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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Peter Bowyer's Top Ten
1. I have been spending a lot of time in the bicycle friendly city of Utrecht in the Netherlands so my Top Ten list will branch out from here. Barry Flanagan’s monumental bronze sculpture, ‘Thinker on a Rock’ 2002, is a major landmark that I ride past on my bike regularly. A great piece of sculpture, and poignant for me because I knew him for a while in the late seventies when I was in my final year at Central Saint Martins. His oversized green high top sneakers and air of intellectual mischievousness made me think of a red haired Bugs Bunny. A year or so later, when he started to make his bronze rabbit sculptures, they appeared to me as self- portraits. Barry Flanagan,1941-2009.
2. My first side trip out of Utrecht was to Den Haag (The Hague) to see a sound and technology based art festival called ‘TodaysArt’ 2010. Here is a picture of Anke Eckardt documenting her sound sculpture from 2009 called ‘!’. The piece consisted of three speakers suspended in a vertical formation over a pool of black liquid. Like the high diver at a circus, the sound, (a kind of whistle that builds to a crash) travels downwards to the pool and make a big sploosh when it hits, like an invisible rock being dropped into a bucket of black water. Repeat.
3. Amsterdam is a twenty minute train ride from Utrecht. On my first visit to the city I mostly went around to commercial galleries, but also stopped at ‘Bureau’ a satellite space of the Stedelijk Museum. Joep van Liefland had an exhibition called ‘Black Systems’ which focused on relics of outdated technology, like VHS. It made me think how art has historically been made from the discarded tissue of other organisms.
At Ellen de Bruijne Projects there was a show by the two person collective ‘gerlach en koop’ called ‘Not not precise’. An arrangement of quite ordinary things with poetic attachment, and relations to a time the artists spent in Brussels. Beautifully presented objects and marks, ‘minimal gestures’ in an installation, that contained some very distinctive qualities of spatial balancing that I associate with Dutch Modernism.
4. London is not far away, so I headed over (or is it under) to check out the Frieze Art Fair and the multitude of other things going on in the city. I had some unexpected revelations about artists and objects at Tate Britain. I was anxious to see Fiona Banner’s suspended Harrier jet, which I assumed would be a grand critique of modernity. It was an impressive feat of art installation for sure, but it did not transcend itself as an ordinary (hollowed out) found object. A more surprising object at the Tate was a small cubist inspired rug designed by Francis Bacon from 1929. I felt privileged to see it, like finding something that had been hidden, a seemingly accidental object in the continuum of his work, but not a found object.
5. Frieze Art Fair was intense. Out of the hundreds of wonderful displays, the one that really stayed with me was the work of Marlo Pascual. Sculptural pieces from vintage photographs, most were printed as face to plexi and displayed like sculpture, either leaning up against the wall, freestanding or flat on the floor. I liked his direct manner of physically interrupting the two-dimensional.
6. Stuart Shave/Modern Art is one of my favorite spaces when touring around the commercial galleries in London. They had a show by Bojan Sarcevic called ‘Comme des chiens et des vagues’. There were similarities to my own work, in the use of metal and the way of combining two and three dimensions. Simple steel constructions on the floor, re-appear in the accompanying photographs as play things for partially dressed super-models.
7. Marina Abramovic’s two exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery were deeply profound. One gallery housed the older performance works, beautifully re-contextualized as framed photographic pieces with poetic text pages explaining the story behind what you were looking at. Across the street were the more recent works, just as powerful but without the violent overtones. A mature artist totally at peace with herself. In this video she calmly describes her parents tortured marriage, to an understanding donkey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSIYGV9dZU
8. The Rijksakademie in Amsterdam is a residency program for artists that does an open house once a year. A mix of painting, video and installation work displayed in the individual studio spaces. I really enjoyed Yaima Carrazana’s ‘Daniel Buren Nail Polish Tutorial’ 2010.
9. The Stedelijk Museum had a large group show called ‘Monumentalism’. Artists working in the Netherlands were invited to address concepts of history and national identity. In the projection ‘Exercise’ 2007, by Lucia Nimcova, the artist filmed older inhabitants of her home town in Slovakia re-enacting some of the exercise routines they were forced to perform in the old communist days. She captured an unexpected form of dance or ritualized movement. The exercises seemed funny, energizing and transformative...lots of laughing on both sides of the screen.
10. Also at the Stedelijk, and bringing to my mind Amy Wilson’s photographic project, ‘Carpets of Las Vegas’; was Job Koelewijn’s ‘Nursery Piece’ 2009. A colored sand painting (with printed stickers and eucalyptus) on pages of text by Spinoza. I share an interest in philosophy and optically complex structures with the artist, and I share a birthday with Baruch Spinoza, born in Amsterdam, November 24th, 1632.
| Jon Davies' Top Ten in no order, just in Toronto, and not including any of his own great triumphs of 2010 (ha ha). 1. The Monkey and the Mermaid by Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows at the Images Festival, April 10, 2010.  Shary Boyle and Christine Fellows’ musical, mixed-media magic lantern show was one of the most delightful, moving, awe-inspiring nights of my life – hands down. Especially the rendition of Dolly's Me and Little Andy and the rebellious young bat in his bedroom. 2. Hovering Proxies by Oliver Husain at the Art Gallery of York University, January 21 – March 14, 2010 and Cushy Number at the Susan Hobbs Gallery, December 11, 2010 – January 22, 2011.  Hovering Proxies  Cushy Number Oliver Husain’s enchanting film, fabric and sculptural installations set the stage for surprising encounters: you inevitably end up as a performer caught in a magical loop between the space of the gallery and his elaborate, whimsical fictions. 3. Un-home-ly curated by Matthew Hyland at the Oakville Galleries, November 27, 2010 – February 20, 2011. Artists: Lucy Gunning, Mako Idemitsu, Suzy Lake, Liz Magor, Luanne Martineau, Shana Moulton, Valérie Mréjen, Paulette Phillips, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Rosler, Nicola Tyson, Jin-me Yoon  Valerie Mrejen Matthew Hyland’s first major group exhibition at the gallery where the young chap is now Director is the first of several planned exhibitions (and a publication) charting contemporary feminist art practices. The work here on the female uncanny was diverse (in materials and perspectives), potent and expertly contextualized and presented (particularly in the Centennial Square library space), with the stand-outs being Paulette Phillips’ work and French artist Valérie Mréjen’s haunting 2006 video of housewife ennui, Manufrance. 4. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) by Michelangelo Frammartino, seen at TIFF, September 2010.  The best film of the year is a wordless Italian metaphysical epic – part Pasolini, part Tati – about the transubstantiation of a soul as it travels from the bodies of a shepherd to a newborn goat (!) to a fir tree to charcoal to smoke. Profound and utterly captivating. 5. Inside The Solar Temple of the Cosmic Leather Daddy by Will Munro at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, February 26 – March 27, 2010.  It’s impossible to talk about 2010 without marking the great loss of artist and producer (of everything) Will Munro, particularly as his last installation – which closed less than 2 months before his death from brain cancer – was essentially his sanctuary, where Munro staged a space to safely and comfortably spend eternity: a cozy macraméd sex sling surrounded by the iconography of his queer forefathers (and, at the opening, by scores of his closest friends and fans). 6. Scream: Ed Pien and Samonie Toonoo, curated by Nancy Campbell at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, April 20 – May 29, 2010.  Samonie Toonoo (left) and Ed Pien (right) Ed Pien is one of our most under-recognized artists, and this in-depth exhibition of his exquisitely perverse drawings alongside equally strong work by artist Samonie Toonoo was a dark, thrilling experience (courtesy of curator Nancy Campbell). 7. A to B curated by Micah Lexier at MKG 127, July 3 – 31, 2010.  Micah Lexier is the hardest working man in the Toronto art scene, and this brilliantly assembled collection of objects (art and not) was the perfect hall-of-mirrors showcase for his obsessions, in this case with order and likeness. 8. Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are so Shut Up and Listen at Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage, February 16–20, 2010.  The misbehaviour of a big group of loutish Belgian youths is sublimated into a Charlie Kaufmanesque structuralist performance as a single scene of perfectly choreographed teen anarchy is re-enacted over and over again with increasingly mind-blowing variations. 9. Unfinished Business: Eric Baudelaire at Gallery TPW, May 6 – June 5, 2010.  Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition – which included a body of work based on Antonioni, a feature-length video (Sugar Water) chronicling a Parisian Metro posterer, and a stack of books all titled Unfinished Business – was a dizzyingly smart and perfectly executed Toronto debut for one of the most exciting younger artists at work today. 10. The Flesh at Work: A Lizploitation Cinemagoria, curated by Derek Aubichon and David Balzer, May 2 – November 7, 2010.  The activity I most looked forward to week after week was this private Sunday evening screening series focused on Elizabeth Taylor’s late “decadent” phase, exploring her persona as a “a blowsy, vulgar battle axe” from 1965–2001. While a library could be filled with my thoughts on these 23 movies – my faves were Losey’s Secret Ceremony (and Boom, natch), Minnelli’s The Sandpiper, the Carol Burnett co-starring and Shot-in-Toronto HBO hit Between Friends, the Cukor-directed and Soviet co-produced musical pablum The Blue Bird, euro-horror trash Identikit, and the beyond-belief There Must Be a Pony – suffice to say that the Bell Lightbox has nothing on these boys as far as rooting out the real classics of world cinema. Honourable mentions: The Fighter (dir. David O. Russell) and The Ghost Writer (dir. Roman Polanski), Jennifer Murphy and Dorian Fitzgerald at Clint Roenisch, David Hoffos at MOCCA, Red Bull 381 Projects in general but specifically Enthusiasm: Abbas Akhavan, Kelly Jazvac and Ron Tran, The Storyteller at the AGO, Christine Swintak & Don Miller at the Blackwood Gallery, Tacita Dean at Gallery TPW, and my boyfriend Sholem Krishtalka’s Lurking Tumblr. |