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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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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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