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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Paul Donald- Certainties curated by Cheryl Sourkes at Akau, 1186 Queen St. W. Toronto.
May 30 - Aug. 2, 2008
Opening: Friday, May 30, 7 pm.
bureautype 2008 ink on paper, hand cut
cabinettype 2008 ink on paper, hand cut
barreltype 2008 ink on paper, hand cut
UNHINGED - Hallwalls' Artists & Models Affair Saturday, May 31, 9pm-2am.
Central Terminal on Paderewski Drive, Buffalo NY.
Lewis Colburn - War Room 2008 mixed media
The catastrophic and on-going CRISIS IN ART CRITICISM has thrown the curators in a total tizzy
and as a result a modified - kitteh has no eyes - version of myShape Shifting Kitteh (thanks for the title mark) will be shown as a video projection.
Gordon Hicks will also be installing his lovely Light Rain Tonight, a work that we've previously featured on this blog.
[...update...]
Hallwalls' director, John Massier, (who is probably the most bewildered of the above mentioned curators) just sent me an installation test image of the kittehs in Buffalo.
(found)
Anthony Easton of pink moose is in Toronto and he's got an opening tomorrow night at 7:00 at Type Books, 883 Queen St. West. Rumour has it there will be a lot of very nice photographs at nice affordable prices.
(found)
Katie Bethune-Leaman at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, 115 King Street E., Toronto ON
May 28 '08 - Apr 15 '09
Opening: Wed 28 May, 4:30-6:30pm
Mushroom Studio 2008 laser cut steel, steel wire, polyurethane foam, paint
I'm in agreement with what Terence Dick wrote on akimblog
"Katie Bethune-Leaman’s work is also funny, but in a macabre way. As is her wont, she twists pop culture references in unexpected directions. Here she posits the corpse of slain rapper Tupac Shakur as a farm bed for mushrooms. A series of delicate drawings and an accompanying sculptural assemblage brings her musings on hip-hop fungi to light."(please note it is much more fun to disagree with Terence Dick)
We finally watched The Golden Compass. I don't understand why people seem to hate it so much. I loved the books, and thought the movie was perfectly entertaining: non-stop action with no draggy bits, groovy dirigibles, suitably cute daemons animated just fine, better-than competent and charismatic child acting, creepy Nicole Kidman, faithful to the dark scary stuff in the books, faithful to the kid-like P.O.V. of Lyra/Pan. The only complaint I had was that Ian McKellen was mis-cast as the Gandalf voice for Iorek Byrnison. That bear shoulda been less of a sage and more of a roust-a-bout. Otherwise, it was fun and I wish they were going to make the rest of the trilogy. Also, the website has a quiz you can fill out to get a daemon assigned (click on "daemons"). Mine is an osprey. If I was 8 again I would be in heaven.
Got Ten (10) art related questions?
simpleposie invites you to submit a ten question questionnaire on the subject of anything art related.
No question is too silly or too smart. Send your questionnaire to J@simpleposie
Its not for money - only love... and the possibility of a great online art conversation.
If you would like to see your questionnaire on simpleposie this summer, the deadline is June 30, 2008.
*All submissions subject to editorial approval.
Some guest questionnaires from last year: Jamie Tolagson's 11 questions,
La Questionnaire par Wil Murray,
Sally Mckay's cryptic queries & Lorna Mills on VVORK.
Two songs about death by Bill Monroe.
.
(found)
Alan Flint - Look Power at CRAM, (a loose collective operating Canada's smallest gallery)
24 James Street - 2nd Floor, St. Catharines, ON. May 30 - June 17, 2008
Opening: Friday, May 30th, 8:00 pm
Badge Magic Series: VanVouVer 2008 silkscreen, 13in x14.5in
Badge Magic Series: Viatoria 2008 silkscreen, 13in x14.5in
Gene Threndyle, the man with the rock collection that looks good enough to eat. Both images from the installation Rocks of The Great Lakes, currently on display at York Quay Galleries until June 22.
There is more from Gene at GeneDigs.com, inlcuding this video document of the Human Jukebox, which VB and I were lucky enought to happen upon on sunny summer day.
Our friends at Hallwalls in Buffalo tell me that May 21, 2008 is the deadline for the U.S. government to appeal Critical Art Ensemble's recent court victory.
How I spent my mini-vacation...these photos do not do the forest justice cause there ain't no audio. The bottom one is a picture of a nesting grouse (yes it is). I flushed it and it scared the shit out of us. Then we knew where its nest was so we scared it back a few times by trying to take its picture. Now we're gone so the poor little thing can get back to worrying about genuine predators. When we first got there we kept hearing a low kind of put-put-putting sound. VB said, "That's grouse." I said, "No, silly, that's a motor on a nearby farm." Then we played is-isn't for a couple of days, and came home to the bird book, which says this about ruffed grouse, "The drumming of the male might be overlooked as a distant motor starting up, or an outboard on some far-distant lake. The 'booming' starts off slowly, gaining speed until it ends in a whir: bup...bup...bup...bup..bup.bup. up. r-rrrrrrr. At a distance the muffled thumping is so hollow that sometimes it hardly registers as an exterior sound, but seems rather to be a disturbing series of vibrations within the ear itself."
the ball field
the orchard
the swamp
the grouse
Happy Victoria Day
 |  |
| James Clark - Count Lavender 1892 Oil on canvas | James Clark - The Thorney Prize Ox 1858 Oil on canvas |
 |  |
| James Clark - Herford Ox 1860 Oil on canvas | J. Loder - Shorthorn Bull 1845 Oil on canvas |
 |  |
| Thomas Weaver - Four Shear Ram 1837 Oil on canvas | R. Whitford - Leicester Ram 1859 Oil on canvas |
And don't forget to enjoy the industrial revolution.
Sacred Harp Music
N.E. Sacred Harp Convention
University of Georgia, Athens
29t Fairfield - Boston Connexion Sacred Harp singing
Dairy Queen Missionary Baptist Sacred Harp Convention
Sacred Harp Kitties (God of Darkness)
"Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp is the first feature documentary about Sacred Harp singing, a haunting form of a cappella, shape note hymn singing with deep roots in the American south. Shape note singing has survived over 200 years tucked away from notice in the rural deep south, where in old country churches, singers break open 'The Sacred Harp', a 160 year old shape note hymnal which has preserved these fiercely beautiful songs which are some of the oldest in America. The film offers a glimpse into the lives of this 'Lost Tonal Tribe' whose history is a story of both rebellion and tradition. The filmmakers, Matt and Erica Hinton spent 7 years documenting this yet largely unknown art form."
(the link above for the documentary's web site has the best sound recordings of this music that I've found since I first heard a Sacred Harp Convention on The Alan Lomax Collection. I fell in love with it because no matter how many bad notes were shrieked out, there were always singers in the chorus that somehow resolved them all)
Movie trailer for "Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp"
I've read that the sources for these weird harmonies are hymns from Restoration England. The BBC did a documentary that includes Sacred Harp called The History of White Gospel that gives a critical look at its roots and its current manifestation as the music of American Evangelical power.
(found)
(found)
(found)
(found)
Peter Max! Hey!
...or maybe pianos, but I'm not too sure of this yet.
Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell is soooo good! If you like brain science. Dr. Campbell is really good at keeping lay people in mind. She does great interviews and always gets her subjects to define terms and explain tricky concepts.
(found)
Karilee Fuglem- here within our curving spaces at The Koffler Gallery, 4588 Bathurst St., Toronto.
Opening: Thursday, May 15, 6 - 8pm
A continous thread 2005 fine nylon thread (details)
I have been learning some groovy things about colour lately. I always knew that certain surfaces reflect and absorb various light rays in the spectrum. What I didn't know was that our brain reads colour as a set of ratios, rather than absolute values. So, according to neuroscientist Semir Zeki, green reflects 70% of middle wave (green) light and 20% of incident long wave (red) light, no matter what the amount of light. We compare all the values and the knowledge we get is about the reflectance of the various surfaces. Colour, according to Zeki, is an interpretation of that knowledge. [Semir Zeki, “The Neurology of Ambiguity,” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, Turner, Mark, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) p.251]
Also, I learned a new phrase: scene gist. It means, guess what, getting the gist of a scene. We can do it really very quickly, and we can get scene gist even if we don't have time to identify any of the objects in the scene. Monica Castelhano has worked on the role of colour in scene gist. Structure tells us a lot, and so we can get the gist pretty effetively from black and white images. But Castelhano found that if the images are blurred, or the time they are shown is reduced, to the point where we have problems, then colour helps us out. One of the things that the brain does to be efficient is look for edges and boundaries, filling in surfaces automatically. Colour helps with this definition of shapes. But Castelhano and her team wanted to see if it had another role besides emphasising structure. They set up an experiment showing people scenes with natural colour, versus scenes with unnatural colour that nonetheless enhanced the structural qualities. People were able to get the gist better from the natural colour. [Castelhano, Monica, "The Influence of Color on the Perception of Scene Gist," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2007]
From Semir Zeki, I also learned that we form a colour memory, learning from experience what colours are associated with what forms. Seeing natural colour in a natural environment activiates the hippocampus (which works on memory) and other parts of the brain that are involved with high level cognition. When we see abstract colours in a painting these areas are not activated. Says Zeki, "...abstract scenes do really seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes." I'm thinking, though, that if we start trying to figure out what those abstract colours might mean, or whether our kid could paint that, then the frontal lobes are going to get involved pretty quickly.[Semir Zeki, Inner Visions: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) p.201]
Yam Lau
Scapeland 2008 multi-channel video projection at YYZ Gallery during Images Festival
Yam Lau is currently in an exhibition with Alain Paiement at Leo Kamen, 80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 406, Toronto until May 31, 2008.
(A previous post about Lau's work.)
Sunday Devotionals - Celia Cruz
Guantanamera (that silk gown became pure sex on her)
Quimbara w/ Tito Puente
Oye Como Va
Joester wrote a nice review of Grand Theft Auto 4. A snippet:
SPOILER: yes you can steal a helicopter and of course you can crash it into the Statue of Liberty (Statue of Happiness). But if you do it right you end up on a higher platform that you can't reach from the tourist entrance. Go through a secret door and you're inside the statue itself. Climb the staircase to the top and what's there? A giant beating heart. Yup, you heard me. It's suspended in the middle of the statue from chains. Right up there with the weirdest things in a video game ever. Shooting it (and who would do such a thing) has no effect, it just keeps on beating. Be careful trying to blow it up with a grenade, it's a real easy way to die. How do you get down from the statue? Well, unless there's a hidden parachute somewhere, you don't exactly survive the experience. http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/213827.html
Magda Wojtrya made these fish for the Fish Net project at Harbourfront Centre (go see it!). The captions and photos are hers, reposted with permission from her Flickr page.
Magda Wojtrya: Brook trout, about 14" long, made from fabric and card from housewares packaging. All the eyes are made from silver chocolate wrapping for the sclera and bicycle innertube rubber for the pupils.
Magda Wojtrya: Emerald shiners, made from silver lame and plastic food containers.
Magda Wojtrya: Threespine sticklebacks, about 4" long, made from fabric, plastic food containers, and the spines are made from a fish tin.
Magda Wojtrya: Marc is holding male and female American eels in their silvery migration coats. Made from painted silver lame and the long fins are bicycle innertubes.
Janet Morton - Better Homes and Gardens at the KW/AG, 101 Queen Street North, Kitchener, ON.
May 9 - July 6, 2008
Opening - Friday, May 9, 7-9 p.m.
Cardigan 2004 hand knit (1993) cardigan with giraffe
Work socks for Patsy (the elephant) 2004 four hand knit socks
posted a Video Supplement (a while ago but I never noticed)
(this animation is totally appropriate, and even if it wasn't, do I care?)Libby Hague and Vent du Nord May 1- 31 as part of le Mois de l’art imprimé,
ARPRIM, 372 , Ste-Catherine Ouest, #426 Montreal.
Gallery hours: Tues. - Sat. 9:30 - 5pm
Inventory:
36 items: 6 ft. stalks of corn (woodcut)
100 items: 9 ft. lengths of yellow ribbon (sunshine)
theatre gels (also sunshine)
12 x 4 ft. storm with fields and various buildings ( woodcut panorama)
snowflakes ( innumerable)
storm clouds
1 avalanche for Isabelle (small, private)
3 fans (on)
3 gusts of wind ( invisible)
seeds (cut paper)
diverse furniture items (collection of ARPRIM)
the public ( a curious, random variable)
Tamias minimus, Petromyscus maniculatus, Mus musculus ( almost hidden woodcuts)
Sunday Devotionals
From TO HELL WITH YOU
For the past five decades Jack T Chick has been writing comics about damnation. InThe publishing house that Jack Chick built still exists. (the next question would be why I am so surprised that it does
the pocket-sized tracts, people are stabbed, burned alive, and eaten by snakes. There
is cannibalism and human sacrifice. The apocalyptic works are equal parts hate
literature and fire-and-brimstone sermonising, with a tough-guy Christ - "Jesus is not a
weak fairy," he writes - as protagonist. Chick, a fundamentalist Christian and president
of a California-based publishing company, wants his books to scare the hell out of you.
(Hey Anthony! shout-out.)
And my personal favourite: Are Roman Catholics Christians?
Here's a Chick parody site and there's an on-line Jack Chick Museum.
Suzy Lake - Rhythm of a True Space installed in front of the AGO on 37' and 19' hoarding
at the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets, Toronto
(Then after a hard day cleaning up after all of you, the ladies can take a bath)
Cheryl Sourkes - Parking on Personal Webcams at Peak Gallery 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto
Opening: Saturday, May 3, 4 to 8pm
something FUN on Friday....
Adjustable Landscape
Rob Cruickshank
Opening Friday, May 2, from 6-9 pm
York Quay Gallery in Harbourfront Centre
Doug Guildford
Wasp (9 views, Nova Scotia) 2002 crocheted poly-twine, 6'
Net (backshore, Nova Scotia) 2001 crocheted stainless steel wire and glass, 10' x 12'.
Net (backshore, Nova Scotia) 2001 crocheted stainless steel wire and glass, 10' x 12'.
Doily (9 views, Florida) 2003 crocheted nylon-coated copper wire, 33" diameter.