Shelley Adler is a Toronto painter who has a nice assortment of works up right now at Nicholas Metivier Gallery. I thought I was going in for the canvases (like Molly, above) but I found I also really loved her smaller works on paper, which I hadn't seen before.
In any case, I got to chat with Shelley about her work, which has generally focused on the face and the figure, a few weeks ago. The resulting condensed Q&A was published in yesterday's National Post. An excerpt:
Q What’s the difference between a portrait and a painting, in your view?
A Well, a portrait is a rendition of a person’s face. And a painting is about light, colour, texture, scale: all the abstract or formal qualities. When I look at a painting, I actually see the abstract qualities of it first. I don’t even see what it is—what the subject matter is. When I walk through museums with people, they will say, “Oh, look what this artist has painted!” and I will say, “What? What? What have they painted? Look at how it’s done!” And in my work, I try find the middle ground between portraiture and painting.
Q With the growth over the past 10 years of sites like Flickr and Facebook, it seems like there are a lot more images of faces floating around in the world. What do you think of that?
A I don’t actually think about it that much, to be perfectly honest. There are faces everywhere. Look at billboards, movies, ads in the newspaper—every time you turn around, the face is advertising something. I guess with Facebook, you have to find the image of yourself now, right? But that self-conscious image is not the kind of image that I’m interested in. I’m interested in faces that don’t have any of that self-consciousness. That’s why I use friends and family a lot, because they seem to not filter themselves for me.
Lately, she has started to look at the male figure more. (There is a particularly humorous couple of these among those works on paper.)
The show, up until February 25, is recommended, and there's also an opportunity to hear Adler speak in person this weekend as she does a Q&A with Sarah Milroy February 18 at 2pm, too.
(Image: Shelley Adler's Molly, 2011, photo by Michael Cullen, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery)
Friday, February 17, 2012
Shelley Adler Q&A out in National Post
Friday, February 10, 2012
Finding Myth in (Supposedly) Mundane Places: Dorsey James profile up at Yonge Street Media
Whoa, did I ever get a lesson about myth when I visited Pickering artist and arts educator Dorsey James earlier this winter. This guy really has a mental store of ancient stories that he loves to convey--and also relate to contemporary life, whether in the suburbs or elsewhere.
I really appreciated Dorsey's enthusiasm for myth and his ability to convey it. This is even the case when it comes to some Grade 9 Family Studies students that I visited with on the same day at Dunbarton HIgh School. They were working on a symbolic representation of their families, carved in wood. Kids in the Facebook age getting excited about the historical meanings of pyramids and eagles and all-seeing eyes? Not something I'd have suspected.
I tried to convey some of these impressions in a profile of James that was posted on Yonge Street Media this week. Here's an excerpt:
Tell most people that you've found paradise in Pickering, and they'd likely look askance. But artist Dorsey James seems to have discovered it. And you just might feel the same way after visiting his light-filled studio.
Housed in a converted garage on a quiet street along Dunbarton Creek Ravine, the bright, white space is filled with well-used carving tools and fresh sawdust smells. African masks, sketches and inspirational quotes (like Henry Miller's "Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life") hang from the walls. Wooden sculptures in various states of development rest on workbenches, shelves and floors, while offcuts fuel the brass and iron stove, creating a cozy retreat from winter's cold—one that James' friendly black lab, Merlin, and golden-eyed cat, Boo, often avail themselves of as well.
"This is my Shangri-La," James says with a smile. "But be careful of Merlin—he might just lick you to death."
This is pure James: a mix of centuries-old mythical references and warm, down-to-earth presence. That characteristic combination threads through more than 30 years of his artworks, from a small in-studio sculpture that renders Greek gods Selene and Endymion in glowing blonde ash wood to a totem-pole-like public piece at Alex Robertson Park that depicts Demeter and Persephone etched out of flame-coloured cedar.
To find out more--including James' past as a US air force mechanic, and its relationship to his work--read on at Yonge Street Media.
(Image of Dorsey James in his studio by Voula Monoholias for Yonge Street Media)
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Review of Shary Boyle's Canadian Artist at the BMO Project Room
In January, Toronto artist Shary Boyle opened a new installation, Canadian Artist, at the BMO Project Room in Toronto.
The BMO Project Room is kind of a funny venue -- it's a small room located on the 68th floor of the BMO bank building on Bay Street in Toronto. It's cool in that it commissions new works from Canadian artists, and then, from what I understand, actually gives the work back to the artist at the end of a 10 or 11 month exhibition period. But it's also kind of weird in that it's only viewable by appointment. The staff, when I've contacted them, have always been pleasant and accommodating, but I bet the location and appointment thing does cut down on the usual art-world foot traffic.
In any case, I was excited to see Boyle's new work there. I wrote a little report on it (including a subsequent visit to Boyle's studio) that went up on the Canadian Art website today. An excerpt:
It all began with an invitation—a thick, heavy, gold-embossed missive that thudded into mailboxes last month advertising Shary Boyle’s installation Canadian Artist at the BMO Project Room in Toronto.
More than spelling out event details, it laid down a gauntlet—and maybe a gag or two.
“A really ostentatious invite that you can crack over your leg… When have you ever seen that in Canada?” asks Boyle over a cup of coffee in her Toronto studio. “And when have you ever seen something like that with the words ‘Canadian Artist’ on it?”
The answer, for this writer: never. Upon opening the invitation, I had laughed with surprise.
“It’s a joke,” Boyle says. “You look at the Serpentine or Gagosian or whatever—they always have those kinds of invitations. It’s about the status related to that cultural site.”
“The things that are made in our country don’t have that same status. They can be as important, interesting and skilled as anything happening in New York or Berlin or London, but … they aren’t lent that status. So I’m just putting forward a precedent.”
Boyle’s installation for Canadian Artist—also intended to be precedent setting—consists of an imaginary family tree (or, as she writes in an exhibition text, a “preposterous, yet semi-logical, system of ancestry”) for its titular character. It stretches back five generations, to approximately 1850. The ancestors’ faces, 44 in all, are presented as pale, unpainted chalkware reliefs edged discreetly with gold; only the artist’s porcelain visage is decorated with glazes. Straight, minimal lines of ribbon link the array in the space, while a related website (canadian-artist.ca) provides background material on each ancestor.
Read on at Canadian Art for the rest.
And to book a viewing of the work for yourself, visit telephone (416) 643-2609
or send an e-mail request to curator@canadian-artist.ca.
(Installation view of Shary Boyle's Canadian Artist by Toni Hafkenscheid and via Canadian Art)
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Emanuel Licha Q&A Out in Today's National Post
I really enjoyed Emanuel Licha's War Tourist series when it was showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario a few years ago. So I was excited to speak with him on the phone recently on the occasion of a two-venue Prairies show at Latitude 53 in Edmonton and Paved Arts in Saskatoon.
The resulting condensed Q&A from our conversation came out in today's National Post. An excerpt:
Q What started your War Tourist series?
A In 2004, I was living in Sarajevo and documenting a bombed house. A car arrived and one woman and two men stepped out. The men were journalists and started taking photographs. They stayed five minutes, then the woman handed me her business card, and I saw that she was a tourist guide. I was pretty naive then, because I didn't know there were tourists of war-torn areas, and that there have been for centuries. That night, I decided to abandon my projects. I felt concerned by the war, but obviously, being Canadian and never having been under a bomb attack, I felt it wasn't legitimate for me to speak about. But the next morning, I called the woman, and that became the first video in the series. It was like, "OK ... I'll be a tourist." Finding the idea of the "war tourist" was, to me, an answer to this problem of legitimacy, a ridiculous way for me to address my own situation vis-à-vis wars.
For more, check out the Arts & Life section of today's Post.
(Image from Emanuel Licha's R for Real courtesy the artist.)
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Artists in the GTA: Faisal Anwar profile at Yonge Street Media
The internet is, to some people, all about connecting. But to others, it can be about reinforcing distances between people as well.
I got to thinking about this while writing my latest profile for Yonge Street Media. It took me to Oakville, where I visited with Faisal Anwar, a Pakistan-raised artist who bridges interests in the web, theatre and social work. Here's an excerpt from the profile:
Some of Anwar's projects—like a 2010 Nuit Blanche piece that turned viewer texts and tweets from Toronto, Karachi and New York into leaves on a single, growing tree—have provided surprisingly poetic visualizations of local and global community. Other ventures have been technically prescient, like a 2004 video-game interface that required children to use broad physical gestures instead of sedentary button-pushing—a paradigm the Nintendo Wii used two years later to achieve mass-market success.
His current projects play with storytelling. Pluscity, a collaboration with artist Siobhan O'Flynn, seeks to make Twitter streams during big civic festivals "more meaningful to people who are experiencing that event" by visualizing them as flowers and planets. Throughout, Anwar has been interested in "the idea of how the audience actually participates in a narrative," whether that narrative is theatrical, social, technological or otherwise.
"I'm trying to work against the randomness of information. Yes, we can share everywhere [in a web 2.0 environment]. But then how do you get focus? How do you find a meaningful narrative around it? How do we generate a community around it?"
To find out more, read on at Yonge Street.
Let me also say that Anwar's wife, Tazeen Quayyum, is an artist too, and makes very interesting work that's more in the realm of painting and sculpture.
(Image of Faisal Anwar by Tanja-Tiziana for Yonge Street Media)
Friday, December 23, 2011
Happy Holidays!
Happy holidays! I'll be taking an official break from today through to Monday, January 2, inclusive. All best for the new year.
(William Armstrong's 1835 winter scene on a Toronto bay from Wikimedia Commons)
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Year-End List Time! My Top 3 Art "Things" of the Year at Canadianart.ca
Aw, yeah, it's year-end list time! Today I got to join in the action with my top 3 art "things" of the year posted at Canadianart.ca.
All of my picks had to do with institutions. An excerpt:
1. Some Downward Pressure on Public-Museum Admission Fees
This year, I completed a rather unexciting transition—from being a writer whose main concern is art to being a writer whose main concern is art’s institutions, in particular our large, publicly funded museums and galleries. Over the past decade—despite museum policies that mandate as much equitable access as possible to their publicly held collections—major museums and galleries in Canada have tended to eliminate free access to such collections, at the same time implementing admission-fee hikes that well outpace inflation. In 2011, for whatever reason, that trend has, thankfully, started to stall (and even reverse somewhat). On October 27, the Royal Ontario Museum—until that point in time, by my calculation, the most expensive museum to visit in Canada—announced it was lowering its admission fees from $24 per adult to $15 per adult. On November 16, during a public talk in Toronto, National Gallery of Canada director Marc Mayer said he wanted to restore free permanent-collection access at the nation’s largest art museum. And on November 22, the Power Plant announced that admission would be free for one year beginning in March 2012 in honour of its 25th anniversary. None of these actions can come close to mending wholesale the relationship between public art institutions and the constituencies for which they were ostensibly founded. (And in highlighting these few nominal improvements, I recognize that I’m failing to cheerlead for the museums and galleries that have bothered to maintain free public-collection access and other free access over the years, from the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and beyond.) But it’s a small start to what I hope will be a more equitable and people-friendly art world of 2012.
To read my other two points, head to Canadianart.ca.
(Image of the Royal Ontario Museum admissions desk Copyright 2009 Royal Ontario Museum)
