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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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 | 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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rocks for sale
Sticker by Swintak
I am a Sol LeWitt fan. Last night at the opening for AGO's Swing Space, I got stickered by Swintak. Swing Space is the AGO's smart strategy for programming during massive renovations. The focus is on contemporary art, and the shows on right now are pretty good. Swintak had Lawrence Weiner fan stickers too. All three were showing together as part of the ongoing project Wallworks (*see note below), in which artists work directly on the walls. Like a lot of artists my age, LeWitt and Weiner (and Ed Ruscha, who at least had a bloody sense of humour) opened the door for me to contemporary art. But that's not to say they should be revered in perpetuity. Swintak, a smart young Canadian performance and installation artist, outshines both these "forefathers of conceptual art" (as curator David Moos described them). LeWitt's piece—a big swooshy rainbow stripe painting, more reminiscent of Frank Stella than of LeWitt's signature ethereal grids—spanned all four walls of the gift shop. Weiner's text filled a wall in the room adjacent to the gift shop. Classic Weiner, instructions for installation had been gifted by the previous owners, and rendered by AGO staff with, surprisingly, a fair amount of input from Weiner himself about paint colours and so forth. The text said something about chains holding together and/or breaking apart ... I didn't transcribe it. Swintak's piece was on the opposite wall, framing the doorway to the gift shop. Yes the gift shop was rather prominent but, in it's nomadic reno-incarnation, just a shadow of its former venerable self.
C. A. Swintak, The thing that won't let you walk away, 2005. Taken from AGO website.
At first glance, Swintak's piece looked like old-style (Rauschenberg) assemblage, ie: just a bunch of random junk stuck to the wall. But this messed up recreation of daily life clutter is doubled, one side a mirror of the other. Blue jeans and socks cascade from under a bed with rumbled sheets. Newspapers, dirty dishes, crumpled panties and dust balls are reflected in perfect symmetry. It's like a digital image, except it's all real stuff, glued to the wall. Swintak's level of detail is good. Every inch, from the empty beer can frieze to the lacy, ladies' slip-covered columns is considered and duplicated. Beyond the elegant non-illusion of reflection, the work reads as a personal portrait (or self portrait), with possible (subtle) feminist reading. The woman to whom this clutter belongs is undeniably a blue jeans girl, but she also owns a pair of red high-heeled shoes with matching underwear. She isn't fussy, she drinks beer, she reads the paper. She doesn't sweep her clutter under the rug, in fact, she'll even put it on display. Juxtaposed against Weiner and LeWitt, this piece is full of life and female agency. I really like the AGO's decision to mix it up. Weiner and LeWitt have been dragged out of history into an engagement with Swintak's contemporary take on conceptual art. Swintak is given a dose of high-profile respect, and her bright, grounded practice can handle it.
*NB: Wallworks started with Weiner, LeWitt and Swintak, whose works are all shown in proximity, but the project is ongoing and according to AGO PR will result in 20 pieces over the next 2 years. Raymond Pettibon also had a piece installed last night which I completely misread. It's about surfing dudes. I'm sooo not a California girl... I thought the big blue wave was supposed to be sky, that the reference to "curls" meant nice hair, and that the floating heads were angels of people who'd died from AIDS. Some days I should not be allowed out of the house. UPDATE: Sarah Milroy on Rayond Pettibon here
Get this: I've been given the assignment (by FUSE magazine) of writing a review of the proceedings of an artist-run centre conference...and I'm really looking forward to it. The book just came in the mail, I've skimmed it and I'm raring to go. It's called Off Printing: Situating Publishing Practices in Artist-run Centres (or in French, Tiré à part: situer les practique d'édition des centres d'artistes). For those other nerds out there who can't live without this book, there is an order form available here at the RCAAQ website. It costs $28.
