
My end-of-the-month gallery stroll -- out in the Post today -- took me to the Bloor-Lansdowne area, a nabe where a new businesses seem to be changing the streetscape on an increasing basis. Here's an excerpt:
Days of the Eclipse/50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot
Mercer Union, 1286 Bloor St. W.
An eclipse -- at least one of the non-Twilight-series kind--offers a strange state during which light and dark coexist, as well as a sense of suspended time and cosmic awareness. So it makes sense that the works in Days of the Eclipse, Mercer's current group show, riff on these eerie feelings -- albeit with an emphasis more on bleak darkness than awe-filled light. It's a particularly Januaryish show that way, with the promise of beginning weighed down by anxiety and regret (post-holiday credit-card statements, anyone?). Best in show is L.A. artist Marie Jager's Past/Present/Future, a wall piece that overlaps its titular words to form a laser-cut mirror. This artwork reflects the difficulty of teasing apart the three temporal states, and suggests that the place where these difficult time-planets meet is, perhaps, one's own, unremarkable, very human body. Jager's Pollution Paintings are also interesting. Made of diesel oil, they look like exploding planets and seem at first to deliver a simple environmental-anxiety message. But they change when one learns (from the exhibition brochure) that Jager makes her paintings by holding canvases up to an auto's exhaust pipe at the moment of ignition. Overall, the show --complemented in the back gallery by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young's stripped-down film 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot -- takes a scientific, clinical approach to big problems of the soul. And though that kind of withdrawn weariness suits the season, this exhibit could use a little more feeling to balance its philosophy. To March 6.
Image of Marie Jager's Past Present Future from her website
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Three Reviews in Bloor-Lansdowne
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