Andrew Harwood's Best of 2007 Art’n’Stuff
1. Wildflowers of Manitoba Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob, video installation for TIFF at MOCCA. Ok I have wanted to do a radical faerie/hippie fag piece for years using geodesic domes and cute live models, but you beat me to it! I loved this show more than I can describe!!! I wish that it had a longer run!!!
2. Luis Jacob and Keith Cole, A Dance for those of us whose hearts have turned to ice …., version at Birch Libralato – what can I say except that Sarah Milroy, Glove & Snail Art critic, was afraid to laugh at this work in her review of Miami Beach/Basel Fair. She was critiquing the fair for its over-commercialization, yet when she saw Dance – the only thing not really for sale, she couldn’t cope. I am sure that Luis and Keith would have been delighted to know that Milroy was able to laugh at their art. For Christ sakes, Sarah, please call a gay man, for styling, before getting your picture taken for a magazine: re: Canadian Art’s “Hot Toronto” issue. I know you love Stephen Shearer’s drawings, but you don’t have to have hair like them!! You are one hot MILF (according to my younger straight male art friends & I can see it too!) and a really astute reviewer and I loves ya, but I know so many amazing hairdressers!!! “Quasi-portly”, indeed, this what Milroy called Cole in the same review. How is that you are the Glove & Snail art critic and you don’t even know who Keith Cole is? Get outta Holts (Leah McLaren’s got that covered already!) and into the art scene!! Cole’s work has been reviewed in McLean’s, not necessarily known for its hip art coverage, and he was also on the cover of C Magazine (the most improved art mag in the country I may add)!!! I think there’s a Chapters just east of Holts on Bloor for research FYI?
a. Luis & Keith thanks for such a great piece that was humourous, fascinating and represented Canadian fags at Documenta!!! (I think a first at Documenta for Canada – is there still homophobia at certain levels of international art events? What next: out of the closet Canadian Fags representin’ at Venice ? What will the white ladies that run the art world in Toronto say about that?)
b. Sorry about the Council’s lack of interest in initially helping you guys out!! (Or is there still h-phobia at certain Councils?) More questions than answers boys – keep ‘em coming!!!!
3. Auto Emotion: Autobiography, Emotion And Self-fashioning, curated by Helena Reckitt and Greg Burk, The Power Plant – (yes the receptionist at PP said you were called Greg now.)
Thank the goddess they hired Helena Reckitt ~ this was one of the best shows I have seen at the Power Plants since AA Bronson’s exhibition. Auto Emotion was a powerhouse survey of contemporary art and performance. Marina Abramovic’s works were like wonderfully odd restorative tonics and a great compliment to Nemerofsky-Ramsay’s saccharine Madonna makeover, what a superlative range of art. Just a note to folks down there at PP , the Toronto art scene is not as cold and even conceptually-based as you have alluded to with your “Toronto Show” this year ~ get with the program. You guys kinda tend towards the conservative side!! Some artists who have shown there repeatedly need to come out of the conceptual closet so to speak ~ ya know who I mean!!
4. Fastwürms, DONKY@NINJA@WITCH @AGYU It was so great to see all of Kim and Dai’s shows from Zsa Zsa, TAAFI and PPCA re/presented . Thanks to Philip Monk and Emelie Chhangur for championing their work!!! Würms you made outstandingly handsome installations at York – I know you worked all summer on Donky and it paid off!!!! Wow~!!! I gave a lot of head at that reception.
5. Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Dead!, Dead!, Dead!, was just Gorgeous!, Gorgeous!, Gorgeous!! (I did a show at Zsa Zsa once called Crafts!, Crafts!, Crafts!) This exhibition was a stunner. The Puritan puppets were so charming and creepy, all at once; they were my favourites, in an already stellar show. The Foundation’s installation crew also needs to be lauded as they help tp make your curation/collection practice even more beautiful! Who couldn’t resist a charm bracelet that once belonged to Ms. Pepsi herself – Joan Crawford!! Hendeles is, unlike any other curator I have seen, able to present works that deal with the humourous and whimsical, but also with the darkest of human subjects in the same exhibition, maintaining clear and ever thought provoking relationships between objects and ideas. In the last several years I have left her Foundation’s exhibitions thinking about them for days, sometimes weeks and sometimes longer. No web site just get the hell down there and see it in person.
6. Michael Bartosik, Dome, at Nuit Blanche – Oh my god that was brilliant Bartosik!!! Anyone who can make a dome out of florescent light tubes rocks my world!! It was so beautiful to see that fluorescing structure come out from behind the trees on the knoll on the corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park. Pure Magic against the dark night sky. I am sure Bucky Fuller would have crèmed his slacks if he was alive!! I am so sorry the drunks tried to wreck it!! Janet Morton’s Femmebomb, was also über spectacular for Nuit Blanche!!
P.S. (Scotia Bank put some more god damn money into this “all night culture thang” it might even get better – ya cheap bastards. You should feel guilty for how much free f’n PR ya got and how little $$ ya put into this venture – you’re, like a bank – pony up the dough ya cash hookers! Hire more independent curators damnit –we’re starving in this town! Same with that god awful Illuminati Festival (Luminato – WTF was that?) – you’re freakin’ L’Oreal!!! pony up the cash too - ya cheap corporate hoes!)
7. Jade Rude, The Rambler Rebel and Tristan Zimmerman, Untitled at The Ministry of the Interior. Extra special props to Jason MacIsaac for opening a fab store/gallery, earlier this year, that blurs the lines between art, design, furniture, craft, urban decay, and interior decor!! Jade Rude’s The Rambler Rebel was an installation used a spinning hunk of aluminum (“consumer grade” – her fave) in the front window of the space and on further inspection was a life-size unfolded origami version of a car. David Cronenberg eat your heart out!! Crash meets Jade Rude!! I know that Rude is quite a formalist – but honey the content of this one is truly profound!! Tristan Zimmeramn’s Untitled, was an interactive sculpture of brass horn parts, that let viewers place their iPod ear pieces to portals around the edges of the piece so that they could here their own tunes amplified through a variety of tuba, trombone and trumpet flutes – old school meets new school – private becomes public – just dazzling, amazing and charming.
8. Mercer Union’s Renaissance: the following shows at Mercer Union portray the gallery’s comeback as a real artist-run centre in Toronto from its past overly oppressive post-conceptual stridency – thank the goddess!! - Michael de Broin’s Shared Propulsion Car & Anitra Hamilton’s, Beater are actual social and cultural critiques of car culture (Jade Rude, too). Yay!! I Love the social experiment aspects of these artists. Janet Morton’s, overgrown was so inspiring and lovely – using recycled and textile materials – so – so homemade modern ~ I can’t stand how exquisite this show was!! An exemplary statement of how an artist can look at nature and culture. Instant Coffee’s Nooks, took Jenifer Papararo’s Vancouver kitchen nook and turned into social spaces! I am sure her kitchen table has seen its share of snowstorms – wink, wink!! This show was tight, fun, sexy and playful – what IC does best and when they really work together and it really works. Dean Baldwin’s Minibar, - he hand rolled me a mini cigarette and I got to smoke it inside the installation – great hospitality and wicked installation Baldwin, Toronto the good forget about it. KUDOS MU!!! Please keep up the great work!!
9. Marianne Lovink, Molecular Mechanics at KATHARINE MULHERIN CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS – Lovinks’s aquatic/molecular worlds in blacks and whites were divine!! If I had access to acid in high school – I think this is how I may have viewed my biology textbooks!! Trippy and elegant. Her new works using stretched and coloured pop bottles on sculpted metal racks had a very ‘60’s feel, but f’n fresh! Lovink is also an artist who bridges nature and culture in ways that questions our relationship to nature – on a micro-macro level. God germs and cells can be so sexy!!
10. Suzy Lake, Beauty at the End of the Season, Paul Petro Contemporary Art - I have to admit that I hated this show the first time that I saw it. The more I visited the show, the more I loved it. There was a sense of humility to this body of work that was almost shocking. It was a gentle and loving reminder of our mortality and that we are all aging. Yet, Lake’s photographs of rosebushes were stark, homely, unadorned and ultimately quite emotional. There is a great risk for the artist to talk about aging, beauty and femininity in a way that she has not explored before and especially in a Paris Hilton wanna-be cultural era. Her close-up photos of faded roses, using the peeled skin of c-prints, are such magnificent reminders that our dermas are not only aging, also that even faded beauty is still beautiful and necessary to the cycle of life!! Beauty at the End of the Season was thoughtful, subtle and had resonant meaning way beyond its exhibition. Congrats too, on the fabulous reviews on Lake’s work in the feminist retrospective in L.A., too. Well-deserved recognition girl!!!
Honourable Mentions:
RIP SPIN Gallery – Thanks for the great shows and always, always interesting parties – I wish you the best of luck in the future!! Hip Hip Hooray for Juno Youn and Stewart Pollock!
11. 18 Illuminations @ McLaren art Centre, Barrie - Carla Garnet & Corinna Ghaznavi, curators
12. Kent Monkman @ MOCCA
13. Andy Fabo @ SPIN
14. EAT THE FOOD @ MOCCA - Camilla Singh & David Liss curators
15. Stephen Andrews @ Paul Petro Small Works + Multiples
16. Heather Goodchild @ Kmart
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