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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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An quick update on Excellence at the National Gallery of Canada:
We complained a lot in a recent thread about the apalling performance of Marc Mayer when questioned on CBC TV about a lack of diversity at the National Gallery of Canada. Now there is "a growing collective of cultural producers from Canada and abroad concerned with the outrageous and blatantly anachronistic policy of exclusion recently asserted by the Director of the National Gallery of Canada, Marc Mayer, during an interview aired as part of a segment on Diaspora Art on CBC’s 'The National' on February 2, 2010." Read the open letter, it's satisfyingly snarky. I signed on. Here's my favourite bit.
Well, we know “excellence” when we see it, and today we prefer to call it hegemony.
As the Director of a major art museum you might like to read up on this concept. You could start with Linda Nochlin’s seminal work "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), and then move on to more contemporary, fulsome texts, such as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) and bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). At the very least you could try reading Fuse Magazine.
Edith Dakovic at p|m Gallery 1518 Dundas Street W. Toronto. Unitl February 13, 2010.
Skin with tattoo and pigment from pigment Studies 2009 pigment and Silastic
Red Dot on Skin from red dot Studies 2009 pigment and Silastic
I have met Lisa Myers, one of the curators (with Suzanne Morrissette) for
Past Now: Works by Meryl McMaster and Luke Parnell — she's uber-smart,
and I think it's gonna be good. Opens on Thursday.
I once wrote this about Scott Carruthers:
Although Carruthers’s drawings are technically static, the effect of looking at them is immersive, disorienting, and dynamic. Carruthers makes us dizzy on purpose, intentionally creating a physical experience of vertigo for the viewer. Because the drawings literally fill up the room, and because each little frame has such potent narrative impact, we have to navigate them, as in a video game, charting our own path through the imagery. Unlike a video game, however, which usually follows a linear narrative, this experience is open-ended. No two people will make the same set of connections or link the images into the same story.Now he finally has a website! And it's got the best artist's statement ever. (The bio is pretty good too.)
Carruthers’s artwork is satisfying as pure entertainment and as social commentary, documenting the oppression, violence, despair, humiliation, and humour of our world in a recognizable way. The installation is also a physical experience, more interactive than most artworks, despite the fact that there are no moving parts. Conceptually, Carruthers’s mesh of potent, activated nodes is a model of the human brain itself.
Sandra Meigs - The Fold Heads at Susan Hobbs Gallery, 137 Tecumseth Street, Toronto, ON. Until March 20, 2010
Hey Yo and Luv Ya So 2009 acrylic on panel, mixed media, gobo light
Feelin’ Lo and Ever So 2009 acrylic on panel, mixed media, gobo light
