The fine folks at Dandyhorse magazine are having their third issue launch tonight at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. This new edition focuses on connections between music and bicycles, and includes my interview with Evalyn Parry, a singer-songwriter and most recently the developer of a musical play about women, marketing and bikes.
Appropriately, both music and bikes will be in great evidence at the launch via a Bike Art Dance Party. Also showing will be original bike art by Elicser, Marlena Zuber, Janet Attard, and Chimo Chan and Darren O'Donnell.
Admission is $10 for general public, $5 for subscribers.There will also be a vintage kid's bike for raffle and smokin' cycling wear for sale from the Deadly Nightshades. Wish I was in town to catch it all, but I'm much looking forward to seeing the party pics.
Stencil art by Janet Attard from Stencil Archive
Monday, August 31, 2009
Tonight! Dandyhorse Launch
Friday, August 28, 2009
Out Now: Harbourfront Gallery Hop
My gallery hop for this weekend's National Post took me to Harbourfront Centre, where amidst debate in Toronto about the need/quality of aboriginal art shows, the galleries offer a great selection of First Nations exhibitions--ones largely overlooked amidst all the hubbub. Here's an excerpt:
Alternation, Main Gallery
York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay W.
Organized by prolific Mohawk curator Ryan Rice, Alternation gathers work by six artists who address First Nations experience in unexpected, and often open-ended, ways. Inuit and Canadian artist Mark Igloliorte, for example, constructed a sculpture that is part snowboard-park half-pipe and part cultural-heritage mural. Then, he videotaped himself snowboarding on the structure, trying to master its metal rail again and again. The main idea—that cultural identity is more a process than a proclamation—is playfully delivered here. Also adept is Calgary artist Terrance Houle’s contemporary redo of Many Snake Woman, a painting by turn-of-the-century German artist Winhold Reiss. In his video, Houle directs his mother, grandmother, sister and daughter in holding the same pose and gaze as the woman in Reiss’s painting, eerily suggesting the ways that individual identities can get transformed by art into blank, one-dimensional icons. Elsewhere, Tom Jones offers a different investigation of cultural-heritage question marks in compelling photographs of non-native weekend warriors dressed up to “play Indian.” To Sept. 20.
At Alternation, I also quite enjoyed minimalist prints by Jewel Shaw and prints by George Littlechild, one of which is seen above.
Also, if you're heading down to Harbourfront for these, be advised that Universal Code at the Power Plant closes on Sunday.
Duly Noted: Canada's Art Biases
Sometimes it's hard to put one's finger on regional/national art trends when one's living in the thick of same. So I've been wanting to post the following, rather astute, observations from Windsor Biennial curator Lee Rodney for some time now. For me, they really helped peg the standard-bearing idiom in the Canadian scene right now... post-conceptualism.
Here, an interview with Bryne McLaughlin from canadianart.ca, Rodney elaborates:
Detroit is an exceptionally difficult place to read as an outsider and it has taken me the better part of five years to piece together and comprehend the city’s aesthetic tendencies. Conceptualism had no lasting impact and a lot of work is made up from the material history of the region—thus assemblage has become a dominant trend. When you start to understand the history of the region, it makes sense that artists working in the last four decades probably had no time for the abstractions of conceptualism. I can think of no parallel in Canada and I think both external jurors (David Diviney and Mathieu Beauséjour) were a bit perplexed by many of the submissions which seemed like a bad hangover from Abstract Expressionism: Joseph Cornell meets Jackson Pollock.
On the other hand, post-conceptualism is the dominant idiom in contemporary Canadian art and Iain Baxter& has had a major impact on pretty much everyone living and working in Windsor. The two cities are pretty disjointed in this respect and it’s impossible to suggest that there is a common regional approach of any kind. One of the aims of the Windsor Biennial is to get more dialogue going between the two cities. In the future it might be interesting to broaden the scope in terms of the region the Windsor Biennial could represent. Windsor has much in common with cities in the Rust Belt and the economic and cultural issues facing places like Cleveland or Buffalo are very similar. Hamilton is also interesting in this framework even though it is very close to the Greater Toronto Area.
Image of the "bias circle" from the University of Otago
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Art of Politics, Non-Shepard Fairey Style
Often in my interviews with curators of politically themed shows, I end up asking "Do you really think art can affect politics? How?"
My line of thinking is that even if I have my own varying opinions on the matter (politics being both a personal and an institutionalized affair) I'm always interested in how others rationalize or envision this connection between, say, sculptures and statecraft.
Here in Newfoundland, where I'm spending my P/T vacay, a particular case of art meeting politics is generating a lot of mainstream discussion. A well-known local artist/photographer, Sheilagh O'Leary, has decided to run for St. John's city council.
In other words, an election is happening and what O'Leary has decided is not to make a poster about it. Not make a piece of conceptual art about it. Not to create a spectacle at a rally. But actually run for it--again, to be clear, not as an art project or lost cause, as has happened in various Canadian cities in the past with other artists, but for reals.
Such a level of italicization/word emphasis might seem excessive to some, but O'Leary's quite real and untheorized bridging of the art/politics boundary gives me pause.
In part, it prompts me to reflect that in smaller communities, identities and roles tend to be less segmented than in larger communities, where role stratification occurs--in larger cities you have your artists and your politicians, your no-frills supermarkets and your luxury grocery stores. But in smaller communities, single entities take on more roles; artists, in this case, attempt political office, and a single grocery chain manages to serve the needs of most consumers.
On a less warm and fuzzy note, I can imagine some people from the big city simply saying "well, if someone doesn't have the mad skills to cut it as a full-time artist, they might well find a different career, politics included." So that's another way of interpreting the situation.
I recognize this as an elliptical, very vacay-ey stream of thought, but I am interested in any related thoughts people might have, particularly about the way geography affects artists and their roles.
And I wish O'Leary well in her campaign too. As she put it in an interview last year,
It’s a leap of faith. Why would somebody like myself, who’s been working in the arts realm take that leap? Well, who else is going to? Who’s going to take the chance and try to effect some changes at city hall? We’ve seen the same faces for the past several years, and it’s time for somebody younger, a woman—let’s get some gender equality going at the city—and let’s get somebody with some fresh ideas in there. I have no big political agenda. I’m not interested in working my way up to mayor or being the premier of the province. I just want to get on council so I can represent people who want some change.
And that's as good an answer as I've heard, for now.
Image of St. John's City Hall from CareerBeacon
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Recommended: Sally McKay on Aboriginal Art Shows Panel
The aboriginal art panel that I flagged last week happened on Sunday, and I was worried initially that without some kind of blog notation it might disappear into the ether. (Also, then I wouldn't be able to find out what happened from my perch out here in St. John's, goddammit!) Luckily, Sally McKay has written an extensive post summarizing the panel discussion and her astute views on it. Recommended reading for sure, with a bunch of comments to boot.
Read More......Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Are Suburbs the New Downtown? Spacing Launch Weighs In Tonight!
There's a bunch of great art stuff happening in the Toronto suburbs these days--from Alex Metcalf's tree-listening installations at Oakville Galleries to the Leona Drive Project, which takes over 5 empty suburban houses as art installation spaces. Appropriately, the next issue of Spacing, launching tonight at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, takes a look at the suburbs--both their promise and their problems. Also along for the ride are the regular Spacing features and profiles, including my review of the new book Public Art in Canada. Here's more info about the issue and launch:
DATE: Tuesday, August 25, 2009
LOCATION: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
COST: $10, includes a magazine. $5 for subscribers
TIME: 7:30pm to 1am
RSVP: Please visit Spacing's Facebook listing to rsvp
The issue’s cover section focuses on Toronto’s suburbs. The city faces its greatest challenges and opportunities in these areas. Spacing senior editor Dylan Reid presents compelling examples of how the suburbs can evolve instead of trying to be reinvented. Spacing’s other senior editor, Shawn Micallef, examines the walkable community of Dorset Park in Scarborough. Our writers explore such things as plans for a downtown Mississauga, environmentalists in Markham, urban farming in subdivisions, the makeover of downtown North York, Burlington’s successful waterfront, and how youth are being engaged to shape the future of their suburban communities.
Out today: Q&A on Expanding Horizons
I'm still out on the east coast of the east coast today, and I must say that I'm really enjoying some spectacular land-and-sea views--almost, as they like to say, pretty as a picture. Out today in the National Post is a different type of take on beautiful views: my Q&A with Hilliard Goldfarb, curator of "Expanding Horizons", the first-ever survey of both US and Canadian landscape painting. The show has been on this summer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and continues there to September 27. Then, on October 17, the show opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Here's an excerpt from our chat:
Q In most of these paintings, Canadian or American, nature is pretty idealized -- there's little seen of blackflies or bear encounters. How do you resolve that?
A I did include some storm images. And I also tried to emphasize that the rigors these painters had to go through were at times horrific -- as well as, in some ways, humorous. In one letter home, John Singer Sargent complained bitterly about porcupines eating his boots, flies, the constant misery of the rain, canned food fried in a pan and waterfalls "pounding and thundering all night." So that experience is documented, even if it's not in his paintings.
Image of John Singer Sargent's Yoho Falls from the MMFA
