While posters for Art Condominiums plaster Queen West these days, actual art can seem harder to find. (Greener Pastures Gallery is now a hair salon, for instance.) But there's still a few good shows out there, as I point out in today's National Post gallery column. Here's an excerpt:
Elise Rasmussen at Katharine Mulherin, 1082 Queen St. W.
Toronto-trained, Brooklyn-based artist Elise Rasmussen offers an alternately dreamy and dismal look at Newfoundland in this compact solo show. Revving up the romanticism are four large photos of windswept landscapes and lasses looking out to sea. Bringing the despair is a small-town mural of a bustling Main Street shown right next to the actual ultra-deserted strip. These extremes intertwine in other works, like After Shanawdithit, which photographs 30 Newfoundland women posing the same way the last known Beothuk did in a famed painting. A double-frame video, titled When the Sun Crosses the Line that Wind Will Rule the Weather, reinforces the effect, presenting shots of quaint fishermen and sunny forests alongside a voice-over on cultural extinction. First, Rasmussen seems to suggest, the Beothuk were driven to their deaths. Since then, the way of life that drove them out -- the colonial fishery -- has met dire straits, too. There's no resolution, and no masterpieces, but certainly evocative and considered stuff. Overall, Rasmussen's show represents a thoughtful attempt to get inside a place and its difficult complexities. To March 28.
Besides my other picks in the paper at the Gladstone and Queenspecific, I recommend Dorian Fitzgerald's show at Clint Roenisch--though I admit I'm a bit biased, having known Fitzgerald socially for a couple of years. Will Munro's show at Paul Petro, which closes this weekend, is also worth a stop by.
Image of Elise Rasmussen's Zephyr of the Bay from her website
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Out today: Queen West Reviews of Rasmussen, Building Storeys & Micah Adams
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Recommended: Shai Kremer, Maura Doyle, Larissa Fassler
A few shows I've seen of late and recommend taking in:
Shai Kremer at the newish Julie M Gallery is a great show. Kremer's an Israeli-born, New York-based artist who here presents very strong photographs of the Golan Heights area. The images really effectively show the legacy of conflict and war woven into the landscape, a pretty horrible mix of beauty and tragedy. Struck me at first as Burtynskyish, but for human conflicts rather than environmental ones.
Maura Doyle at Paul Petro is a gas. (I feel like I'm 80 using that description, but whatever.) Doyle's show "New Age Beaver" is themed on--you got it--beavers. Not only did the beaver happy face drawing on the wall crack me up, but so did Doyle's replicas of beaver-created objects previously described in books and field guides. Bizarre and fun.
Larissa Fassler at Interaccess is also worth a look. Born in Vancouver, Fassler trained at Concordia and lives in Berlin. Fassler's got a sculpture showing alongside a video work by Richard Schutz, but it's really Fassler's work that's the draw. It's a miniature replica of all the tunnels and hallways in a U-Bahn subway station. It looks kind of like a weird spaceship and I really liked the way it brought the underground up, revealing the invisible architectures of cities.
Finally, Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer's Chinese is a Plus at V-Tape provides an interesting look at migration and culture. Boisseau and Westermeyer are from France and Germany, respectively. The video itself is a bit dry and subtle, consisting simply of German students of Chinese language in conversation. One group of students is of Chinese descent, and talks a lot about cultural preservation and pride, while the other group, of German descent, talks more haltingly about an interest in Chinese food and cities. (Commerce more clearly drives the interests of this latter group, and culture the former.) There's something in all this that's a great portrait of cultural gaps, changes and stillnesses in a super-migratory world.
Image of one of Maura Doyle's beaver-sculpture replicas from Paul Petro
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Recommended: Jason McLean, Adrian Norvid & more
Some quick hits: I recommend the current show at Jessica Bradley. Montreal's Adrian Norvid provides more sad rock and roll references than you can shake a Helix LP at and Toronto's Jason McLean brings the colour with large-scale text and abstraction paintings. (His cardboard watches upstairs are also fun.) Tis indeed a no-brainer.
Also recommended: Julie Beugin & Gretchen Sankey at Paul Petro (impressionist mishmash in development and humorous ghost-inpired sculptures), Leopold Foulem at David Kaye (ceramic witticism to accompany a show at the Gardiner), Jon McCurley at Gallery TPW (anti-anti-urbanist performance, high-concept comedy, and low-concept silliness in sculpture), and Stripmining for Creative Cities at Toronto Free (a small but thoughtful look at gentrification, and prevention thereof).
Jason McLean, Hello Ruby in the Dust (top) Adrian Norvid, No Brainer (middle) from Jessica Bradley Art & Projects,
