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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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"I'd also like to say a word about speculation, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation among some scientists. Describing someone's idea as "mere speculation" is often considered insulting. This is unfortunate. As the English biologist Peter Medawar has noted, "An imaginative conception of what might be true is the starting point of all great discoveries in science." Ironically, this is sometimes true even when the speculation turns out to be wrong. Listen to Charles Darwin: "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened." - From: V.S. Ramachandran, M.D.,PH.D., and Sandra Blakeslee, "Preface," in Phantoms in the Brain, New York: Harper Collins, 1999. pg.xv-xvi
Mr. Nobody just got back from Japan.
This show is going to be good.
Holey informational diagrams! Bee sure to check out this one.
Von Bark is gonna be sparring in an art critic match at this event tomorrow night...
I am really looking forward to this. Come and heckle with me!
HELL ¥€$
A YYZFUNDRAISER, A YYZPARTY.
Friday, May 19, 2006 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM
Latvian House, 491 College Street
tickets $25.00 at the door for non-YYZMEMBERS
If you support contemporary art say Hell ¥€$!
"Presenting the history of the cosmos through the lens of modernist chandeliers, in a material as delicate and unwieldy as blown glass, requires an odd combination of hubris and masochism."Interesting article in the New York Times about this piece by Josiah McElheny.
[thanks Marc!]
The Mods and Rockers opening last night went great, and so did the performative lectures! THANK YOU THANK YOU to artists and performers Myfanwy Ashmore, Chandra Bulucon, Susan Bustos, Rob Cruickshank, Amos Latteier, Lorna Mills, Tom Moody, John Parker, Andrew J. Paterson and Veronica Verkley for all your excellent, excellent work! The lectures were both fanstastic, and the art show (which stays up now for almost two months) really sings. For Tom and John in New York, who couldn't attend, tons of people came out and the vibe was grand! I was too high strung to take any pictures, but I will post some soonish (no fear) and I'll make a fuller report next week.
There is a lot happening at Harbourfront Centre this Friday evening (May 12) and you can see it all! Come for the opening reception (7-9pm) of all of York Quay Centre's spring exhibitions including Mods and Rockers with collaborations by Myfanwy Ashmore & Lorna Mills, Chandra Bulucon & Andrew J. Paterson, Rob Cruickshank & Veronica Verkley, Tom Moody & John Parker.
Then at 9pm, saunter down the hall to the Brigantine Room and settle in your seats the (free!) entertaining performance lectures by Susan Bustos and Amos Latteier. Also, a special guest appearance by Von Bark on monosynth. Tell your friends, its' gonna be good.
Both events are guest-curated by me as part of digifest at Harbourfront Centre.
More details here.
Inky Circus, a neato website about "life in the girl nerd world," has posted a really nice blurb about the performance lectures by Susan Bustos and Amos Latteier this Friday.
Thanks Inky Circus!
Mods and Rockers teaser posted by Rob Cruickshank.
Rebecca Diederichs, FLICK, 2004/2005 (laminated digital print, 128 X 197 cm). Image taken from here.
Rebecca Diederichs is a close friend. She is also one of my very favourite artists. Her work is lush and eye-popping, yet she exercises such intuitive discernment that there is also tons of tension. Borrowed fragments are magnified and re-composed with precision. Her appropriations (these stripes above, for instance, are from the packaging on a box of tissues) tease us with the vague sense that they come from somewhere familiar, offering full-on colour-blasts of visual satisfaction but dodging the "ah-hah" of recongition that would collapse them into quotes. In her recent work, Rebecca introduces language, and treats it as yet another piece of the world. Text-in-art can be a deplorable device, but Ruscha-like, Rebecca pulls it off. The words adopt shapes, dissolve into form, but do not lose their sense nor their readability. Here the word "flick" and the concept of "stripe" carry about the same amount cognitive weight, so the piece rolls and folds and interacts with your neurons in a bunch of different ways. It's good for savouring.
Rebecca Diederichs has an opening tomorrow night at 8:00pm at YYZ Artists Outlet. She will be installing a new work called BLAZE. I'm looking forward to the exhibition, which also includes a show by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, and another by Jeanie Riddle.
| Our shows at York Quay Centre open next week (Friday May 12th). That means the current shows are coming down soon (Sunday is the last day), and if you haven't seen them, you should! City Beautification Ensemble's dystopic future diorama (tiny abandoned cars and tiny bits of rubble and tiny weeds sprouting out of tiny crumbling tarmac) of the Gardiner Expressway is Blade Runner satisfying in both its detail and its amibiguity. The Case Studies show about Beauty, curated by Patrick Macaulay, has a killer weird human-faced doggy by Allyson Mitchell and a giant black ooozy blob by Seth Scriver that looks like a tar pit sprouting its own life form. The other pieces are good too, and the whole thing holds together really well. |  Simon Faithfull, 30Km, 2004 (image taken from here | My favourite thing of all, however, is a video by Simon Faithfull in the show in the main gallery called Timeless – time, landscape and new media. Faithfull affixed a video camera to a weather balloon and recorded the signal via wireless feed. The balloon just went up into the atmosphere and eventually popped. The video is circular, projected on a round screen, and what you see is the earth slowly getting farther and farther away. As you rise, the signal starts to break down. Sometimes towards the end the image will be all noise, and then suddenly a shape will appear and you realise it is the curve of the earth. When you are damn near to entering outer space, the screen goes all black with white static. Then the static slowly diminishes into tiny sporadic points of light. I recommend watching the whole video, which takes about half an hour. It's really beautiful, and, compared to internet satellite technology, the experience feels very personal. I found it very sad, but that could just be me. |
3 x YouTube. That is a looong time to, as MTV put it, look "the president in the eye and let loose a characteristically blistering barrage of invective, which was met with a stunned silence by the crowd and reportedly made the most powerful man in the free world squirm in his seat on the dais." Whatever they say about Stephen Colbert in the future, they will never say he was a coward.
In Canadian comedic news... Harper's budget sucks but we're stuck with it and the Mercer Report is off season. Agh!!
update: Colbert's speech was removed from YouTube (thanks Mark) but it's still available here at Viral Video and the transcript is here at Common Dreams.
