sally mckay and lorna mills

Gabrielle Moser's Top Ten

1. Oliver Husain at the Art Gallery of York University

hussein

Photos by Cheryl O'Brien

I think this is the first show I saw in 2010, and it set the bar pretty high. I love Husain's playful installations which combine unexpected, seemingly fragile materials with beautiful video pieces and audience interaction (The fan! The balloons! The scarves!). The AGYU solo show was impossible to explain to other people, and yet I kept talking about it all year. I still haven't caught his new solo show currently up at Susan Hobbs, but it is first on my post-comps viewing list.

2. "To Be Real," Althea Thauberger, Lars Laumann, Helen Reed, Prefix ICA, curated by Rose Bouthillier

Althea Thauberger

This group show on art, ethnography and fandom, curated by recent OCAD Criticism and Curatorial Practice grad Rose Bouthillier, hit just the right mix of earnest and ironic for me. It was nice to see Althea Thauberger's work in Toronto, which seems to happen rarely, and to see Lars Laumann's very strange Berlinmuren put into conversation with Helen Reed's fantastic co-production with a bunch of Twin Peaks fan fiction writers (it helped that I was also re-watching Twin Peaks from the beginning at the same time).

3. Ryan Trecartin at the Power Plant, curated by Helena Reckitt and Jon Davies

I usually have video art attention deficiency problems and find it difficult to sit through anything longer than 7 minutes, but I had to be pulled away from the beds, airline seats, picnic tables and bleachers that populated Trecartin's show at The Power Plant. The solo show was a big scoop for the gallery and, whether you love or hate Trecartin's frenetic, over-the-top productions, you couldn't deny that this seemed like an "important," truly international-caliber show. And, as Terence Dick pointed out in his list, after seeing so much work these past two years that was historiographic and obsessed with the past, it was refreshing to see an artist whose aesthetic seemed to herald something about the present/future.

4. "No Soul for Sale: A festival of independents" at the Tate Modern, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni

Black Dogs

I caught this exhibition over two days at the Tate Modern while I was living in London. It marked the 10th anniversary of Tate Modern and invited more than 70 artist-run centres and non-profit/independent arts organizations to co-habitate in the Turbine Hall. The event was not without its political and organizational problems, such as a lack of artist fees or travel funding (some of them are outlined on Black Dogs' website, which used the event to discuss the implications of an "independent" event in a large institution like the Tate: http://www.black-dogs.org/index.php?/recent-current/how-not-to-sell-your-soul-at-tate-modern/), but it was also unlike anything I have ever seen before, and wandering amongst so many exhibits and events from all over the world did drive home the point that incredible things are happening in artist-run culture, in spite of (or because of) increased neoliberal pressures.

5. Wangechi Mutu at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated by David Moos (I think?)

mutu

Maybe the biggest surprise of 2010 for me was Wangechi Mutu's solo show at the AGO, "This You Call Civilization?". After reading many critics' responses to her work, which can be a bit over-the-top (the pock-marked walls, for instance, were a bit much for me), I didn't expect to like the show, but Mutu's large-scale collage works, especially the ones that incorporate medical diagrams of women's reproductive "ailments", were both comical and icky.

6. Tacita Dean's "Craneway Event" at Gallery TPW, curated by Kim Simon

A co-presentation with the Images festival, this 16mm film that charts several days' rehearsal of Merce Cunningham's "Craneway Event" dance performance was more watchable and engaging than every commercial movie I saw this year. I brought several people to see it during its all-too-short run and kudos should be given to Kim Simon for bringing Dean's work to Toronto and presenting it with just the right amount of reserve.

7. Katie Bethune-Leamen at MKG127

I loved Bethune-Leamen's wacky mix of Victorian arctic explorers, experimental orchestral synth-pop, dazzle camouflage and Cold War spies. Her videos, sculptures and paintings were gorgeous to contemplate on their own, but also offered up more nuanced, layered meanings the longer you stayed with them and the more background research you unearthed about her references.

8. Ken Lum at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite

Lum

Lum's from shangri-la to shangri-la seemed the perfect, subtle commentary on the effects of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games on Vancouver, recreating several shacks from the Maplewood Mudflats–the site of 1960s artistic radicalism on the city's North Shore where Malcolm Lowry and Tom Burrows both created work–at the Vancouver Art Gallery's "Offsite" location at the base of the city's largest building, a luxury hotel/condo complex called The Shangri-La. Whether you drove by it on your way to the North Shore, or saw it up-close, it was an understated reminder of the city's trajectory through urban development.

9. "Un-homely" at Oakville Galleries, curated by Matthew Hyland

moulton

Shana Moulton

This two-site group show on the feminist uncanny was a pleasant reminder of what Oakville can do when it tackles a great combination of works in an original way (the Centennial location has never looked so different). Standouts were Paulette Phillips' new video work, seeing Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" in larger-than-life scale and getting to watch Shana Moulton's "Whispering Pines" series in full. I'm already looking forward to the other exhibitions in the gallery's three-year series of feminist projects.

10. My favourite art discoveries of this year: Karen Asher's photography, Margaux Williamson, Carl Wilson and Chris Randle's blog Back to the World, Ryan Trecartin's list of inspirations/directions for his W magazine spread, "Studies in Motion" by the Electric Theatre Company, Bravo's "Work of Art" reality TV disaster, and the realization that NFL football makes pretty great animated gifs.

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