstory” will showcase Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and highlight her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists previously omitted from the canon.
New Museum description of Judy Chicago: Herstory

It is this role as a cultural historian which Judy Chicago fully inhabits in her artwork called “City of Ladies.” The piece is a show-within-a-show in which nearly ninety artworks by notable women from history are on display.

Installation view “The City of Ladies” by Judy Chicago

Hilma af Klint, *Group IX/UW, The dove, no.2* (1915) from “The City of Ladies”

Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein), *Portrait of Miss E.M. Craig* (1920) from “The City of Ladies”

In an interview about “The City of Ladies” Judy Chicago often mentions a certain “Christine.” It took me a while to figure out she meant Christine de Pizan, who wrote “The Book of the City of Ladies” in 1404. Christine de Pizan lived from 1365 to 1430 and is thought to be the author of some of the very first feminist pieces of literature.

From compendium of Christine de Pizan’s works.
Shows the author lecturing to a group of men. Created in her scriptorium in Paris in 1413.

A brochure provided by the New Museum is a compendium of the women included in the show, and contains a short but detailed biography of each: Hilma af Klint, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Elizabeth Catlett, Emily Dickinson, Artemisia Gentieschi, Zora Neale Hurston…among many others.

Wounded Deer, by Frida Kahlo (1946) from “The City of Ladies”

As Judy Chicago says: “If you bring Judy Chicago into the museum, you bring women’s history into the museum.”

“The International Honor Quilt,” another “call and response” project, is composed of 539 individual triangular quilts, produced by women from around the world. Each triangle celebrates a woman, a women’s group or a feminist issue, and together they create a joyful depiction of global female solidarity.

Installation view “The International Honor Quilt” by Judy Chicago

Detail of “The International Quilt of Honor” by Judy Chicago

Mostly global icons, like Queen Elizabeth II, are represented, but there are also lots of obscure women’s groups and a few mythological, religious, fictional women make the cut, for example: Deborah, Demeter, Eve, Isis, Nancy Drew, Persephone, Virgin Mary and, weirdly, the Loch Ness Monster.

Parts of the show seem too binary. Are all women good because they can give birth and all men are evil warmongers? That part of the show — despite the beauty of the massive collaborative tapestries — struck me as an illustration of the limits of second wave feminism.

I prefered looking at her most recent work, where she meditates on death and the climate crisis.

But wait, the big thing, the thing I heard about for decades, the thing that defines Judy Chicago — “The Dinner Party” — was not there. It was a ghostly presence throughout, constantly referenced, but absent.

I was obliged to journey to Brooklyn, change to the 2/3 at Hoyt, past Grand Army Plaza and The Botanic Gardens, onward, to Eastern Parkway and the stately Brooklyn Museum, where Judy Chicago’s famous work is permanently lodged.

Entrance to “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago at the Brookly Museum

Detail of “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago

It was a long trip, but it was worth it.

October 19, 2023

Inter/Access:

Remember Tomorrow – A Telidon Story

There was a warm, fuzzy feeling at Inter/Access on the evening of October 19, 2023. The organization was celebrating 40 years as a center dedicated to expanding the cultural significance of art and technology.

Before that evening I did not know that Inter/Access was originally named Toronto Community Videotex or TCV, and that it was first set up as a non-profit, artist run corporation to provide tools for artists using Telidon.

Yes, Telidon. The Telidon program, a television-based information-sharing system that allowed users to browse computer databases, was developed by the long gone Canadian government department called the CRC (Communications Research Center.) The program began officially on August 15, 1978 and ended on March 31, 1985.

“Transmitting Information over Telephone Lines,” diagram from Inter/Access website.

Wandering around the show I got the feeling the Telidon developers were so close to something, groping around in the virtual landscape — blindly, unable to quite make it happen — but knowing, absolutely, they were there, at the beginning of something.

Telidon was a proto-type for the Internet. It was a 24/7 source for information. All you needed, as a user, was a Telidon terminal and a keypad. It was interactive! I think it was the interactivity part that really got the original Telidon artists hooked.

Detail of “She Seemed to be in Transit” by Johanne Daoust, produced using Telidon

The concept of simultaneity was another idea that was intoxicating to artists. Toronto gallerist Paul Petro, one of the original founders of TCV and an artist using Telidon, spoke during the evening about the excitement of hosting an art opening in three different cities, at the same time!

An early “selfie” created with Telidon by Paul Petro

The images created with Telidon have a blythe, cheerful, pop art look. They are rendered in time as layers load and intersect in a satisfying, somewhat hypnotic, display.

Installation view of “Remember Tomorrow – A Telidon Story” at Inter/Access

This exhibition explores the allure of Eighties hardware and, well, I guess you could call it lifestyle. Big television sets that look like credenzas, potted palms and wow, orange shag have been lovingly installed in the Inter/Access gallery.

Lots of obsolete hardware is on display. By lifting a telephone receiver and pressing “rewind” and then “play” on a tape deck the gallery visitor can listen to interviews with participating artists. (Unfortunately several of the taped interviews had been inadvertently erased during the exhibition because users were unaware of the lost art of “removing the tab” from a cassette tape to prevent just this type of mishap.)

The exhibition catalog, put together by curator Shauna Jean Doherty, contains the most endearing story about the Telidon artworks selected for the Venice Biennale of 1986. Created on a series of floppy disks and “playable only using specialized hardware” the artworks were indeed shipped to Italy for the big show, but because of technical difficulties they were never put on view, and instead sat in a cardboard box for four decades.

The whole show has a sort of elegiac feel to it. Maybe it’s about mourning the loss of innocence in regard to technology.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn…”
Douglas Parkhill, one of the father’s of Telidon, quoting HG Wells in a report chronicling Telidon’s history, from the exhibition catalogue.

The developers definitely did have a romantic view of that brief, Telidon moment. There were some catchy words and phrases that picked up the “beginning of the beginning” vibe and quickly rose and fell: Whatever happened to “informatics,” “Instant World,” “Telematic Culture” or the “Information Paradigm?”

Detail of Installation view, “Tomorrow Remembered – A Telidon Story” at Inter/Access

But it hasn’t all disappeared. Thanks to John Durno, head of Library Systems at the University of Victoria, an operational Telidon decoder does exist and numerous Telidon artworks have been restored and are ready to be returned to Venice for a conference this year.

“Telidon Commercial,” Telidon image by Don Lindsay

1983..1983…1983…? To be honest, I can’t recall anything specific about that fateful year. Fortunately we now have the Internet to fill in the blanks:

In 1983:
The metric system of weights and measures was officially adopted by the Canadian federal government.
25 Red Brigades were sentenced to life for kidnapping and murdering Italian Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro in 1978.
Singer and drummer of The Carpenters, Karen Carpenter, died from complications caused by eating disorder anorexia nervosa, age 32.
Though already available in Japan and Europe, Sony and Philips released their CD players in the US and Canada. Though a compact disc player costs over $1000, they prove to be extremely popular.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller went to number 1 in the US 200 Billboard album charts for 37 weeks, setting a world record for the amount of time an album stays at number 1.
Astronauts Peterson and Musgrave perform the first spacewalk of the shuttle program during NASA’s STS-6 mission. The spacewalk lasts over four hours.
Israel and Lebanon sign an agreement to take a step towards peace.
The Internet took a step towards its creation as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was moved to TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol).
Arcade game Mario Bros. was released in Japan. The arcade game, produced by Nintendo paved the way for future Mario games to become one of Nintendo’s greatest creations.

September 23, 2023

Erika DeFreitas at Doris McCarthy Gallery: “It’s because of the shimmer, the verge, and the yet.”

In her short remarks at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Erika DeFreitas explained the title of her current exhibition. She mentioned that “the shimmer” refers to the spiritual; by “the verge” she means the beginning, and “the yet” for her, is the future.

I really like the idea of “the shimmer” in particular. It’s so vague and yet so evocative of something delicate, fleeting and gorgeous, and as I wandered through the show I found the “shimmer” discernable in many of the works on display. Erika DeFreitas explores what could be called the paranormal, with a light, but sure, touch.

For one thing, she communicates with the dead. In particular, she gets in touch with deceased female artists. During the pandemic lockdowns, Erika DeFreitas describes herself as “conversing” with Agnes Martin, by re-creating a series of approximations of Agnes Martin’s quintessential line drawings.

Picture of line drawing — Detail of art piece by Erika deFreitas titled “the responsibility of the response (in conversation with Agnes Martin)

Another long deceased presence in the show is that of Gertrude Stein, who died in 1946. Erika DeFreitas considers her ongoing series of sculptural works titled “(if you look closely she moves)” as a kind of response to the 1922 play by Gertrude Stein called Objects Lie on a Table.

…DeFreitas asked a psychic medium to request Stein’s permission to collaborate. The medium informed DeFreitas that Stein has been working with her all along.
List of works from the exhibition: description of (if you look closely she moves)

Assemblage by Erika DeFreitas titled *(if you closely she moves)*

Death is a recurrent subject for this artist.

I really liked looking at the piece she did using individual obituaries clipped from newspapers and preserved using beeswax.

Detail of art work by Erika DeFreitas titled *“In Lieu of”*

The tiny stacks, obsessively ordered, have a tombstone like quality. The viewer is compelled to read the text and gaze at the photos of long dead strangers, sort of like wandering through the Mount Pleasant Cemetery

Erika DeFreitas is a little more playful when she collaborates with her mother, Cita, or channels her deceased grandmother, Angela.

Picture of series of photographs showing decorated faces — Photo series by Erika DeFreitas titled *“The Impossible Speech Act”*

decorated face — Detail of “The Impossible Speech Act” by Erika DeFreitas

In the photo series above, Erika DeFreitas and her mother have created “death masks” using cake decorating techniques passed down from Angela. The icing sugar hardens but gradually melts against warm (living) flesh.

Apparently Erika DeFreitas’ grandmother, a Trinidadian, would adorn statues of Black Madonnas with jewelry and gorgeous fabrics. Her granddaughter has continued this practice with a contemporary twist.

Detail from *“The Black Madonna of Great Echoes”* by Erika DeFreitas

Another long deceased artist that interests Erika deFreitas is Jeanne Duval. (It’s a long story.) There’s a big, complicated piece in the show, featuring many large photographs, and its all about a painting by Gustave Courbet. The full title of this painting is: The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life. It was painted in 1855 and currently is located in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France.

Courbet was a leader of the Realist movement and a rebel against the prevailing cliched Romanticism of the day. Apparently, he was always in political trouble in France and ultimately had to disappear to Switzerland, where he died at the age of 58.

Erika deFreitas focuses on a portrait that is missing from this very famous and massive picture. (It was more than 19 feet wide.) She has done some careful research and found that Jeanne Duval was erased from the picture. Jeanne Duval was Baudelaire’s girlfriend. When they had a fight, the poet — Courbet’s champion — demanded her likeness be removed.

Detail of art work by Erika DeFreitas titled *“arriver savant moi, devant moi”*

Photographs of paintings and hands — Detail of art work by Erika DeFreitas titled *“arriver savant moi, devant moi”*

Erika DeFreitas gets deeply into this erasure. It holds a lot of meaning for her. The piece is like a detective’s notes revealing how the artist gets closer and closer to something. To me, although I liked looking at the images and thinking about how things were, this does strike me as art world gossip from about 170 years ago.

photo of Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval — Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval

It’s kind of great, however, that the painting, shown below, is still stirring people up, all these years later.

Painting by Gustave Courbet — “*The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life*” by Gustave Courbet

September 18, 2023

Liz Magor at MOCA: “The Separation”

What about all the forgotten items? What about the stacks of coffee lids, the candy wrappers, the plastic bags in soft pastels, the crenillated foil cups, and sparkly bits of paper stuffed in a gift bags, the trays — presenting so many things! — artfully coated in silver or gold? What about the big gulp holders — the really big ones — with plastic straws poking out the top? What about the hard — infuriating, practically unbreakable — plastic encasements for purchased items? What about the cigarette butts, the liquor bottles, the beer cans, the unwanted toys, empty bottles, scattered gravel, moldy cookies, moth eaten blankets, matted fake fur, dead animals, shells, gum, junk, garbage, trash?

We’re talking about the metier of Liz Magor, in her exhibition titled The Separation, on view at MOCA.

On entering the exhibition the viewer is faced with an expanse of shiny, hard mylar boxes. The boxes are brightly lit from above. They sparkle. They attract.

Installation view of “The Separation” by Liz Magor

The lighting fixtures are kind of hilarious and create a bit of a fun house atmosphere.

I wander through the box array, anticipating. I don’t know what exactly — but something — something that is going to be exciting, in some way. And that is where everything starts to slow down.

Detail of installation “The Separation” by Liz Magor

Liz Magor presents the material that slips by us moment to moment, all the stuff that we ignore. As she does that, we are obliged to consider a lot of things, but mostly transience and permanence, and, as strange as it may sound, the whole idea of time rushing by.

Many of her scupltures, protected in their big, clear boxes, are casts of the original objects they represent. They are facsimiles, removed from their original function, context and incidental narrative, to exist in another realm altogether. Maybe that’s what she is referring to in the exhibition title (“The Separation.”) She has removed these bits of our material lives and “separated” them from their predictable stream of existence.

There are a few structures on the pheriphery, — hammered together Ikea and antique, worn work tables — holding cast sculptures of stuffed (or sometimes just dead) animals, lying in sympathetic poses, insisting on our attention.

(In fact, I may have won this lion creature, above. It was some years ago, at the ex, prior to the pandemic. Yes, it was a shooting game! Oh god, look at him now.)

There are lots of video’s online featuring Liz Magor talking about her work. She has a very calm, amused presence, although she always seems to be talking about being a “worrier.”

Something I got from watching one of the videos is her connection to minimalism. She is drawing our attention to particular objects. Don’t start looking for some allegory, metaphor or moral. She’s not hectoring us about being consumers, urging us the Save the Whales, or read Wittgenstein. She’s all about: “What you see is what you see,” as Frank Stella famously said.

The videos are worthwhile. I definitely liked watching her make stuff and talk about her interest in death.

Liz Magor at Susan Hobbs: “Style”

More work by Liz Magor can be seen at Susan Hobbs. The show, titled “Style,” is really beautiful and concise, comprised mainly of clothes slightly eaten by moths. Found objects — mostly stuffed animals, also possibly moth eaten — attend the garments, embrace them and present them for our viewing.

Installation view of Liz Magor show “Style” at Susan Hobbs

The gallery has helpfully provided some instructions on dealing with moths. I know from experience this has been a problem over the past few years in my Toronto neighborhood.

Clean your closet, combine sunlight with vigorous brushing, heat-treat woollen items in an oven set to the lowest heat, freezing (but only if the change from warm to cold is abrupt) for at least 72 hours, hide the rest of your clothes in compression bags. In executing some of the solutions above, the garment is stripped of its function and tended to as an object that needs our intervention. Our attempt to fix the problem only adds to our conception that we hold control, but all things have a lifespan with and without us.
from Susanhobbs.com

The artwork of Liz Magor strikes me as so efficient! As in “The Separation” at MOCA, in viewing “Style” we are obliged to consider the limits of our possessions, the past and future of our prized wearable items, and so too of our own limits. Hmmmm.

January 26, 2023

Conceptions of White

What is Whiteness anyway? This is the question posed by the current exhibition at the Art Museum University of Toronto.

We enter the show through the pristine “Portal”, created by Robert Morris in 1964. “Portal” is pure minimalist sculpture, ostensibly stripped of meaning, so neutral as to be almost invisible.

The piece encapsulates one of the ideas the show explores: how the concept of White, especially in the art world, is so natural and all-encompassing, it’s virtually unseen.

But wait. Hold on! Before we take that fateful stroll, we are invited to engage with the present — shut up, and check our privileges — through the augmented reality filters created by the “Famous New Media Artist” Jeremy Bailey.

Detail of “Whitesimple” by Jeremy Bailey

In the handout that accompanies the exhibition the curators declare their biracial status and indicate they are seeking a clearer understanding of their own relationship to Whiteness. (Full disclosure: Through Ancestry.ca I traced one of my family branches all the way to Viking marauders sweeping down on the Orkney Islands to commit mayhem. They went on to settle in Manitoba. Some things you don’t want to know.)

On the other hand, I like the way this show acknowledges history at every turn. I agree that the story of the present can only be told by starting from the past.

The exhibition contains a graphic display locating the invention of Whiteness right around the time colonial adventurism, also known as The Age of Discovery, was ramping up. Since colonial logic maintained that a place did not exist unless White Europeans had seen it, it was important to distinguish White from everyone else.

Detail of graphic in Conceptions of White exhibition

Deanna Bowen‘s installation, called “White Man’s Burden” takes a dive into Whiteness and the history of the Canadian cultural elite. Her ambitious and engrossing piece is made up of numerous items from various Canadian archival sources, some hung upside down and/or printed in a negative versions.

Installation view of “White Man’s Burden” by Deanna Bowen

Detail of Deanna Bowen installation, featuring MacKenzie King, and other cultural elites.

According to his biographers MacKenzie King was cold and tactless. During his long political lilfe leading the Liberal Party, King had several close female friends, including Joan Patteson, a married woman with whom he spent some of his leisure time.

There are many fascinating images and documents in Deanna Bowen’s work: the cover of the T.C. Douglas master’s thesis, for instance, titled “The Problems of the Subnormal Family” in which Douglas recommended several eugenic policies, including the sterilization of “mental defectives and those incurably diseased;” or, a newspaper clipping describing the “objects and purposes” of the Kanadian Klu Klux Klan, including a membership pitch.

Detail from “White Man’s Burden” by Deanna Bowen

There is a wonderful complexity to this artwork. Deanna Bowen leaves it up to the viewer to solve the puzzle of images, covering hundreds of years of violence, vanity, greed and hubris.

Conversely, the vinyl wall installation by Ken Gonzales-Day is simple, direct and deeply horrifying.

The piece is from a series titled Erased Lynchings in which Ken Gonzales-Day reproduced souvenir lynching postcards — a thing in certain southern states — after digitally removing the victims.

The video piece by Howardena Pindell, free white and 21, in which the artist — speaking to the camera in a frank, casual, somewhat bemused style — relates numerous incidents of routine rascist behaviour which she has personally experienced. The video is all the more disturbing because of her blase delivery .

You can watch the whole thing here:

Link to Howardena Pindell video, “free whitge and 21”

Both Nell Painter and Fred Wilson examine the tropes of art history to shed some light on White.

Detail of “Ancient Hair” by Nell Painter

It is as if Nell Painter cut up a Survey of Western Art textbook, scrawled some trenchant questions onto 81/2 by 11 sheets of bond, and pinned the whole thing to the nearest wall. I like the ad hoc feel of this piece. The idea is to just get the ideas out as quickly as possible and to hell with all the niceties of framing and smoothing, tweaking and hanging.

Installation view of “Ancient Hair” by Nell Painter

Fred Wilson puts objects together, transforming their meaning through proximity. In this case, milk glass, white porcelain and china, copies of “classic statuary,”– some broken and toppled — and kitschy items like the white nubian goddess and the black “mammy” cookie jar are arrayed. Looking at this collection of items, each charged with social, cultural and historical meaning, we wonder, which objects belong and which don’t? And why?

Detail from “Love and Loss in the Milky Way” by Fred Wilson

Installation view of “Love and Loss in the Milky Way” by Fred Wilson

I spent some time watching the The White Album, a video piece by Arthur Jafa. Composed largely of found footage, with an original soundtrack that has a chilling, dirgelike quality, this artwork is mesmerizing as it drills deep into the contemporary psyche and unearths a rich and sometimes terrifying vein of emotions.

Excerpt from The White Album by Arthur Jafa

Like the show’s curators, now is apparently a time for me to seek a clearer understanding of Whiteness.

Earlier this month I happened to take a tour of the McLeod Plantation, on James Island, on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike previous trips to the American South, where I heard alot about French antiques and hoop skirts, the tour at the McLeod plantation was an unflinching description of rape, torture, brutality and exploitation that endured into the 1990s.

Spanish moss on the 100 year old oaks at the McLeod Plantation, James Island, South Carolina

Homes of the enslaved, at the McLeod Plantation, James Island, South Carolina

Spanish moss wafted in the beautiful old trees, and the fields — where sea island cotton was once grown — were green in mid-January.

June 21, 2022

So many of the people I encountered in New York last week had an edge of resentment and anxiety. The desperate days of the pandemic barely receding, the present dominated by spiraling inflation and violence at home and abroad, and the future — the future — looming as a terrifying mix of extremist, political mayhem and climate meltdown.

It made sense to visit the dark, deathy 911 Memorial, with its relentless flow of tumbling water into the black pit of eternity. What did that terrible event — now so distant — foreshadow?

Quiet As It’s Kept – The Whitney Biennial

(I don’t quite get the title? “Quiet As It’s Kept” is referred to, in the materials about the show, as an expression, but it’s one I had not heard before.)

At the 2022 Whitney Biennial — the eightieth edition — that same feeling of future dread that was conjured by the 911 Memorial was in evidence. A mix of trauma, fear and pain was defnitely one of the thematic strands running through the massive exhibition.

The work of Daniel Joseph Martinez, for instance, made me think of the Flagellants of the middle ages, who “demonstrated their religious fervor and sought atonement for their sins by vigorously whipping themselves in public displays of penance.”

Below is the Post-Human Manifesto presented by Daniel Joseph Martinez:

Daniel Joseph Martinez is an artist who works in many different media, including modifying his own body in monstrous ways. So much loathing, rage and frustration seems to be contained in this work. He describes his piece at the Whitney as a:

“radical performative experiment of becoming post-human and the evolution of a new species.”
Daniel Jospeh Martinez

Detail of Photograph by Daniel Joseph Martinez

Similarly, a video installation by Andrew Roberts called The Horde, displays creatures that are him, but not him. They are horrible — undead things — that he identifies with “as a Latino and queer person confronted by a crossfire geopolitical war where bodies and identities similar to mine are treated as disposable.”

The Horde by Andrew Roberts

A sculpture by Canada’s own Rebecca Belmore, of a human figure or maybe a sort of grim reaper wrapped in a sleeping bag, fleeing or hiding or in mourning, had a powerful feeling of despair. It was surrounded by a glittering array of gold coloured bullet casings and stood in the murky light of a gallery with walls painted black.

“I’m hoping that the work contains some positive aspects of this idea that we need to try to deal with violence,” is a quote from Belmore in the Biennial notes.

Photographs by Buck Ellison confront violence from a circuitous distance. For me, the result was a lurid fascination.

“Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft, 2003” by Buck Ellison

Buck Ellison hires models and builds sets for his photographs, attempting to recreate particular moments in the lives of the very rich and priviledged. Here, Eric Prince is depicted, at his ranch in 2003, just before he received notoriety and billions of dollars for his role as the founder of Blackwater, the military contractor which figured so prominently in the war in Iraq.

Buck Ellison has stated that he tries to change the predictable narrative and force the viewer to confront their own emphathy or curiousity. (It kind of works … and then there is the fact that the model bears an uncanny resemblance to a close relative of mine.)

This show has many moments of emotional power but one of the most dramatic was by artist Coco Fusco. It was a riveting experience, watching her 12 minute video essay, recorded in the waters around Hart Island, home to the largest mass grave in the United States, where New York’s unclaimed victims of COVID-19 have been buried.

Still from “Your Eyes will be an Empty Word” by Coco Fusco

Yes, there was painting.

In fact, it seemed like there is a resurgence of abstract painting. It is definitely great to look. The huge, somehow claustrophic paintings by Denyse Thomasos, another Canadian woman, are hectic, compulsive, bristling with energy.

Detail of “Displaced Burial” by Denyse Thomasos

Denyse Thomasos, who died in 2012, stated that her paintings “refer to the violent systems and structures that shape our world,” and that “…the paintings are deeply personal.”

The painting below is by Awilda Sterling-Duprey and it’s called “…blindfolded” because … well … watch the video.

“…blindfolded” by Awilda Sterling-Duprey

video of Awilda Sterling-Duprey performing at the Whitney Biennale 2022

I was really happy to see the paintings by Jane Dickson, one of the artists I remember from the East Village Art Scene of the early eighties. Her canvases looked so lush and rich in form and content.

63 artists and collectives are participating in the eightieth Whitney Biennial. This is just a handful of the items that caught my eye on that sultry afternoon.

Often, there is some sort of controversey roiling the bi-annual exhibition at this particular museum, but this year there was none, that I could discern … yet.

2019 – boycotted by a group of artists, in protest of the museum’s vice chairman, Warren Kanders. Warrren Kanders’ companies sell military supplies (teargas and bullets) via Safariland.
2017 – In response to the exhibition a painting by Dana Schutz, depicting Emmet Till in an open casket, African-American artist Parker Bright began to silently protest it by standing in front of the painting wearing a T-shirt with “Black Death Spectacle” on the back.
2014 – The YAMS Collective, or HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a collective of 38 mostly black and queer artists, writers, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers participated and withdrew from the 2014 Biennial as a protest of the Whitney Museum’s policies including a lack of diversity.
1987 – the show was protested by the Guerrilla Girls for its alleged sexism and racism.
1976 – artists protested what was viewed as blatant economic pandering because the Biennial’s 1976 theme revolved around bodybuilding as art and featured California’s future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

March 4, 2022

Shary Boyle at The Gardiner Museum

Shary Boyle is an exceptionally accomplished artist. Her show at the Gardiner Museum, called Outside the Palace of Me, is a tour de force of skill and imagination. And the subject of the show — the idea of identity and how we create our “selves” — is an utterly timely and fertile one.

The image above, by Shary Boyle, is titled “Cephalorphoric Saint.” The word cephalophoric means a saint who is carrying their own severed head. In Christian art, this generally means that a saint has been martyred by beheading. I’m not sure if Shary Boyle sees the artist as a matyr, or a saint, but it is an interesting idea about how the artist functions in contemporary society. In some of her images of artists, the subjects are devoid of any legitimate head, instead, blindly and thoughtlessly — without any conciousness at all — they are engaged in self-representation, groping to create an outward, public manifestation of their limited identity.

Ours is society consumed with self-image. The decorated visage is everywhere and each seemingly innocent Instagram post a plea for validation. Do we even exist if we aren’t “liked?” Shary Boyle explores that contemporary affliction with an absorbing collection of objects and images.

Fame, status, and our hunger for validation drive cultures of excess. Tweeted Tik Tok Selfie influencers. Fate, addiction, glamour, celebrity, greed, the Fool. We are all the centre of the universe.
Shary Boyle, handout at exhibition “Outside the Palace of Me”

*Julia Fox Deletes All Kanye West Photos From Instagram – XXL*

The arrangement of the show references theatre. The visitor gingerly enters from a darkened hallway to pass three muses (“Focus,” “Lens” and “Pupils”), which are visible in a two-way mirror. Emerging onto a bright proscenium lined with ten, glass-encased, ceramic sculptures — each exqusitely rendered and fascinating to look at — the visitor is then obliged to consider their own participation in the show.

At center stage is the coin-operated star!:

“Centering” by Shary Boyle

Shary Boyle weaves an old timey sense of performance into her up-to-the-minute observations: traditional hucksters, wax museums, vanity cases, Punch and Judy performers, ventriloquists, vaudeville, carny folk, puppet masters and manipulators of all stripes are represented in the exhibition. She creates a slightly seamy, corrupt, down-market vibe, like a stroll around Clifton Hill after checking out Niagara Falls.

Walking to the Gardiner Museum along Bloor street I encountered a protest march. About a dozen people took part. One held a sign that read “Fuck Trudeau!,” while the leader shouted “Jesus Loves You” through a bullhorn. The Bloor Street shoppers, still masked and tentative, glanced with mild irritation at the noisy interlopers. I could really relate to Shary Boyle’s piece called “The Procession” and her quote:

One person’s parade is another’s riot.
Shary Boyle, handout at exhibition “Outside the Palace of Me”

“The Procession| by Shary Boyle

And then there is “The White Elephant.” I imagined this freakish creature striding around, blithly wrecking the place, leaving a path of misery and destruction wherever she goes, like a preppy white Godzilla in a twinset.

October 29, 2021

Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is hosting an experimental exhibition. This one has a twist. It questions the whole idea of exhibiting art at all.

The work of The Synthetic Collection, a collaboration between scientists and artists, comprises the basis for the exhibition, in particular their work studying the microplastics pollution of the Great Lakes.

*Great Lakes: Accumulations* by Kelly Wood, member of the Synthetic Collection

Whereas the exhibition does a great job of displaying numerous art works, it also posits an institutional critique, and it is hardcore. It’s not just a show, but a manifesto on responsibility in making and showing art, a series of public dialogues, and a call to action.

A Manifesto for Curating and Making Art in a
Time of Environmental Crisis
1. If you’re going to make it, make it count.
2. Lead by example.
3. Take steps to mitigate environmental damage of art making and exhibitions. Doing so reveals other economies of inequality and acknowledges the art world’s culpability in upholding systems of oppression. Projects should enhance initiatives aimed at preventing, reducing, and mitigating harm.
….
excerpted (first three steps of ten) from downloadable booklet: A DIY Fieldguide for Reducing the Environment Impact of Art Exhibitions

Unlike most other exhibitions, here the gallery space has not been made immaculate in preparation for a new exhibition. Nail holes, scuff marks, scratches are left as is.

Signs are handwritten and pinned to the wall. Nothing is hidden. There is no dumpster filled with incidental debris that is hauled off to a landfill. The “Plastic Heart” exhibition aims to be totally transparent.

It’s a big show, featuring numerous artists – contemporary and historical – and tackling a breadth of topics, some truly nightmarish. Particularly in the visual depictions of toxic pollution in the Great Lakes, one difficult upshot of the exhibition becomes clear, i.e. the overwhelming sense that there is no way out of this mess.

Watching one of the teaser videos for the show, the following phrase stood out as alarming, verging on terrifying: “All the plastic we have ever made is still with us.”

Visual depiction of plastic pollution in the Great Lakes region, by Synthetic Collective member Skye Morét

I was so impressed by Skye Moret’s website! She describes herself as a designer /scientist /adventurer and the site provides a glimpse of the many roles she inhabits.

Description of Mermaid’s Tears by Synthetic Collective

Some of the artwork took the form of lists of plastic producers or plastic descriptors.

Research documents by Synthetic Collective

The names of the various plastic compounds have a particularly chilling, incantory quality. I randomly googled “crystal styrene” and learned the following:

The conventional method of producing styrene involves the alkylation of benzene with ethylene to produce ethylbenzene, followed by dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene. Styrene undergoes polymerization by all the common methods used in plastics technology to produce a wide variety of polymers and copolymers.

And voila! …”crystal” styrene is the fully transparent form of styrene, a rigid and rather brittle low cost thermoplastic. When you by a box of organic baby spinach, chances are you are buying crystal styrene. Is it recyclable? Maybe.

Some of the artists in the show decided to bite the bullet and work with the ubiquitous material.

Flexi-Shield (Eostra) by Amy Brener is made from Platinum silicone, pigment, larkspur and chrysanthemum flowers, fern leaves, miscellaneous objects.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png — Detail of “Permeations of a Dataset’ by Tegan Moore

Tegan Moore has a very successful piece in the show, balanced beautifully on the edge of elegance and banality. The photo above depicts a very small section of the long, complex stream of material. The work is made from “Factory reject’mystery foam’ sheet with anti-static agent, haildamaged polycarbonate roofing, photodegraded corrugated plastic, plastic pellets, plastic fragments, salvaged phone, starch packing peanuts, mulberry paper.”

Detail of “New Balance,” sculpture by Meghan Price is made from used sneakers

Detail of “Water Song” by Hannah Claus, made from acetate, thread, pva glue and plexiglass

In the notes about Hannah Claus‘s piece, “Water Song” the fact that it “packs small” is mentioned.

I couldn’t help thinking about some of the superstar global artists and the “bigger is better” sensibility that has existed for many decades.

For example, below is an installation shot of a 2020 show of the work of Anselm Kiefer. Clearly, this work does not “pack small.”

Installation view of 2020 exhibition of the work of Anselm Kiefer.

Anselm Kiefer — and he is only one example! — talks about his work in extravagant terms. He claims he is trying “to articulate the known fundamental interactions of the universe and forms of matter.” Could it be that this type of work, boundless in its ambition and scale, corporate in its fundamental self-absorption, might be slightly out of touch?

That is the really interesting thing about seeing the “Plastic Heart” exhibition: suddenly we are thinking about a different moral equation and a different motivation for making and exhibiting art.

For instance, Christina Battle‘s piece alerts us to those “plants helping us to remediate land and wonders how we might support them in return.” Part of this artwork is to invite her audience to receive a Natural Plant toolkit in the mail, and to plant and monitor seeds appropriate to the region. (I was too late. All the seeds were sent out.)

And then there is this video by Leticia Bernaus. What can I say?

Excerpt from video by Leticia Bernaus

Plastic Heart: Surface all the Way Through includes work by the following artist.

Christina Battle, IAIN BAXTER&, Sara Belontz, Leticia Bernaus, J Blackwell, Amy Brener, Hannah Claus, Sully Corth, Heather Davis and Kirsty Robertson, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Fred Eversley, Naum Gabo, General Idea, Kelly Jazvac, Woomin Kim, Kiki Kogelnik, Les Levine, Mary Mattingly, Christopher Mendoza, Tegan Moore, Skye Morét, Meagan Musseau, Claes Oldenburg, Meghan Price, Françoise Sullivan, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Lan Tuazon, Marianne Vierø, Joyce Wieland, Nico Willliams, Kelly Wood

The featured image at the top is by Iain Baxter.

September 26, 2021

The end of September is one of those perfect times in the year; the honey-coloured light, the tension between perfection and decay, new clothes and sharpened pencils, and suddenly, Gallery Weekend!

Everything feels tentative after this long period of fear, isolation and lockdown. I enter cautiously: masked, distanced, with proof of a second dose ready on my phone.

Will this city ever feel carefree again?

Maybe next year.

Bill Burns at MKG127

Installation of view of Bill Burns show at MKG127 titled “The Salt, The Oil, The Milk”

At MKG127 Bill Burns is into the third year of his slow performance, described below:

Bill began his slow performance called variously The Great Trade or The Great Donkey Walk in Amden Switzerland in 2018. With the help of two Donkeys, Bill carried salt from the local salt mine up some gentle slopes in the Swiss Alps and so this project began. Goat milking, donkey walking, sheep shearing, honey rendering, cheese making and occasionally country singing are Bill’s modes. This exhibition includes several dozen drawings that Bill refers to as “pre-documents”, pictures that depict events that have yet to occur, as well as “documents”, pictures of events that have already occurred.
MKG127 handout

The numerous drawings — which are small, pale, delicate watercolours, featuring text, which is sometimes descriptive and sometimes not — were apparently ripped from Bill Burns’ notebooks and then meticulously framed and hung in tight grids.

Installation view of drawings by Bill Burns

It’s such a liberating concept of what art could be: slow, thoughtful, lots of unexpected twists, delightful objects that spin off the activities and make sense in terms of the internal logic of the piece, big questions to mull over.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 4-2000x567-1.jpg — Pennants by Bill Burns

I have yet to witness a Bill Burns performance but I am excited to report that I will attend one October 8th, at the Oculus on the Humber River Trail.

In the meantime, I appreciate the meandering, round about, surprising way this artwork touches on so many aspects of our present day world: Where does all the stuff that we have come from? How do things get done, made, traded, shipped, bought and sold? What is our connection to farms, to animals? What kind of hierarchies govern our lives? Our we wasting our time rushing around, getting, and spending? What does time even mean now?

Bill Burns walking a Donkey in Amden, Switzerland in 2018. This was the start of the slow performance.

I really like the way Bill Burns uniquely speculates, slows down and simplifies contemporary life, teases it apart and offers it to us — with a light and playful touch — for consideration.

And what about Donkeys? They are so appealing. I learned the following on The Donkey Sanctuary of Canada website:

Donkeys have been a cornerstone in human existence and they still prop up entire communities today, ferrying water, food and crops.

*****

Marcel Van Eeden at Clint Roenisch

Marcel Van Eeden is a major Dutch artist. I learned this from the many publications available at the Client Roenisch gallery, on the occasion of this exhibition, titled “Stolen Pictures.”

Drawing from the Rijks Museum series by Marcel Van Eeden

According to Client Roenisch, there is a key to this artist’s obsessive rendering of imagery which existed prior to his own birth. Marcel Van Eeden came into this world on November 22, 1963. Yes, that was the day JFK was murdered in Dallas! Even as a child Marcel Van Eeden saw the coincidence of the assassination of JFK and the beginning of his own life as an almost mystical nexus.

Marcel Van Eeden’s creative production has been to draw everything – “the light, the architecture, the travel, the people, the cities, the familiar, the foreign, the intrigue, the art, the violence, literally everything” — from the period including the start of photography and concluding at the moment of his own birth.

The drawings in the main gallery at Clint Roenisch — which all reference a distant art theft, including text and locale — are huge, powerful, intensely black (rendered in charcoal), and extremely elegant. They have a certain reckless vitality that also manages to be very precise.

There are also some small paintings, some in colour, also referencing the past, which is moving further and further away from Marcel Van Eeden.

Video about Marcel Van Eeden

I found this video on You Tube. It goes deep into the practice of this fascinating artist, his relentless drawing and his obsessions. There is very little talking in the video, although at one point the artist does explain his underlying motivations and what he’s getting at and why and just what its all about and so on… but then, of course, I don’t speak Dutch.

*****

Rae Johnson at Christopher Cutts Gallery

At the Christopher Cutts Gallery Rae Johnson’s paintings are on display. Sweeping vistas and low horizons, serene and majestic, filled with awe and reverence, these paintings express a deep and joyful love of nature and an acknowledge of the stark indifference we are all faced with — in our brief, frantic lives — as we look out, in a moment of calm, on this astonishing world.

**STORM FRONT BREAKING, 1989, painting by Rae Johnson**

The show is called “Of Light and Dark” Water, Land and Sky Paintings: 1989-2009.

**SELKIRK/GROUND SHADOWS, 2008,** painting by Rae Johnson

In many of her paintings, not shown here, Rae Johnson has depicted archetypes of depravity and redemption, populated by lonely, dreamlike sylphs in dimly lit nighttime haunts, or caught in painful scenes under a harsh fluorescent glare. This exhibition is another side of Rae Johnson’s work. Here, she is enthralled by the elements: air, light and colour

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is untitled-5.jpg — **STORM FRONT WINNIPEG MANITOBA, 1998, painting by Rae Johnson**

**GREEN SKY, 1989, painting by Rae Johnson**

I wanted to bring the sublime into people’s existence.
Rae Johnson

It’s so uplifting to wander around the Chris Cutts Gallery, look at Rae’s paintings and realize that yes, she definitely succeeded in her goal.

*****