It’s mid-January and winter has arrived on Queen Street. As I round the corner from Ossington and walk east, the scene is windswept, bleak and grey. Not so, however, within Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Paintings and works on paper by Ron Giii are on display, and suddenly I am in an atmosphere suffused with life, heat and light.
“Volume and Heat” by Ron GiiiInstallation view “The Effect of Temperature” by Ron Giii
The title of the exhibition, “The Effect of Temperature,” points to the climate crisis which looms over us all. Many of the names of the small works — The Hot Sun, The Melting Greenland Glaciers, Somali Famine — overtly reference the global menace of our heating planet.
Here’s a quote about the climate threat, from the artist, which is posted on the gallery website:
This exhibit is humbly aware of a greater nature the laws of nature have, and climate change is the reality we have designated. My small paintings cannot cry at the dangers coming amidst the deluge.
Ron Giii
The small works on paper, which have a powerful intensity, make me think of those NASA photographs from the Webb Telescope, of distant suns, dying or being born. On the other hand, they are reminiscent of infinitesimally small things too. Cells for instance or pictures of mitochondria itself.
“Time is the Daughter of Space” by Ron GiiiInstallation view “The Effect of Temperature” by Ron Giii
A few of the small paintings on paper appear to have been ripped apart and put back together with strips of clear tape. According to Paul Petro these artworks “… were destroyed by the artist during a bipolar disorder episode last year following which the artist attempted to repair the works by puzzling them back together and taping the tears. In conversation, it was agreed that these works would be consolidated with archival tapes on the verso, with the assistance of a paper conservator, to stabilize them, and that these works would be shown in order to provide a level of transparency that would welcome his disability into the conversation. Giii has subsequently referenced the Japanese kintsugi concept of repair, and finding the beauty in the broken in this work. He has lived with the challenges posed by bipolar disorder, and an original misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, for most of his adult life.”
“Fusiona” by Ron Giii
In talking about his work Ron Giii acknowledges the influence of various philosophers, of geometry, of his long term interest in quantum physics and, most recently, of the writings of the British evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane.
“Parallel Membranes 2” by Ron Giii
For Ron Giii, it was Nick Lane’s research into the origins of life and his descriptions of various electrochemical processes that directly inspired the striped paintings, which he calls parallel membranes, a phrase that turns up in Nick Lane’s book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.
Stripes are a thing for many artists. Here are just a few examples:
Danel Buren used colored stripes, in site-specific situations, as a way of relating art to its setting. As a Frenchman, he was comfortable with the classic French fabric motif.
“Suspended Painting” by Danel Buren
Canadian artist, Guido Molinari, sought pure abstraction in his work. To that end he completely eliminated the horizontal from his canvases, and thus any suggestion of depth.
“Untitled” by Guido Molinari
Frank Stella was also looking to eliminate by using stripes. In his case, it was emotion. The stripes did it. They got rid of all that messy action painting splatter and opened the door to minimalism.
“The Marriage of Reason and Squalor” by Frank Stella
And just upstairs from the Ron Giii is an exhibition of ink washes by Francesco De la Barra. Here, the artist deploys stripes as a unifying motif in this dreamy suite of sensuous, poolside imagery.
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.
Installation view of “Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story” at Inter/Access.
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.
A Telidon Terminal
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.
Installation view of “Remember Tomorrow – A Telidon Story” at Inter/Access
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.)
Installation View of “Remember Tomorrow – A Telidon Story” at Inter/Access
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 difficultiesthey 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.
Detail of Telidon image by Rob Flack“Sherry” Telidon image by Glen Howarth“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.
In Toronto and elsewhere, the lack of distracting activities like movies, concerts and sports is contributing to profound events. The real world is changing so fast, as people get focused and rise up. Meanwhile, in the cultural domain, time and place, and, openings and closings, don’t really matter. Many cultural products have become digital and are therefore on demand, untethered by time constraints. Time itself can be compressed to almost nothing or drawn out and made to last.
2020 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
Ho Tam at Paul Petro Contemporary Art
For example, the 2020 Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, which normally takes place throughout the city in the month of May, was largely postponed, except for the bits and pieces of it which can still be seen, either online or, in a few instances, as outdoor public installations (in the real world.)
In a 25-year-old video by Ho Tam, which was exhibited at Paul Petro Contemporary Art as part of CONTACT, Godzilla is the opening act. The video, titled “The Yellow Pages”, has a lightness and playfulness that belies its serious content.
The Yellow Pages by Ho Tam
Silent and less than eight minutes long, Ho Tam’s video is an illustrated alphabet of racial cliches and assumptions. A is for “Asian Crimes,” B is “Butterfly”, C is “Chinatown,” D is “Dogmeat.” The artist has a very graceful way of layering one cliche upon another. E is for “Enter the Dragon” but instead of Bruce Lee we are treated to a clip of a painfully decrepit Mao Zedong meeting (possibly) Soviet dignitaries sometime in the early 70s. Everything feels so weighted with meaning. Maybe that’s why the piece is so delightful to watch. The cliches are off, and, therefore unsettling.
Uniformly bathed in sepia, the images diverge wildly: “Head Tax” is a ghastly heap of skulls documenting the reign of the Khmer Rouge, “Ninja Turtles” refers to a group of elderly Tai Chi practitioners, and the “Asian Crimes” section — the first letter — introduces the endearing yet ruinous antics of Godzilla. I’m not sure if Godzilla is punishing “Asian Crimes,” or maybe Godzilla himself is the crime, unleashed upon the world.
According to social theorists, since the first Japanese movie featuring Godzilla debuted in 1954, the giant lizard has effectively tapped into our fears and preoccupations. He embodies nuclear weapons, catastrophic bio-hazard, global environmental degradation, cross-species virus transmission and whatever comes next. That’s why we love him!
Toho Studio
Dawit L. Petros at Power Plant
On the CONTACT Festival website I was advised there was a public installation currently On View at The Power Plant. I rode my bike down to Queen’s Quay to have a look. The Power Plant was closed. But, I did get to see the giant, outdoor banner, art piece by Dawit L. Petros, erected as part of the 2020 CONTACT festival.
Installation view of Artwork by Dawit L. Petros titled “Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view III)“
Reading the accompanying text makes clear that this is a scene of current and historic misery. A man is holding a large photograph, which conceals his identity. The man is named Moktar. He is described as one of the millions of migrants who have embarked on dangerous journeys all over the world. Coming from Eritrea, Moktar traveled through Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and across the Mediterranean to a new life in Italy. He was photographed at an unspecified location.
Detail of installation view of Artwork by Dawit L. Petros titled “Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view III)“
The photograph Moktar is holding is “a reproduction of an etching by Georgina Smith, an eyewitness to the sinking of the transatlantic steamship SS Utopia. In a tragic accident on March 17, 1891, the SS Utopia—used frequently to transport European immigrants to the United States—collided with a battleship off the shores of Gibraltar and sank quickly, killing over 500 passengers, many of whom were poor southern Italians seeking better lives across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Detail view of installation by Dawit L. Petros titled “Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view III)“
Looking closely at the photograph of the etching, the detailed image of the terrible event can be seen.
The migrant experience, quickly forgotten by subsequent generations, is perilous today, as it was in 1891.
View of Lake Ontario from southern facade of the Power Plant.
The view southward from the art installation appears serene. Queen’s Quay, normally thronged with tourists during the summer months, is deserted. The lake is very calm in the sudden summer heat.
Museum of ContemporaryArt
MOCA closed on March 14th, right in the middle of a exciting moment in the Museum’s brief history. Exhibits by four celebrated artists —Shelagh Keeley, Megan Rooney, Carlos Bunga and Sarah Sze — at various points in their respective career — made the building feel suddenly packed with bold endeavour. What a letdown when the pandemic wrapped things up way too soon!
Since that time, MOCA, like so many other cultural institutions, has tried to figure out ways to retain their audience and foster engagement.
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 158 Sterling Road Ben Rahn/A-Frame/A-Frame
During the lockdown, each week the Museum presents a new time-based work, frequently in collaboration with another local cultural organization. This week you can watch an experimental play, which is particularly relevant to the Black Lives Matter events of the moment. It is titled On Trial: The Long Doorway, by Deanna Bowen, and it can be seen on MOCA’s Shift Key platform.
Meanwhile, the real exhibits, which were scheduled to run to mid-May, languish in the silent halls of the Museum. Hesitancy and confusion about when shows start and end constitute more pandemic fallout. (So many changes in the world right now: I really like the fact that Grind Culture is taking a hit during this global episode! Slow the hell down!)
Guided virtual tours, by MOCA curators, are provided in connection to some of the works inside, including a tour of An Embodied Haptic Space which is the title of Shelagh Keeley’s exhibition of site specific wall drawings and photographs. Tarp paintings from 1986 and a fascinating video are also in the exhibition.
Installation view of drawings at MOCA by Shelagh Keeley
Shelagh Keeley, “Fragments of the Factory / Unfinished Traces of Labour”, 2020. MOCA Toronto. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid
The washed out greens and purples in the drawings multiply the feeling of decay and putrescence seen in the photographs, themselves part of the visual wall, which the artist took, when the site at 158 Sterling Road was still unrenovated.
The sense of intuitive confidence, so evident in the beautiful drawings, was also at work in the video part of the exhibition. The text accompanying the video, titled The Colonial Garden, explains that this place, now largely shuttered and in disrepair, was part of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition, where it functioned as a kind of human zoo, exhibiting native people from Portugal’s colonies. Shelagh Keeley’s video, creates a growing sense of the sinister, as it takes the viewer on a slow tour of the shambolic garden.
The paintings by Carol Wainio on display at Paul Petro Contemporary Art quickly drew me into their dense, tangled layers of imagery.
These paintings are so visually deep. A dark, gnarly, ancient-looking forest landscape is the middle ground. Far in the distance are winsome pastel vistas. Strangely patterned birds, maybe pheasants, charge about the forest floor, heading for clearings and stone pathways through the old growth. Numerous disparate objects, creatures, little people, symbols of all types and sometimes words are found embedded in the welter of images. In the foreground, bold, simple line drawings and fat polka dots create a closer surface, as though we are looking through glass into another world.
Les Cailloux Blancs
Detail from Les Cailloux Blancs
Accompanying the show, titled Dropped from the Calendar, is a long text written by Carol Wainio in which she suggests the nature of modern life has resulted in certain losses such as the creative luxury of boredom, certain notions of enchantment, reliable shared memories and rhythms of the seasons. The phrase “dropped from the calendar” refers to the pages of traditional holiday calendars which were once reserved for personal recollections. Are these blank pages no longer necessary since recollections are manufactured and provided for us now?
Lost
One Evening
Frequently the outline of a transparent fawn, like the familiar twinkly Christmas lawn ornament, turns up in the paintings. Could be that Carol Wainio is connoting our feeble and sentimental link with the natural world through this image.
Renderings of children, definitely from another period in history, also recur in the paintings. For some reason I thought of the Hummel figurines my mother-in-law in New Jersey used to collect. They seemed beyond kitsch — the height of manufactured nostalgia – to me. Maybe that is what Carol Wainio is getting at, i.e. that our private nostalgia has been hijacked and sold back to us.
It is a pleasure to look at these paintings which are both visually and metaphorically deep and to spend some time speculating on the connections and references within them.
In the accompanying text Carol Wainio quotes Walter Benjamin’s talking about fairy tales in the modern age: “This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.’ I was thinking about these ancient tales and how they helped people in perilous times when I came across an announcement about the release of some long lost Grimms’ Fairy Tales. One of the stories is summarized below:
“Once there was a father who was slaughtering a pig in the yard, His two sons saw him do this, and they decided to play slaughtering. One of the brothers became the pig, and the other became the slaughterer and he slit the throat of the younger brother. In the meantime, the mother was watching upstairs from a window and saw what had happened. She ran downstairs and took the knife out of the boys throat and, out of fury, she stabbed the older boy in the heart. And then she realized the baby was upstairs, and in the meantime the baby had died and drowned in the tub. She was so remorseful she committed suicide. The father, he was so dismayed that after two years he wasted away.”
There is so much frenetic construction activity along Queen’s Quay on the way to The Power Plant. What’s going on? It appears RBC’s marketing team are working overtime to hint about what might be in store for us when all this commotion is done and the dust settles.
I admired Shelagh Keeley’s drawings back on September 6th at Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Here, covering The Power Plant’s vast clerestory wall, is an example of the artist’s site specific work, scaled up.
The piece is called “Notes on Obsolescence.” It has the spontaneity of jottings and doodles pinned up on a giant push-pin board but, amazingly, the numerous drawings, photographs and writings coalesce to create one monumental work of art.
Threads, strings and strands – sometimes drawn directly on the wall – drop, dip and fall in concert with layers of more drawings and many photos (of different textures, hues, vintage and size) depicting spindles, shuttles, punchcards, servers, circuit boards, weavings, intersecting woofs and warps, dye mechanisms, the factory floor, gadgets and widgets, quotes from Marshall McLuhan, cascading reams of paper from a long gone dot matrix printer and so on and on. The work follows the relentless march of technological innovation by looking backward at the abandoned remains.
This piece is endlessly fascinating to look at. There is so much rich content and beautiful details. It was annoying that I could not see the loftiest sections until I realized I could simply walk upstairs.
Seeing this sculpture by Julia Dault got me thinking: What if I owned an austere modernist rectangular house? What if I placed this sizzling pink and blue bundle in one of its large imposing rooms?
How cool and sophisticated would I be? Would I have to hire a staff just to dust my possessions?
Maybe its the playful colors and unconventional materials but I definitely got a sense of joy seeing this work. The high gloss sculpture appear on the verge of flying apart and the paintings have a late-night, rock ‘n roll high spiritedness to them.
Julia Dault’s exploration into mark making is deep. At the same time it has a certain infectious giddyness most evident in the sprawling lexicon of marks, encased in a grid, which she created for one wall of the gallery.
This sculpture is brawny and muscular. I-beams appear to have been ripped from walls and scattered about recklessly as if in mid demolition. (There is no way this piece was not made by a guy.)
It has a dangerous feel too: through the precariously balanced beams, sharp metal edges, vulnerable neon tubing and tangles of explosed wiring. Wandering through this huge installation reminded me of my walk through the construction site to get here. I really enjoyed the bold, massiveness of it as the lake sparkled outside in the morning light; and there seemed to be emotional content too but it was not out of control, instead it was more like thinking about havoc in a repressed, distant and thoughtful way.
That same contemplative feel is evident upstairs in a gallery containing fourteen paintings by Pedro Cabrita Reis. These formalist paintings are very somber: Raw canvas, reddish stain, heavy slablike layer of dark brown nearly black paint encased in elaborate plexi and welded metal frames.
(The lights in the gallery were so bright and the frame surface so reflective I was unable to capture the actual look of the paintings. You’ll just have to see for yourself.)
The purpose of this blog is to write about Art in Toronto. What’s going on in art in Toronto right now? I intend to start this project by taking a walk every Saturday, visiting some galleries, taking a few pictures and recording my impressions and thoughts here. I am not sure where this project will take me. Galleries might be just the beginning. I admit I don’t know where the art scene is at this time. I hope to find out.
On Saturday, September 6th, I walked down Ossington Street. It felt like the last breath of a short, cool summer. The street was lively and colorful.
Callum Schuster’s exhibition is all about limits: He uses only the sphere and only in black and white. Any evidence of the human hand has been expunged from the work. Numerous spheres were created in various media. Each sphere is divided in half: one half a dense matte black and the other half dazzling matte white. The sphere’s were twirling, white sphere’s becoming black spheres, they were lined up, tilted, embedded in frosted plexiglass, some larger, some smaller, all extremely controlled, modulated, calm. The artist made animated films and sculptures of black and white spheres spinning in the same steady, controlled way. The work had the feel of an architectural or maybe mathematical model; pristine, artfully constructed, and indeed, the artist has stated he is interested in measurement. It is dry, cool, extremely clean – bordering on obsessively clean – work.
The tall, elegant co-director of O’Born Contemporary, Rachel Anne Farquharson, was very gracious. I scanned the artist’s statement and asked her what is the meaning of “praxis.” (The context was the “praxis of painting.”) She told me it means “practice” in Greek. I didn’t know what to make of that. She mentioned the artist’s cleanliness, obsessiveness, tidiness etc. and has also been quite taken with his intelligence.
The overwhelming sense of this show is how removed the work is from the anything that’s going on just outside the white gallery cube. I can relate to that specific focus and can understand that someone might not want to even read a newspaper in the ghastly summer of 2014.
I really like Jamie Angell. He is truly an art enthusiast, and no one can work a room like him.
Jamie’s main artist, i.e. the one that keeps the gallery financially solvent, is Kim Dorland but Jamie takes risks on all kinds of other artists and always has something unusual to look at. The current show in the large gallery is by Daniel Hutchinson. What do you know? This artist is all about limits and is extremely intelligent! This is what the lovely young gallery assistant told me. I’m detecting a trend.
Daniel uses only black, although he under paints in color. The color sometimes bleeds through but the viewer is not quite sure if it’s a hallucination or some kind of afterglow that occurs from staring at the profoundly black paintings. From my perspective they were hard to look at. The black was so shiny and sticky looking, like old liquorice, tar or pumped up rubber, industrial stair treads. The artist added glare by strategically placed neon tubes next to the paintings
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Daniel is interested in cosmology, dark matter and various themes from contemporary physics. In the statement heavy hitters like Malevich and Ad Reinhardt are referenced. Clearly Daniel Hutchinson is a serious and ambitious painter.
Incidentally, this morning on CBC a scientist was talking about the Higgs boson particle. I knew it was a big deal to find this particle but I was not really sure why. According to the scientist this is a happy story because it means we are not surrounded by a lonely vacuum as was previously surmised. We are in a soup of matter and the discovery of the Higgs boson proves it. This particle is the building block of everything, hence, it is called the “God Particle.” The details are a little hazy for me but as Daniel Hutchinson seems to suggest aspects of physics such as the Higgs boson are mysterious and compelling and provide rich inspiration for visual art.
What would we do without MOCCA? Who would provide a venue for STAG Library’s mugwort recipes and eloquent documentation on “relanding.” (“Relanding” is the word used by Gina Badger and cheyanne turions, the two individuals who make up STAG Library, to describe an attempt to reconcile the violent past of original European settlement in North America.)
Also in the main space was an exhibition called TBD which is focused on reimaging the Museum. It consisted of numerous ideas for exploding the conventional museum and dispersing the contents in inventive, original ways. The ideas are so amusing: Think of the possibility of a temporary museum in the construction hoardings around new buildings.
There was lots of standing around reading at MOCCA, which doesn’t really work for me. A certain amount of reading is okay but maybe this exhibition should have been a magazine or a book?
The prints of Museum floorplans were stylish objects and they would definitely look good in a corporate boardroom.
Sometimes MOCCA’s installations are so subtle that I just miss them totally. Apparently there is a sound installation by Mark Soo currently on display. It’s called “House is a Feeling” but I couldn’t really get a beat on it even though I was wandering in the main gallery for 10 minutes or more. How I missed it I do not know. Maybe that installation had something to do with the intermittent drilling that finally drove me out of there and into the adjoining exhibition.
The highlight of the MOCCA visit for me was the 2013 film entitled “Provenance” by Amie Siegel.
The piece explores the fetishism around certain mid-century modernist furniture. In this case, chairs and other items designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret are documented being packed up, travelling across the ocean, expertly marketed and sold for hefty prices, eventually to take their places in a succession of glamorous contemporary settings. These objects turn up in all the right places and they seem to become more beautiful and desirable as the film progresses, invariably captured in slow tracking shots in a muted palette as the context screams Understatement! Taste! Money!
The back story on these chairs is so interesting. Chandigarh is a city in India designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jenneret in the middle of the last century. This furniture is apparently the everyday office chairs and desks that the inhabitants of this dreamed up city would use.
The downstairs gallery features an exhibition by Morley Shayuk. I would like to get to know this artist and ask him to accompany me to Home Depot or Rona sometime. He seems to really know his way around hardware and building materials. He creates massive wall reliefs incorporating all the latest polymer variants. They have an off-hand grandeur and would have looked great in the (now bulldozed) former Winnipeg International Airport.
Upstairs was an arresting show by Shelagh Keeley. What I really liked about her paintings (on Mylar) was their uncomplicated sophistication. No handout required: It is all there in the paintings. They are lush, meditative, succinct and that works for me.
Clotilda was texting me to meet her at Starbucks. I concluded my first Toronto art blog walk with a feeling of calm and optimism.
annetteandquebec 