Distillery-Area Reviews: Owen Kydd, Mandy Keeping, Daniel Hutchinson

With new galleries popping up as far west as the Junction, the east end seems more remote than ever to some art scenesters. (Case in point: the person this weekend who told me it's been years since he went east of Yonge. I get it.)

But the east end is still well worth a visit, as my reviews in this past Saturday's Post indicate. They cover Owen Kydd @ Monte Clark, Mandy Keeping @ Pikto and Daniel Hutchinson @ G Gallery. An excerpt:

Owen Kydd at Monte Clark Gallery
55 Mill St., Bldg. 2, to May 1
In these video portraits, Vancouver’s Owen Kydd continues to draw out the decisive moment, allowing us to look at people and places for several seconds rather than just 1/100th of one. Created along two sometimes down-at-the-heels strips (Vancouver’s Kingsway and Los Angeles’s Florence Avenue), Kydd’s videos find beauty in many things we might otherwise miss: a bungee cord-covered painting, strawberries scattered across a scratched wood tabletop, a lush tree spied through a bare window. Communing with Kydd’s artworks (particularly the Kingsway, Home series) produces the intense sensation that life is beautiful, if you only take the time to look at and appreciate it. He really has a knack for showing how worn our world and its people might be, but also how alive and how vibrant. Granted, some could quite reasonably query if it’s ever really this sunny in Vancouver, whether physically or philosophically. Others might opine that it’s all a bit too precious. Personally, I don’t mind Kydd holding my vision still for a few moments while the world marches on. One video focusing on a petal-losing Camellia (a plant that supposedly blooms just one week per year in Lotusland) underlines Kydd’s point: Life is falling away every moment, people. Let’s enjoy it — and maybe actually even see it — while it lasts.

Read on at the Post for the Keeping and Hutchinson reviews.

One thing I noticed from this outing: when I really, really like a show, I tend to try and think of (or acknowledge) how other people might also object to it. With shows I feel less exuberant about, I actually let go the critique thing a little more. Don't know quite what this is about, but I'll be watching this tendency a bit more from now on.

(Still from one of Owen Kydd's Florence Avenue videos from Canadianart.ca)