Thursday, May 28, 2009

Q&A: The National Gallery's own Angels & Demons Blockbuster?


Today, the National Post published my Q&A with David Franklin, curator of "From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome", which is the National Gallery of Canada's summer blockbuster. I know it's silly to tie the production of an art historical exhibition to Dan Brown's Angels & Demons... but of course that didn't stop me from trying. An exerpt:

Q The movie Angels & Demons just came out. Are there any connections here for Dan Brown fans?

A I think if you want to understand more of Rome and papacy there's definitely lots to delve into in this exhibition. I'm not sure about one-to-one parallels, though.

Q Still, aren't Brown's books about looking for clues in artworks and architecture?

A Yes, and it's a nice metaphor for what art historians do. We're also looking for clues, and while there may be this veneer of accuracy in what we write, there's a lot of room for interpretation and detective work. It's inevitable that art produced centuries ago is going to keep a lot of secrets or enigmas.


The show opens Friday May 29.

Image of one of Raphael's portraits from Jerry and Martha

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Grange Prize Wins, Luminato Losses & Montreal Malheur


A few newsy bits:

Tonight the winner of the $50,000 Grange Prize in Photography was announced tonight at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Mexico City's Marco Antonio Cruz was the winner as decided by popular online vote. Photos by all four finalists will be displayed at the AGO to June 26.

Today, Luminato, Toronto's best-funded arts fest, sent out a release admitting that Reena Katz's scheduled fest event, each hand as they are called, "has been postponed indefinitely and will no longer be part of Luminato 2009." The cause? Multiple project partners pulling out of the project over Katz's views on Palestine. More info from the artist here: eachhand.com

Kudos to the Globe's Sarah Milroy for bringing some info on this year's Montreal Biennial controversy back to us anglos. Still, I was a bit wondering why Milroy didn't mention the alternate biennial "OFF BNL MTL" organized by artists as disappointed in the official version as she.

Image by Marco Antonio Cruz from the Art Gallery of Ontario

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Monday, May 25, 2009

Out Today: Assume Nothing's Small-Town Social Realism


This spring, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria shone a spotlight on social-relational artworks with its show "Assume Nothing". Including well-known international artists like Harrell Fletcher and Haegue Yang as well as locals like Robert Wise and Andrea Walsh, the exhibition, which closed yesterday, seemed pretty interesting. (I especially liked the idea of Wise's sex-worker kiosk, installed on the grounds of the AGGV.) Today, the National Post published a brief Q&A I did with show curator Lisa Baldissera, as well as a bunch of images from the show. Here's an excerpt:

Q This exhibition focuses on "socially engaged art." Do you really think art can change society --and by extension, the world?

A I think the societies that are the most dysfunctional are the most unconscious, the ones where there's no field for debate. So as far as art changing the world, it's about creating a space that says discussion is important, but taking that discussion outside of the high-pressure environments of the boardroom or the city hall chamber, where there's urgency for specific solutions. It's about creating a field of "what if?" discussions where revolutionary ideas can be brought forward.


Image of Robert Wise & PEERS's The Office: A Portable Amenity Kiosk for Female Outdoor Sex Workers from canadianart.ca

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Saturday, May 23, 2009

Out Today: West Queen West Gallery Hop



Today the National Post published a wall-themed gallery hop of mine for the West Queen West area. It appeared earlier in the week on their Posted Toronto blog. Here's an excerpt:

Akau
1186 Queen St. W.
You know how in high-school chemistry you learned that an electron could be considered both a solid particle and a fluid wave? Well, Karen Henderson might be considered Toronto’s art chemist. In her artwork, Henderson has a tendency to position objects as time, and vice versa. In her latest work at Akau, this involves the display of two innocuous-looking still photographs that record over 14 hours of movement and time. Here’s how it happened: On Feb. 3, Henderson set up two cameras into Akau’s space, taking photographs of two display walls every 30 minutes for seven hours. Each time she took a new photo, she moved the camera’s view slightly to the right, generating what she calls a “Slow Pan.” The resulting panoramas look like simple 1/250th-of-a-second-snapshots, but contain much more. Conceptually, it’s a nice experimental project. But for all the time Henderson invested, it feels, in person, like there’s something missing, or at least amiss. Maybe this, too, is more dry science than engaging art? To June 13.


Image of installation at 47 gallery from Posted Toronto

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Canada! Arts! News! Roundup!


A roundup with lots of shout-outs to round off the week --

--On his Untitled blog, he Toronto Star's Murray Whyte has done a good job of following the troubling events surrounding the sudden "disassociation" of Jewish cultural org the Koffler Gallery from artist Reena Katz over her views on Palestine. As he reports, more artists are now choosing to dissociate themselves from the Koffler, and more Jewish cultural orgs are dropping out of Katz's project--which was to launch this week! (Untitled)


--The Georgia Straight reports that BC is the only province to have cut funds to the arts this year. Who sez? The Canadian Conference of the Arts. (The Straight)

--Erstwhile Canuck Paddy Johnson aka Art Fag City gives Toronto gallery sites a huge FAIL. Fun! (via Gabby Moser)

--Canadian architect Arthur Erickson died this week. The Post's Ampersand blog rounds up some of his greatest hits. (The Ampersand)

--With news of increasing museum fees in Toronto going pretty quietly into the Internet ether, I really appreciate Modern Art Notes's Tyler Green and his coverage of American admission fee issues, most recently at the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspiring to us too-adaptable, too-easygoing Canucks. (Modern Art Notes)

--The Globe's Fiona Morrow has a nice profile on how head Kathleen Bartels has changed the Vancouver Art Gallery for the better. (Globe and Mail)

--Two Alberta art writers, Amy Fung and Anthea Black, take a reality-TV style approach to their separate reviews of a Steve McQueen exhibition. Same exhibition visit, same deadline, same word count. Nice idea -- the reviews go up by midnight tonight! (Prairie Artsters & Shotgun-Review.ca)

--The Coast's Meredith Dault provides more insight into Eyelevel Gallery's Internet-free, 1970s-tech-only month. Can you say "rotary dial only"? (The Coast)

--Andrea Carson and I like to disagree about a lot of things over at her blog View on Canadian Art. But her thumbs up to overlooked artist Graham Peacock? Spot on. (VoCA)

Image from Goldenplec.com

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A World that seems Off: Motorola's Mateo Guez Collabo


A quick note on a current exhibition that baffles me/concerns me somewhat. For the month of May, the window of Camera, the bar and screening space attached to Stephen Bulger Gallery, has been taken over by something called "Off World." When you walk by, you see the large window covered with black vinyl. In a few places (maybe 8 to 10 or so) the black vinyl has been cut away to reveal a cellphone screen unfurling images of kids scavenging and playing in Smoky Mountain, a slum/refuse site in the Philippines.

The project is a collaboration between Motorola (one can see their logo on each small screen) and artist/filmmaker Mateo Guez. There is a special mobile-tech aspect in that the images can be downloaded to one's own phone via Bluetooth (or as I like to describe it, magic). The images can also be downloaded from the "Off World" website, with new sets of images uploaded weekly.

The whole thing makes me a bit uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, I guess, about these kids not being compensated by Motorola for their participation in this whole sponsorship thing. (You think at least they could've given them a phone or something, though I'm sure that would seem similarly in poor taste.)

It also actually makes me uncomfortable that these are images people can take with them on their phone, a discomfort again related, perhaps, to the privilege of having this technology to tote around pictures of people whose yearly income probably doesn't even total the cost of said mobile device.

At the same time, I can reason the other way with myself--like well, these are images of extreme poverty, and they should make you uncomfortable. Or, well, at least more people know now about these kids and their situation--isn't that a good thing? And don't people tote around/possess newspapers and magazines full of horrific images, for which the subjects are not compensated one iota? How is it different or worse toting around the images on a phone?

Still, I feel somehow that this dialogue, internal or otherwise, is not really justified by the means. Ideas? Gripes? Defenses?

Image of Mateo Guez's Super Hero, Smokey Mountain, 2008 from Contact Festival

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Paste Ups vs. Public Art @ Torontoist


In Toronto, the railway underpass at Queen and Dufferin streets is a hot graf and paste-up spot. Now, with the city doing a reno, it wants to put in some official public art. The finalist proposals—from Ken Lum, Isabelle Hayeur, Vera Frenkel and Luis Jacob—are pretty cool but one wonders how graffiti folks will respond. Read more at my Torontoist post on the topic. An excerpt:

Vancouver artist Ken Lum, best known for photo-text works on themes of migration, discrimination, and belonging, proposed a series of digital clocks. On one side of the underpass, the clocks, titled Sunrise Today, would report the sunrise time at locations around the world, from Dubai and Delhi to Toronto. Clocks on the other side of the underpass would do the same for sunsets, with the idea of differing geographic awarenesses being a fact of everyday multicultural metropolitan life...

[But a] key issue is whether graf artists will regard new, official public art as an invasion of space. City of Toronto public art officer Clara Hargittay thinks not. "Statistically," she says, "it’s true that if a work of art exists it is seldom tagged. This is also one good reason to put public art in, because artists respect other artists' work."


Image of the Dufferin railway underpass from Torontoist

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