Three Dundas West Reviews, Just to be Kind of Conventional and All

Now that Nuit Blanche is over, we can go back to looking at art in the daytime! Not that there ain't a lot of other festivals around to organize the experience for us... the super-quick Flash Forward Festival of photography (Oct 6-10) in Liberty Village looks like a mini-tour of the emerging photog world in terms of its exhibitions, while heavies like Alec Soth step up to its lecture mic. Also coming up soon is Printopolis (Oct 18-21), which focuses on printmaking (apparently famed Dutch printmeister Stefan Hoffmann is printing a work directly onto the Drake Hotel's windows and other public spaces as part of the fest). So it's with a bit of an extra-conventional mood that I headed out to some commercial galleries on Dundas West for my reviews at the National Post this week. The reviews went up online today and will be in print on Saturday. An excerpt:

Nicole De Brabandere at Alison Smith Gallery 1410 Dundas St. W., to Oct. 23
Sometimes art appreciation can simply be a matter of finding your own particular kind of weirdness reflected back to you in an object — and Nicole De Brabandere’s works are definitely my kind of weird. Her small porcelain sculptures mash up decorative with ugly, industrial with biological, artistic with domestic, and fleshy with futuristic. Lately, these have gotten even weirder (yay!) with the addition of bricks and brick slices. De Brabandere is inspired by growing up on an Ontario farm, and by the way its harsh outdoor work contrasted with the charming depictions of rural life in her parents’ Franklin Mint figurines. That sense of contradictory meanings being bound together in individual objects definitely comes across in her works and in titles such as Sugared Intestine. Overall, De Brabandere’s wide-ranging references, absurd mood and crafty practice remind me of better-known artists such as Luanne Martineau. I trust that her own reputation will soon expand accordingly.

You can read on here for more.

(Image of Nicole De Brabandere's Sugared Intestine from Alison Smith Gallery)