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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I just cast my viewer's choice vote for "most memorable exhibition in the Toronto Sculpture Garden." The website is a nice history display, with images of all the works and artists' statements.
L.M. sent me to the vvork website recently, for which I am very grateful. I think everyone else already knew about it except for me (I can't do the Boing Boing daily, it gives me facial ticks), but just in case you aren't already checking out this suave and simple growing collection of international art images here's the link.
I knew it!
Trees in BC killed by pine beetles. Photos by Lorraine Maclauchlan, Ministry of Forests, Southern Interior Forest Region, BC
When we were driving in BC recently we saw a lot of territory that looked like the pictures above. Those dead trees are due to the pine beetle, which has been thriving too well due to recent warm winters due to, you guessed it...global warming. I'd heard something about this beetle on the radio, but it did not sink in until I saw for myself: mountainside after mountainside of completely dead trees. The government website says that "ministry surveys detected 8.5 million hectares of red-attack in 2005." It's a strange time for logging, because the dead trees represent a boom economy right now, but a big shortage coming up. Logging communities, of which there are many, are going to really suffer. The government FAQ informs that development trusts have been set up to "give communities the ability to pursue new opportunities for stimulating economic growth and job creation." ie: yikes. Naturalists are also anticipating increased pressure to log in conservation areas and parks that are currently protected.
On our road trip we got to stay a day in the Clearwater Valley with Trevor Goward, lichenologist, naturalist and gracious host extraordinaire. He makes an ecological arguement against cutting down the dead pines because they provide the perfect environment for a lichen that caribou like to eat. Once we got up north we saw a lot of caribou and a lot of lichen, both super stunning to look at.
Snapshots from Muskwa-Kechika by Sally McKay
At the artist exploration camp in the Muskwa Kechika, we got to know people from Northern BC who are worried about development. Several of the participants live in prairie land near Dawson Creek where natural gas wells are springing up all over the place, flaring and off-gassing right by people's farms and homes. Artist Karl Mattson said, "I have a bad feeling that the North is going to get raped."
Snapshots from Muskwa-Kechika by Sally McKay
The Muskwa Kechika, where the camp was held, is an absolutely gorgeous area that is remarkably undeveloped. (The dead trees in the photo above are not from pine beetle, but from naturally occurring forest fire.) Because the area is so large, it represents an opportunity for us to protect a really significant chunk of wilderness. Wayne Sawchuk, naturalist, photographer, and one of the organisers of the camp along with writer Donna Kane, had some really interesting things to say about humans and wilderness. He has been going deep into the Muskwa Kechika for 20 years, and he obviously has a deep love and respect for the area. He suggests that human perception of wilderness is a key to preservation. Wayne said "the idea of the frontier is over. It's very sad, but we have to accept it."
Snapshots from Muskwa-Kechika by Sally McKay
The way I am understanding this right now is that we need to acknowledge the importance of wilderness, not only in the empirical sense of preserving species and habitats, but also as a concept of human cultural value. Wilderness is an important aspect of how we understand the world, and we are in very real danger of destroying it. The preservation of natural areas directly serves human cultural interests, as well as wildlife interests. It is very sad to think of nature the same way we might think about exhibits in a museum, but we nevertheless need to face our romantic notions of the great wild 'other' beyond our imaginative powers, as even the wilderness ideal itself will not survive us without our direct and organised intervention ... I think ... it's abstract ... I'm still mulling all this over.
Snapshots from Muskwa-Kechika by Sally McKay
One thing that is not at all complicated is that the Muskwa-Kechika is freakin' beautiful, and keeping it that way seems like a very good idea.
There are good installation shots here of the art show Cosmic Wonder, which we also saw recently when we were in California. There are 23 artists, including some bigwigs like James Turrell. I really liked it, especially the gigantic cartoon robot deity with dvd screens and multiple audio tracks by Paperrad. There was an animated squarish face up near the top that made a series of Chewbacca-meets-Zeus-like moaning roar grunts. Around human head-height, ie: the crotch/stomach zone, was a big screen with a loooong loose narrative about many topics including a robot who lost his heart and a prophet/scientist attempting to determine the entertainment of the future. Somehow (I can't remember, there were a lot of plot shifts) a video tape of the entertainment of the future got made, but during a scuffle at the lab it got stepped on and cracked and the entertainment of the future leaked out in a sort of rainbow puddle. Then an ipod absorbed it and re-interpreted the data in its own digital way. Then the screen pulled back and the movie was on tv and some cartoon characters were watching saying "I don't get this" and "what happened to the robot?" There was lots more, including a death-head puppet menacing various irritated household pets.
There was other work I liked as well, including this gi-normous, ornate punched-out paper bird collage by Reed Anderson,
and a trippy tricks-with-mirrors "Kaleidoscope" video ball by Ara Peterson and Jim Drain (the images below are from a different installation).
The show was ambitious, entertaining, and fun in a dazzling sort of way. Some works, like Richard Misrach's big sky photographs, were more stately, and some, like Terence Koh's row of white robed spectres, were downright goofy, but I really enjoyed the ballsiness of bringing all this disparate art together under the concept of metaphysics. I would not still be thinking about it much, however, if I had not read this review by Kenneth Baker, who pretty much pans the show with an old dude/young dude polemic.
Organized by guest curator Betty Nguyen, the exhibition looks at younger artists' replays of '60s pop aesthetics to express -- what? -- blissful awareness of life, hankering for a lost cultural innocence, honest amazement at what they experience?The review represents a kind of ungenerous whining about the shallowness of youth that really gets my goat. For one thing, to characterize contemporary high-visual-impact-party-art as a "replay of the 60s" sounds a tad narcissistic. Baker calls the show nostalgic, I would call it hedonistic (and I would mean it in a good way). I do understand the irritation of watching similar themes churn through culture over and over again, but that's just the curse that falls on any of us who stay interested in art for more than 10 years. It behooves the older people, who have laid the foundations, to give younger people the benefit of the doubt when they take on the tropes in their own way. There's a distinction between providing historical context and missing the point. Anyhow, the show is not presented as a documentary rehash of 60s pyschedelia, but rather "an exhibition of metaphysical art that gives colorful expression to the mystical yearnings of a new generation." Contrary to Baker's point above, there was no hint of postmodern angsty wallowing in impossibilities. The whole gung-ho thing may not have resulted in a deep spiritual experience, but its a such a cocky, out-on-a-limb premise that the no holds-barred funness of the show was both refreshing and uplifting. Go metaphysics!
The difficulty of deciding hints at the fraught position in which young and mid-career artists find themselves today. They look back at a period, indeed a century, in which their predecessors seemed to do and lay claim to everything that could be done in the name of art and its promise of surprise, pleasure, confrontation with and deliverance from managed consciousness.
Grumpy hyena-type kitty creature drawn by an anonymous internet user... (yay!)
I like Sketch Swap a lot better than TV and also quite a bit better than most art shows. (Thank you Rob). Once your drawing is complete you don't get to see it again, which is infuriating and weirdly addictive and says something about art and narcissism. And its freeing too, I've done about 30 sketches so far, and I loved them all. You deposit your sketch, and then you get to watch somebody else's art appear before your eyes. The lines of the drawings show up in the order that they were made, so you get to really see how people draw, which is fascinating, even (or especially) when its just yet another giant eyeball (complete with veins!) (cool).