Sculpture – Page 3 – annetteandquebec

November 30, 2015

Koffler Gallery – Isabel Rocamora

Yesterday was the last chance to see the Isabel Rocamora show – titled Troubled Histories, Ecstatic Solitudes – at the Koffler Gallery. The exhibit, dominated by three large-scale video projections, opened way back on September 17, and it is utterly prescient in terms of its grave, unflinching tone and the subject matter it contains.

Still from Body of War by Isabel Rocamora

In Body of War Isabel Rocamora probes the phenomenon of close-up brutality. In an extended sequence the camera warily circles a fight to the death between two anonymous soldiers. Staged on a barren runway beneath grey skies, this grim, slow battle confusingly becomes a kind of homoerotic dance from which there is no escape. A soundtrack of medieval-like, choral chanting heightens the sense of ritual and archetype in this piece. Eventually a victor is left standing, panting and jubilant, and the camera turns away to slowly penetrate the opening of a nearby bunker. The desultory movement toward darkness creates a truly horrifying moment.

Stills from Horizon of Exile by Isabel Rocamora

In Horizon of Exile, a two channel video piece, snippets of monologue hint at the reasons a women must leave her home and set off into a barren, windswept desert. Against an elegiac score and relentless wind, two women then perform a mesmerizing rolling dance, where they are carried like flotsam across a glittering salt flat in a God forsaken plain somewhere.

Stills from Faith by Isabel Rocamora

An Orthodox Jew, a Greek Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim are all engaged in prayer in Isabella Rocamora’s three channel loop called Faith. Filmed in a craggy desert that reads “holy land” they are united in ancient transcendent practices. The religious trappings – the robes, the gestures, the pious heavenward gazes, the fervent ritualized murmuring – are remarkably alike. In fact not much is separating these men of God from one another, and yet, Isabel Rocamora seems to be saying, the superficial similarities are meaningless. Tradition is terminally unique.

I really liked seeing this show: The stark graphic power, the rich soundscapes, the choreography of the camera and the subjects, and the potent imagery. Ultimately the work struck me as very dark: The subjects are all unable to break out of age old oppression, each is condemned to endlessly repeat the rituals of the past and passively accept their fate.

Typology – Nicolas Fleming

Fortunately, it is possible to go shopping for handmade items on the third floor of Artspace Youngplace otherwise I would not have trekked upstairs and come across the tiny gallery called Typology.

Installation shot of Moving Right Along by Nicolas Fleming

An installation by Nicholas Fleming called Moving Right Along is about to close. I’m glad I caught this show.

Nicholas Fleming must be a very energetic guy. He has built an entire room within the gallery, except that it is all delightfully backwards so that drywall, spackling paste, chipboard and insulation foam are on display and the smooth, white gallery walls with crisp corners and subtle lighting are hidden. It’s kind of like putting a dress on inside out.

An unmistakable Home Depot fragrance wafts into the hallway from Typology.

I really liked looking at the “fountain” in the center of the space. It has ghastly, poisonous look to it. Something toxic appears to be weeping from the hardened foam to create a pool, coated in noxious sheen, at its base.

Installation shots of Moving Right Along by Nicolas Fleming

No doubt Nicholas Fleming allies himself with Minimalism, Arte Povera and various Conceptual Art branches emerging in the 1970s but what is so interesting about this show to me is the exotic beauty created by these humble materials which leads to the whole idea of the infrastructure of our society and how it is hidden and denied and avoided, with perilous consequences.

November 5, 2015

Trek to King City – Richard Serra’s “Shift”

Having lived in the US for a number of years I was somewhat reluctant to participate when my friend insisted we knock on the door of a strange farmhouse in King City, about an hour north of Toronto. Egress to the site of Richard Serra’s earthwork / sculpture Shift was no longer possible from the adjacent subdivision. A passing jogger suggested we try the overland route, which would be trespassing.

“We are pilgrims,” we explained when the farmer opened the door, “looking for the Richard Serra sculpture.”

The farmer was cool (and unarmed) and in fact he recalled the period in the early seventies when the sculpture was created. “Cement trucks arrived every day all one summer,” he said.

Richard Serra was a young artist at the time. He and his girlfriend, Joan Jonas, together visited the site which belonged to art collector Roger Davidson, who commissioned the piece. The artwork references their joint walks around the fields, which have a mildly rolling topography. It apparently traces the natural zigzag path the two would take from the points which were furthest from each other but from which they were still visible to each other. (You have to be there.)

“It will be about a half hour walk,” the farmer told us.

We set off:

We passed various attractive outbuildings, associated with the farm.

..saw water systems, signage…

…and then made a left down the most idyllic path….

…edged by a corn field.

We got lost for a while….

… but met another friendly farmer who directed us onward…

and we then found the landmark below. It’s a…some sort of wood storage device.

We skirted a swamp….

….got covered in burrs, clamored up a muddy hill and there it lay: internationally obscure, audacious, sprawling, precise, stately, playful, supremely confident, enduring, elegant, startling, and big. It is worth the trip.

Shift by Richard Serra

Great afternoon in King City! Although the subdivisions are encroaching, and from time to time a developer insists the artwork be destroyed in the name of progress, the Township of King has seen fit to designate Shift as protected under the Ontario Heritage Act, preventing its destruction or alteration. All the local people we spoke to seemed to have a soft spot for the artwork. My friend (whose idea it was to make the trip) is sure there will be a gift shop and parking for 300 in another decade. In the meantime it was time to go home and get the burrs out.

September 6, 2014

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.

First stop: O’Born Contemporary

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.

Next up: Angell Gallery

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

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.

Onward… to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)

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.

And finally: Paul Petro Contemporary Art

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.