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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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| We are going back to the woods. I'm going to find out if the racoon is still doing this. Will report next week. |
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Thanks to Camilla Singh from MOCCA for sending me images to go with that drawing show review:
Alison Norlen,Untitled, mixed media on paper, 2004. Collection of the artist, photo: Kim Clarke.
Courtesy of MOCCA.
Anna Torma, Draw me a car (detail), hand embroidery on linen with silk threads, 2004. Collection of the artist, photo: Kim Clarke. Courtesy of MOCCA.
 | As another smog day dawns in Toronto, I am thinking about the futuristic dystopia, "The Lost Continent" by Norman Spinrad in which the American economy survives solely on tourism, as people fly in from Africa to see the amazing smog. Americans, who must wear filters continually, have lost their technological prowess, their minds dulled by continual exposure to airborn pollutants."As we stepped out onto the cracked and pitted concrete, the spectrum of reality changed, as if we were suddenly on the surface of a planet circling a bluer and grayer sun. The entire grotesque panorama appeared as if through a blue gray filter. But we were inside the filter; the filter was the open American smog and it shone in drab sparkles all around us." |
| Sound depressing? It is! But at least its just a story, not like the real smog that has been literally deppressing the systems of Torontonians for weeks. Friends are tired and cranky, eyes are scratchy, lungs are tight. Some people are getting sick, others are moving much too slowly to get a full day's work in. On days like these the mere fact that someone is driving a car is enough to make me deeply dislike and distrust them. I am misanthropic cause I'm crabby cause I and my loved ones are oxygen depleted, but also because the days of driving cars in cities must, surely, be nearly coming to an end. Need cheering up, like me? Tino's photoblog, Bike Lane Diary and Darren Stehr's critical mass pictures at Toronto Cranks are very pleasing. | |
UPDATE: see video clip here.
Kristin Lucas, Magic Eyes Cream Headache Sandwich , 2005. three channel video installation, running time 4 minutes (image taken from Postmasters)
Yesterday was a good art day. First off Kristin Lucas sent me links to her current show at Postmasters in New York. This woman's art never ceases to surprise me. Yes she is my friend, she is also ff'ing brilliant. In the 4 minute video installation, "Magic Eyes Cream Headache Sandwich" two arms with lives of their own, try to feed the head some cake. And play music. It's like a post-cyborgian birthday part: love your own detachment, embrace the mind/body split, desire the explanatory gap, and you might just have some fun.
Next I dropped in at Angell Gallery to see Geoffrey Pugen's show. I made a note earlier about a video of his that I liked - the video in this show was even better. Abstracted morphing mandella's made from the smooth tanned bodies of futuristic aerobics-type folk encircle the slowly morphing heads of animals. I was not totally excited about Pugen's prints, most of which you can see here. They provide a distopic chuckle, but the videos are on another level; technically lush, conceptually insidious, and visually mesermizing.
Alison Norlen,Untitled, mixed media on paper, 2004. Collection of the artist, photo: Kim Clarke. Courtesy of MOCCA.
Gary M. Dault's review (scroll down) of the big drawing show—Just My Imagination at MOCCA—is testament to the fact that one person's point of view is not enough when it comes to art, however qualified that person may be. What he describes as spotty, convenient, and massively glum, I would describe as ambitious, surprising, and open-ended. Drawing as a tool is essential to most art practices. In recent years there's been a wealth of smallish self-effacing drawing, a la Royal Art Lodge. This show is full of great big wall-sized drawings that stretch beyond themselves. Established, canonical draw-ers like John Scott sit in visual dialogue with youngsters like Raphaëlle de Groot. Artists who draw, like Michelle Gay, Ed Pien, and Alison Norlen are allowed to shine.
Alison Norlen's panoramic dark blue landscape is the first thing you see upon entering, a spooky, bleak northern setting with sad fantasy roller coaster shimmering in the dim light. Dault complained that the trees in Norlen's background were "poorly rendered," willfully missing the point by reducing this invented, evocative environment to some kind of technical exercise. Ed Pien's light blue wall caught my eye next. An anthropomorphised water spout spins demonically in the centre of the work, while watery figures float and swim in angsty suspension around the vortex. (Ed Pien also has a totally stunning piece on display at York Quay Centre right now, a massive cut-out black paper silhouette of life-sized male figures perched in the laboriously intricate branches of a spreading tree.)
Anna Torma, Draw me a car (detail), hand embroidery on linen with silk threads, 2004. Collection of the artist, photo: Kim Clarke.
Courtesy of MOCCA.
I won't describe everything. Two more highlights for me were Sheila Butler and Anna Torma. Butler is a smart feminist with Nancy Spero-type chutzpa and iconic linear narrative. Spanning the two walls of a corner, penciled lettering tells of a dream in which a sinister man is chasing her. She can't tell if he is trying to pull her down or boost her up, and in the end she realises she is afraid of levitation, scared to go too high, and equally scared of not going high enough. Household items dot the scene, gloves with faces, a kitchen sponge with painted teeth, hands reaching out from every direction. If I had to pick a 'best-in-show,' I must confess that Anna Torma's embroidered wall hangings blew me and Von Bark away, especially the piece titled (I think) "Draw me a Monster." Kids images of fire breathing dinosaurs are rendered in vibrant coloured thread, combined in a jam-packed composition with other items like technical console dials, math sums, landscapes and bits of text describing ancient life on the planet earth from a child's perspective. Like most quilts and weavings, the image reads as an overall density, yet the pattern is based on art composition, a zine-like crammed in chaos that nestles into order and colour when you take a step or two back. Torma is obviously extremely sophisticated, both in her conception and her execution, and Dault's inane dismissal the work—he says the use of kids drawing is "minor-league procedural affectation" says more about him that it does about her. But, as I mentioned, Dault is just one guy, and in this case I think his point of view is off the mark.
An ambitious drawing is a compositional balancing act, all areas of the surface must hold their own, the space must breath and yet retain tension, the marks but be varied and yet cohere. The same criteria apply to an ambitiously curated drawing show. In my opinion Kim Moodie and David Merritt have succeeded in creating an engaged art space full of connections and potential.
NOTE: Entering this show feels great. One reason is MOCCA itself. The gallery is big, with high ceilings and white walls and concrete floors, but unlike, say, Chelsea or Ydessa Hendeles, it is open to the street and the staff are welcoming. Unlike say, the AGO or the Power Plant, MOCCA is both easy to get to and free (suggested donation). North York's loss is Queen Street's gain, and each time I go there I feel like some weird weight has been lifted and I breath a happy sigh. This feeling will pass soon enough, and I'll be full of complaints and expectations, but til then I plan to enjoy the new MOCCA as much as I can.
I always enjoy Kate Taylor's column in the Saturday Globe and Mail. She is very straightforward in her broad scope summations of art's role in the overall socio-economic matrix. This week (unfortunately it's subscription only online) she says some clear-headed stuff about criticism.
...the great paradox of all the cultural babble on the net is that a phenomenon driven by a huge appetite for critical information is also deeply hostile to traditional critics, who are routinely dismissed as arrogant elitists dispensing questionable judgements from their self-appointed perches.She cites Bookninja.com as an example of a site where "the critical air is bracingly pure."
[...]
Mainstream critics have taken note—and are worried about their shrinking authority. Of course, critics are always worried about their shrinking authority, criticism being one of those things, like morale at the CBC or the fortunes of the symphony orchestra, that are in perpetual decline.
[...]
But at the same time, critics are professional opinion-makers and the Internet is a beast that is hungry for opinion. If the consumer sites and the blogs can be full of subjective rants disguised as reviews, the best arts sites are experimenting with criticism, providing their readers with new voices and more depth....They can mix academic and popular criticism and can try out Platonic dialogues or conversations in the place of traditional reviews; they can push aside publicists to set their own agendas and can ignore publication schedules and release dates, reviewing classic films or books that are centuries old.
Von Bark's excellent essay about Scott Carruthers' excellent artwork is online at Truck Gallery .
www.sallymckay.ca/waypoint/_ _-_ _-_ _ find the cache to complete the url pre-programmed GPS tracking device available at York Quay Centre N 43º 38.465 W 079º 22.786 |
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I'm in a show called Waypoint that opens tomorrow, in the Case Studies gallery at the York Quay Centre. Each of the artists has been working with a GPS device to create a geocache in the harbourfront area, or at least, refer to that idea. The show is curated by Patrick Macaulay, and the artists are Scott Berry, Dave Dyment, Karen Henderson, me, Gwen MacGregor, Paola Poletto, Mitch Robertson, and Laurel Woodcock. Friday evening is the big opening for all of York Quay Centre's summer exhibitions, come on down.
Waypoint is on from July 16 - September 11, 2005
Opening is Friday, July 15, 2005
6 - 9 pm York Quay Centre
235 Queens Quay West, Toronto
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Shinobu Akimoto
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Matthew Evans
G.L.N.
Jean-Paul Kelly
Sandy Plotnikoff
Tanya Read
What a line up! Where can you see this show of excellent Canadian artists? Why, Japan, of course. Smart artist/curator Shinobu Akimoto has put together the Canadian component of the + Video Awards 2005, at Plus Gallery in Nagoya. More info here.
detail
Today I rode my bike past the AGO (Superbuild project underway, architect Frank Gehry) to a meeting at the ROM (Superbuild project underway, architect Daniel Libeskind). Which is better so far?
As I mentioned earlier, I like what I've seen of the AGO's 'swing-space' programming. The galleries are way reduced, but the let's-let-our-hair-down-and-do-some-contemporary-programming attitude is good. I wrote about Swintak earlier, but neglected to mention the exquisite installation by cartoonist/artist Seth of Palookaville fame. Seth has been making 3-d cardboard building. Each is about the size of half a bread-box. The surfaces are painted, details illustrated down to individual bricks, in Seth's characteristic and coherent style. Painted in lush, bluish-grey tones, Dominion City, looks like a town in twilight, simple and surreal and well worth a visit.
drawing by Seth, image from Lambiek
Today I had a browse around the ROM's appease-the-public-with-something-to-look-at-while-we-reno exhibit, Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight. The set-up felt a bit tawdry, tucked off to one side, but there were tons of very cool fossils to look at from Liaoning in China. For some reason I didn't take in, the rock in this quarry allowed for unusual preservation of soft tissue and tons of dinosaurs with feathers intact! There are also perfectly preserved insects—spiders and flies— and one very cool little flightless bird with a stomach full of rocks.
fossil from Liaoning Province of China, image from fossilmuseum.net
I'd say I'm more impressed with the AGO's transitional programming efforts, but the ROM still wins for one important reason. Their construction hoarding includes a passageway for pedestrians (and it's wide enough you can sneak through on a bike if you want). The AGO's hoarding, on the other hand, interrupts a bike lane, and completely blocks off the sidewalk between Beverly and McCaul, with a sign admonishing pedestrians in orange lettering not to walk along the road.
nice hoarding w/sidewalk, thanks ROM! image (cropped) from skyscraperpage.com
This one's for Shwarz: Libeskind's Toronto project in progress. The so-called crystal is pretty cool looking in its current eyebeam wireframe incarnation. Images below are from the Royal Ontario's Museum's website.
"I think the web has changed the way a handful of artists are thinking about art. But as long as museums and galleries insist on 'slide reviews' and don’t look for the buzz online, and as long as the art market privileges painting on canvas as its main economic engine, these changes are roughly at the level of Czech writers passing around photocopies of their novels in the Soviet era. They’ll have an effect about 20 years from now, if at all. A lot also depends on the future of the web, and whether it will continue as it is or be Balkanized by commerce or politics."Excerpt from Aaron Yassin interview with Tom Moody in NY Arts magazine.
 | There's really good click-n-learn earth science stuff on Berkeley's Explorations Through Time website. I found it while looking for humanity-in-relation-to-geologic-time analogies.There are a bunch: the toilet paper roll is good, and so is the beer glass (you gotta scroll down). The Berkeley site uses a book. I can't remember where my favourite one came from (Stephen Jay Gould? My friend Ben?) but it goes like this: Suppose the length of your arm represents geologic time. Now take a nail file and make one swipe across the tip of the nail on your middle finger. The width of the amount of nail you removed represents the length of time that humans have been in existence. This one, from Ohio History Central, is good too: Geologic time covers a VERY long period of time, often counting hundreds, even thousands of millions of years. If we think in terms of human life-spans --- using 70 years as the average --- one hundred million years would be the equal to about 1.43 million human lives strung out in succession, one after the other. |
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rocks for sale
Sticker by Swintak
I am a Sol LeWitt fan. Last night at the opening for AGO's Swing Space, I got stickered by Swintak. Swing Space is the AGO's smart strategy for programming during massive renovations. The focus is on contemporary art, and the shows on right now are pretty good. Swintak had Lawrence Weiner fan stickers too. All three were showing together as part of the ongoing project Wallworks (*see note below), in which artists work directly on the walls. Like a lot of artists my age, LeWitt and Weiner (and Ed Ruscha, who at least had a bloody sense of humour) opened the door for me to contemporary art. But that's not to say they should be revered in perpetuity. Swintak, a smart young Canadian performance and installation artist, outshines both these "forefathers of conceptual art" (as curator David Moos described them). LeWitt's piece—a big swooshy rainbow stripe painting, more reminiscent of Frank Stella than of LeWitt's signature ethereal grids—spanned all four walls of the gift shop. Weiner's text filled a wall in the room adjacent to the gift shop. Classic Weiner, instructions for installation had been gifted by the previous owners, and rendered by AGO staff with, surprisingly, a fair amount of input from Weiner himself about paint colours and so forth. The text said something about chains holding together and/or breaking apart ... I didn't transcribe it. Swintak's piece was on the opposite wall, framing the doorway to the gift shop. Yes the gift shop was rather prominent but, in it's nomadic reno-incarnation, just a shadow of its former venerable self.
C. A. Swintak, The thing that won't let you walk away, 2005. Taken from AGO website.
At first glance, Swintak's piece looked like old-style (Rauschenberg) assemblage, ie: just a bunch of random junk stuck to the wall. But this messed up recreation of daily life clutter is doubled, one side a mirror of the other. Blue jeans and socks cascade from under a bed with rumbled sheets. Newspapers, dirty dishes, crumpled panties and dust balls are reflected in perfect symmetry. It's like a digital image, except it's all real stuff, glued to the wall. Swintak's level of detail is good. Every inch, from the empty beer can frieze to the lacy, ladies' slip-covered columns is considered and duplicated. Beyond the elegant non-illusion of reflection, the work reads as a personal portrait (or self portrait), with possible (subtle) feminist reading. The woman to whom this clutter belongs is undeniably a blue jeans girl, but she also owns a pair of red high-heeled shoes with matching underwear. She isn't fussy, she drinks beer, she reads the paper. She doesn't sweep her clutter under the rug, in fact, she'll even put it on display. Juxtaposed against Weiner and LeWitt, this piece is full of life and female agency. I really like the AGO's decision to mix it up. Weiner and LeWitt have been dragged out of history into an engagement with Swintak's contemporary take on conceptual art. Swintak is given a dose of high-profile respect, and her bright, grounded practice can handle it.
*NB: Wallworks started with Weiner, LeWitt and Swintak, whose works are all shown in proximity, but the project is ongoing and according to AGO PR will result in 20 pieces over the next 2 years. Raymond Pettibon also had a piece installed last night which I completely misread. It's about surfing dudes. I'm sooo not a California girl... I thought the big blue wave was supposed to be sky, that the reference to "curls" meant nice hair, and that the floating heads were angels of people who'd died from AIDS. Some days I should not be allowed out of the house. UPDATE: Sarah Milroy on Rayond Pettibon here