The Contact photography festival officially kicks off tomorrow in Toronto, with what they say is 1,000+ artists participating. It also looks like it could be one of Contact's most socially conscious years ever. Today the National Post ran my Q&A with festival director Bonnie Rubenstein. Here's an excerpt:
Q The theme for this year's festival is "Still Revolution." What does that mean?
A We make our themes quite broad so they can mean different things to different people. What we're looking at on one side are the revolutions in photography itself, in its technologies. And on the other side, we're looking at photography and its ability to document transformation and massive change in social and political realms.
Q You've helped organize a central exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on this theme. How does Still Revolution come across in actual artworks?
A The exhibition at MOCCA deals primarily with the social and political meanings of revolution. We have eight different artists with works that are very different, from documentary to completely abstract.
Mikhael Subotzky, for instance, did a documentary project on Pollsmoor Prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela spent some time. It's notorious for very difficult, overcrowded conditions, and he did 360-degree panoramas of certain cells. For me, it's dealing with a result of the apartheid era, even though there was such a revolution around apartheid in the nation as a whole.
Image of Martha Rosler's Home Invasion from artnet.de
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Contact Fest Q&A Out Today
Monday, April 27, 2009
Artsy, Newsy & Roundup-y, all at once
Just in time for grad! Prom dresses become phalluses in Calgary – and get sorta censored
Going to Venice, dah-link? Yeah, me neither. But there is a free official Venice send-off party this Thursday that’s a little easier to get to.
The Canadian government has decided to dole out $6 mil in matching funds to arts groups like Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Banff Centre, the Calgary Philharmonic and the Edmonton Folk Festival; not much vis arts except MANIF Quebec, but nice to see.
The Ontario government boosts the Ontario Arts Council Budget by $5 million, bringing total funding for the year to $60 mil. I'm glad to see this; last year the OAC spread $40 million among 1,300 individual artists and 874 organizations across Ontario. But why's their funding jump less than the ROM's or the AGO's?
The feds are set today to release a few mil for "tourism-drawing arts events" like the Toronto International Film Fest as part of a newly created “Marquee Tourism Events Program”. Sadly, the monies can’t go to regular operations or deficits but must be new programs or new marketing initiatives.
After dropping out of many sponsorships due to tobacco advertising restrictions, Imperial Tobacco is getting back into the arts funding game with yet another new Canadian arts prize—the Arts Acheivement award. This one is worth $75,000 and goes to organizations, not individuals.
The Star's Murray Whyte has a nice profile of Canada’s Venice commish Barbara Fischer
The Globe's Sarah Milroy pans a new exhibit of native art at the AGO, but gives props a new exhibit of young BC artists at the National Gallery
The Coast's Sue Carter Flinn notes that dogs are having their day at gallery in Halifax
An arts centre opens in Vancouver’s contested downtown eastside
BC arts groups say funding has been frozen in the face of an election
Vue Weekly's Amy Fung says Edmonton’s art scene is “No Killer, All Filler”
Image of Kristin Ivey's "The Phallus Series" from The New Gallery
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Holy F-Stop! Contact previews are back!
Toronto's Contact bills itself as the world's largest photography festival. And with over 200 exhibitions throughout the city, as well as courses, lectures and TV programming, it just might be right. Though the fest doesn't officially kick off until this coming Friday, May 1, some shows are already open: Alison Rossiter's photo-geek look at old photo papers opens today at Stephen Bulger, while the Blackwood Gallery's group show Awashawave opened earlier in April. Some of my pencil-in-the-calendar picks are published in today's National Post. Here's an excerpt:
One highlight of the [feature] show is the Toronto premiere of a new work by internationally renowned Vancouver artist Stan Douglas. Massive prints mixing supermodels and the Middle East by iconic New Yorker Martha Rosler are sure to attract attention, too, as will American artist Trevor Paglen's covert photographs of spy satellites and CIA jets.
Out on the streets, there's also a lot to see via Contact's 24/7 public installations program. Mumbai-based art star Shilpa Gupta will put some smart, historically inspired photos on shipping containers at Harbourfront, while Toronto-born, New Yorker-published photog Louie Palu will install photos of Afghanistan graffiti in the bathrooms and back walls of Queen West's grotty Bovine Sex Club.
Image of Stan Douglas' Abbott & Cordova, 2008, which will be on view at the fest, from canadianart.ca
Friday, April 24, 2009
About Last Night... Matthew Teitelbaum & the $20,000 MOCCA Award
So I got a press invite at the last minute to the MOCCA Award ceremony last night, and I went to see what the award recipient, Matthew Teitelbaum, might mention in his remarks.
After all, MOCCA announced it was bestowing the $20,000 award on Art Gallery of Ontario director Teitelbaum back in December 2008, while the gallery was still basking in renovation afterglow--and well before the gallery laid off 23 workers. Seeing as how the gallery didn't decide to rehire any of those workers following a surprise grant of $18.6 million from the provincial government, which was announced just days after the layoffs, there was some speculation (see Gabby Moser in a past comment here) about just what Teitelbaum would do with the $20,000 prize.
Answer: Teitelbaum did the quite politically wise thing of turning around and donating the $20,000 back to MOCCA, an institution which, though its name sound grandly national, is a much smaller, younger, closer to the ground museum than the AGO.
Overall, the evening seemed to have the tone of a roast or, really most readily for me, a bar mitzvah. Photos from Teitelbaum's youth were displayed, as were images of the first places he worked like the London Regional Museum and the Mendel Art Gallery. (Generating laughs were images of Teitelbaum with Keith Richards in real life, and with his head pasted onto Andy Warhol's Elvis silkscreens.) Quotations on each wall provided testimony to why Teitelbaum deserved the award. It seemed that many funders of the AGO and of the MOCCA were in attendance--the ceremony itself being a $500-a-ticket funder for MOCCA--and there was a sense of pride for certain.
But were the layoffs mentioned? No. "Challenges," yes. "Optimism," yes. "Inspiration," yes. But "layoffs"? No. Adding irony to the situation was the fact that one speaker spoke fondly of how Matthew knew the first name of every one of his staff. It's hard to reconcile that "affectionate family" tone with what has been going on there of late.
The criticality was slightly upped by a post-award conversation between TVO pundit Allan Gregg and Teitelbaum. Gregg did ask some key questions about the current mania for museum renos (Teitelbaum rationalized the AGO's reno as "providing a better home for art") and also asked Teitelbaum to rationalize the millions his institution has recently received (his answer included the observation that the government knows "As the AGO rises, so do the prospects of all cultural institutions.... You can't let your flagships fail.")
So besides a couple of piquant attempts, the back-and-forth was mainly a soft-lob affair. To be expected, really. And it truly does seem that Teitelbaum has done some hard work and served as an inspiration to the local funder community. But when the AGO has been unprestigiously named on an international timeline of museums and recession impacts, and when they're turning their fall/winter season over to an exhibit of King Tut (a move prompting newly forgiving media supporters to backpedal) to bring in the cash, there are a lot more questions that remain to be asked.... and answered.
Image of (L to R) the AGO's Matthew Teitelbaum, the MOCCA's director David Liss and the BMO's Gilles Ouellette from Canada Newswire
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Review of Jae Ko Out Today
Korean-American artist Jae Ko makes some really lovely sculptures with paper. Unfortunately, some of her most interesting work is excluded from her current Toronto show at Galerie Lausberg. Read my review in this week's NOW for more details.
Image of Ko's art from NOW
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Bingo + No Internet = Nouveau Retro?
I'm interested in a strange juxtaposition that's developed today. Mercer Union, a hip-yo artist run centre here in Toronto, is doing bingo tonight as a fundraiser. And Eyelevel Gallery, another oft-youthful locus, this one in Halifax, is at midnight starting its Eyelevel Unplugged project, yanking all computers and Internet access from the space and (I presume) banning their staff from checking work emails otherwise.
As Eyelevel notes in a "Final Disconnection Notice!" email,
"Starting tonight at midnight, Eyelevel will fall off the digital grid and will not be responding to or sending any email communication for 35 days. As part of our upcoming project Eyelevel Unplugged, the Gallery will be going off-line from April 23-May 27th. During these 35 days, we will not be checking emails or or using any office technology that post-dates 1974."
The partial rationale for Eyelevel Unplugged is to commemorate the gallery's 35th anniversary by reverting to the technological conditions identical to its birth year. I will speculate that another partial aim might be to kick off a new retro trend, namely no Internet. You got it people, the 80s revival ain't just harem pants and Laura Ashley floral prints anymore!
Do you think they'll actually be able to do it?
Image of cyber-devoid 1970s coolness from the Eyelevel archives
Steve McQueen Q&A Out Today
Steve McQueen's best known right know for his direction of the feature flick Hunger, but some of his art is also opening this weekend at the Banff Centre. I was fortunate to get a chance to chat with him by phone last week about this particular piece, "Once Upon A Time". Today the National Post published the condensed interview. Here's an excerpt:
Image of slides from McQueen's Once Upon a Time, 2002, from Banff Centre website. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, NY Read More......
