– LOVED
– LOATHED
– LIFE IS ART IS LIFE
– PREDATORS & PREY AT YDESSA HENDELES ART FOUNDATION
– OCAD: A SCHOOL TO WATCH
– A FEW ARTISTS TO WATCH
– NEWS
– SOME OF MY UPCOMING WRITING
– PROFILE: PAUL BUTLER OF THE OTHER GALLERY
– ARTISTS TO GOOGLE
– TALK TO US
– AND FINALLY…

Hello,

Welcome to View on Canadian Art - the collector’s newsletter.

-This month looks at who and what to watch in Canada.

-We loved, we loathed

-We went to CONTACT, Toronto’s photography festival

-We suggest a few films to watch

-We look at an art school in transition

-We recommend some artists to watch

-We profile Paul Butler of The Other Gallery - a dealer to watch!

This letter goes to over 200 curators, artists, dealers, editors and collectors in London, Florence, Rome, New York, California, Washington, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Please forward it to anyone who you think would be interested! Thanks and enjoy!

With very best wishes, Andrea

LOVED
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1. American Icons at Corkin Shopland Gallery.The best show I saw for CONTACT in May was this fantastic exhibit featuring work by Margaret Bourke- White, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz and others. A dizzying selection of phenomenal works were displayed along the two walls in the gallery’s main space. One needs historical work to put so much contemporary art into perspective. The show continues through end of June.

Also in the dimly-lit back room were a number of wonderfully muted Parisian scenes by Eugene Atget.

2. Highlights from the Black Star collection at BCE place. The Black Star Historical Black and White Photography Collection was gifted to Toronto’s Ryerson University by an anonymous donor. The NYC-based Black Star photojournalism agency was founded in 1935 by Kurt Safranski, Kurt Kornfeld and Ernest Mayer, all fleeing Hitler’s Germany.

Many people of cultural and political significance are included in the collection, among them Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Malcolm X, Marshall McLuhan, Stalin, Regan, Hemingway and Matisse. Photographers include such legends as Andreas Feininger, Bill Brandt, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mario Giacomelli. The show was well installed in the centre of the atrium. Ryerson has plans to build a gallery and research centre to house the collection - Toronto is lucky to have it!

3. The Toronto waterfront proposals on public view at BCE place. Five proposals by the following teams to address Toronto’s beleaguered waterfront:

-Foster/Zeidler/Atelier Dreiseitl

-Balmori/H3/Halcrow/Lobko/nARCHITECTS/Saski/Snohetta/ Weitz & Yoes

-Wasaw

-Tod Williams Billie Tsien/Martinez Lapenna-Torres

-West8/Dutoit Allsopp Hillier/Schollen/Diamond & Schmitt/ Arup/Halsall/Dennis

I think the best are the Tod Williams Billie Tsien team’s proposal although it includes the construction of a new island. And the Allsopp/Diamond Schmitt proposal, despite the quite horrifying inclusion of floating maple-leaf shaped islands in the lake.

Toronto Waterfront website

4. Chris Gergley at Monte Clark. I really like Chris Gergley’s work. But that’s because I know about it. Chris is a man completely obsessed with photography, and his photographs each carry a story which links the work’s title, image and occurence within itself. They are perfect works for a collector looking to bridge contemporary and historical photography, or conceptual with documentary - or for anyone who wants a conversation piece.

5. Could Have Been the Weather curated by Christopher Eamon at Tatar Gallery. Toronto has seen a number of well-curated shows in commercial galleries, a great way of contextualizing work and encouraging collectors to think in terms of relationships.

Chris Eamon, curator of the Kramlich collection (of video art), was invited by Judith Tatar for the gallery’s tenth anniversary show and given curatorial carte blanche. The result was a group of moody works and photographs, the best of which was the installation by San Francisco-based artist Mads Lynnerup. A brown paper umbrella sits in the corner of the room. The sound of rain pervades the air. Upon walking behind the umbrella, you see a video of two hands scrunching a large piece of paper up into a tiny ball. The show ended on June 6, but you can get more info from the gallery’s website.

Tatar Gallery

LOATHED
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-Power Ball 8 (Toronto’s annual “do” in support of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery) was mediocre. So here are 9 tips for Power Ball 9:

1. Take the dj out of the corridor.

2. Put him in the same room as the dancefloor.

3. Eliminate ALL lineups.

4. Have more decoration - energy! Colour! Make it a visual feast!

5. Make the events really outrageous. The karaoke was fun, but you can do that at the Gladstone every week. Pillow fighting? Try foam or jello and get naked!

6. Tell people what’s going on! Signage!! Who knew that Francesco Vezzoli’s Caligula was playing? And play it on a loop, not occasionally.

7. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Take one hors d’oeuvre theme, for instance and do it well.

8. Serve CHAMPAGNE for God’s sake! Or at least Cava. $160 and all I can get is prosecco???

9. Do whatever it takes to make sure people get their money’s worth.

The Power Plant

-The Scotia Bank-sponsored show of work by Medecins Sans Frontieres. Five photographers from the VII Photo Agency traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005 with MSF in order to shed light on the suffering of the Congolese people as they struggle to survive a war that remains virtually invisible to the outside world.

The idea is so important but the installation was very unfortunate. Someone brought office dividers down into a beautiful atrium, set them around the edge of the room and put up some snapshots. The installation should have given the images the importance that they deserve.

-Artist talk by Stephen Waddell. Stephen Waddell’s work is often lovely and poetic - he can produce some incredible images. In his talk, he referred several times to Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life, (Waddell began his own career as a painter.) But I didn’t sense, from his talk, a strong direction for his art, and I think that’s important. Otherwise how does one justify it?

-Joan Fontcuberta’s Googlegrams at Artcore. The artist has used the Google image search engine to group a number of images together under the same theme. He then overlays this grid of images with an image of his own choosing (one that typically contrasts with the underlying images).

The larger image is achieved through burning and fading of the grid. For instance tiny portraits of the world’s richest men and women overlaid with an image of a homeless man.

Many of the images in this show were kitsch; I kept thinking of the excellent artist (and master of kitsch) Glenn Brown.

Artcore Gallery

LIFE IS ART IS LIFE
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At the beginning of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, he shows some photographs of the earth from outer space. As Marshall McLuhan noted, humankind developed a new relationship to our planet once this space perspective was made available. That photograph was in a sense the ultimate photograph. To trace photography’s history from the camera obscura to the camera to the mega-distancing effect of this image is also to trace man’s relationship to nature.

The film’s central message is that global warming is a moral issue, that we, regardless of nationality have to embrace this challenge. This will necessitate a change (complete rethinking?) of how westernized societies conduct ourselves.

Art photography has already mimicked a global perspective, in work by Andreas Gursky and others. ‘Environmental’ photography (Burtynsky et al) often takes a God’s-eye view of the landscape. This is important because such a perspective allows for a kind of objectivity. There is a sense that we are observing ourselves and the meaning of our actions.

Photography has always been closely linked with technological advancement; digital technology has allowed for the proposing of multiple truths. At the same time, self-observation and documentation has suggested that our very actions are creative acts. The earth is our canvas.

Duchamp’s readymades proved that life could be art. Today’s artists are making art from life. Noviembre, a Spanish mock documentary from 2003 recently screened at Toronto’s Goethe Institute is a perfect example of this.

The story follows an acting troupe based in Madrid, whose idea of real theatre begins with performance out in the streets, face to face with the public. For instance they dress as gypsies and go through the crowds as gypsies, incognito to all but themselves. Eventually they stage a fake shooting, remaining in their roles until the real ambulance arrives. Needless to say, they are arrested several times. The film ends in a terrifying episode and is well worth seeing. For the troupe, there are no limits. The question becomes, “what is the difference between a faked shooting and a real shooting, if all the surrounding circumstances are the same?”

Mark Lewis’s film Rear Projection features the Canadian actress Molly Parker in what is essentially a portrait. The actress (who was filmed in Los Angeles) stands still, hands clasped, against a background filmed in Algonquin Park. The backdrop moves in and out slowly, as if breathing. (The camera was set on a 30-foot track and uses the push-pull effect of the camera’s lens.)

The four-minute film references the Renaissance portrait, wherein the landscaped background would have been painted in around the central figure. Many of Lewis’s works deal with the idea of double-time that exists in painting, and how that translates when the scene is re- interpreted in the time-based medium of film.

Rear Projection takes the conventions of Renaissance portraiture and gives them new meaning. One could say that he brings art to life through subtly emotive, sublty moving painting. Like Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a video recreation of Velasquez’ Las Meninas, or Sam Taylor-Wood’s time lapse Vanitas portrait of rotting fruit, these works ask the viewer to look through the lens of history from the present moment.

Not only are we looking down at ourselves physically, but also back at ourselves historically. What is the meaning of this perspective?

Al Gore’s film - An Inconvenient Truth

Mark Lewis’ films at Monte Clark Gallery Toronto until July 23:

Monte Clark Gallery

PREDATORS & PREY AT YDESSA HENDELES ART FOUNDATION
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The excellently curated show at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto opens with a bang.

A set of fine porcelain from the Hindenburg Zeppelin, inscribed with a Nazi insignia incorporating an eagle and a swastika. Beyond its own identity, this work spoke volumes about much contemporary art today, which uses the discrepancy of meaning between two opposing perspectives to make a new statement. The opening statement of the show, then, is that the difference between art and life is in the perception. This point is echoed in the second work on display. A pair of the curator’s own gold, studded Gucci stilettos, every inch echoing both the predator and prey of the exhibition’s title.

The exhibit continues with a series of black and white arial photographs of Zeppelins flying over exotic cities from New York to Rome to Cairo. The images are enlargements of photographs included with cigarette boxes of the day - a glamorous marketing incentive.

Other fantastic works include a vitrine arrangement of Victorian toys including Mother Goose. Another vitrine showcases an antique vampire-killing kit, arranged in precisely the same formation as in the auction catalogue from which they were purchased, and, in another room, two reproductions of antique lamps, lighting a room full of Andre Kertesz’s photographs of life in a Trappist monastery.

It’s wonderful how Ydessa Hendeles is so invested in understanding, and articulating the meaning of things.

OCAD: A SCHOOL TO WATCH
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Excerpts from Sara Diamond’s Presidential Installation Speech at Roy Thompson Hall, Toronto.

In some quarters, we are seeing the dramatic re-enactment of the Age of Anxiety of the 1920s..This context introduces a compelling urgency for art in the 21st century, an art that, with all of its complexity and challenges, allows us to live within and resolve “the rich texture of the present.”

Canada is still, in part, bound up with the industrial age of centuries past and reliant on its resource economies..We need to move boldly and quickly to find, harness and challenge the imaginations of a new generation and to channel them into our most important endeavours - economic, scientific, social and cultural.

Let’s imagine our nation, our world, where citizens placed art and design at the centre. Personalization and the direct sharing of stories and opinion are hallmarks of 21st-century mass culture. This sharing occurs in a context that is increasingly collaborative…In our time, knowledge is now cognitive, sensory and integrated.

In the 21st century, imagination is power!

In this new Age of Imagination, excellent, successful products, services, and processes make use of sophisticated art and design skills. Art and design engage our values..Artists and designers sniff the Zeitgeist, and having sensed the future, they have the disciplined imaginations that can blend emotion and form.

To be leaders in the emerging imagination economy, we require a new model army, not based on command and control but rather on distributed intelligence and on a priori-appropriate hierarchy..OCAD can unite the integrative power of art’s long-term and social vision with design’s systematic and creative ability to meet needs..OCAD will embrace the Ecology of the Imagination.

We will produce the Young Toronto Artists who will meld the eloquence of form, the expressive quality of materials with lilting commentary on the Age of Anxiety. These artists, with their exhibitions in Beijing, Kabul and New York, will place us on the international cultural map and make Toronto a cultural tourism magnet..To ensure that Canadians are culture makers as well as consumers, game designers as well as players.

We will build world-class, niche graduate programs, framed through interdisciplinary studios in art, design and liberal studies, and provide a gateway to the larger world of science, engineering and medical research. This will be a networked resource, built with partners across Ontario and the world..Circulating art and design in concert, not in competition, with others in Toronto.

Yes, this is a bold vision, but it does not require magic to become a reality, although we do intend its results to seem magical, indeed.

Ontario College of Art and Design

A FEW ARTISTS TO WATCH
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-Mike Bilodeau. Just a guy from Hamilton, Ontario, Mike was “discovered” by curator David Liss and given a show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. His black, spidery wall-mounted sculptures are made from scrap metal and electronic machine parts that look like disconcertingly futuristic life forms.

Bilodeau showed them under ultraviolet light at Mocca for his show Exoskell, to accentuate their “exquisitely abysmal quality”. I would love to see these vaguely gothic wall sculptures alongside those of by Cathy de Monchaux’s. Eaqually macabre, his are the masculine to her feminine.

Cathy de Monchaux at home

-Megan McKnight at PM Gallery. McKnight has a deft hand with paint, using it like a pastry chef, creating tiny swirls of pigment built up like coral on canvas. Her seductive technique works best on smaller canvases, and she has yet to reconcile her ideas into a wholly complete work where background and foreground come entirely together. She is loaded with possibility, though and she’s one to watch.

PM Gallery

-Adam Brandjedis - won the 2006 award for Integrated Media at the Ontario College of Art and Design and he’s just won the 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize which gives him a wonderful studio space. His sculptural project Genpets are “real” genetically modified, packaged pets. They have thankfully arrived safely in Basel where they will be included in an exhibition through August.

Check out:

Genpets

And then:

Adam’s blog

-Dyan Marie (Gallery) - Opened in September 2005 with an urban- oriented mandate. The city is examining itself and Dyan Marie’s artist projects are a part of this. The gallery’s current project is a community and public artwork that creates “an art-embedded walking system throughout the community”.

Participating artists include Vera Frenkel, Eldon Garnet, Tony Scherman, Monica Tap and others. Each has contributed a drawing that has been recreated as a bronze relief sculpture. The drawings are set into the walkway and “walkway users can create their own print edition by covering the cast in paper and rubbing a pencil over the surface.” Free art!

Dyan Marie Projects

-Painter Mike Bayne. He’s 26, with an MA from Concordia and he makes miniature, exquisitely detailed paintings. One to watch, definitely.

He shows with Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, but there’s little info and no images on her website so instead here’s an interview with the artist:

Mike Bayne interview

-John Monteith - Presently shows with Xexe Gallery in Toronto, where you may have seen his pale portraits or line drawings, but more importantly he will be going to New York in the fall to study at Parsons. He has a subtle, refined sensibility and I think he’s another one to watch.

-Shaan Syed - Left Toronto last year to get his MA from Goldsmiths in London. He shows with Birch Libralato in Toronto, and currently has a show at Plug-In in Winnipeg. Watch for his work to change considerably, in coming years.

Plug In ICA

NEWS
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-This year’s Serpentine Pavilion opens at the end of June with a stunning pavilion by Rem Koolhaas. The big draw will be the enormous, translucent egg-shaped dome floating above a lower amphitheatre.

The pavilion will hold a series of lectures and events throughout the summer. And in the gallery itself there’s a Thomas Demand show through August 6. What could be better?

Serpentine Gallery pavilion

-Speaking of pavilions, in the fall Vancouver firm Pechet and Robb will represent Canada at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, so book your tickets now. Their installation Sweaterlodge will envelop the Canadian pavilion with an enormous, orange polar fleece sweater. Once inside, visitors will pedal stationary bicycles screening vignettes that intertwine urban life with nature, to reflect the biennale’s theme of “Cities, Architecture and Society”.

Afterward, the sweater will be shipped back to Canada where it will be recycledinto various garments at a public “sew-in”.

Sweaterlodge

-And speaking of Vancouver, Catriona Jeffries just opened her new gallery. The industrial warehouse space, designed by architect/artist Robert Kleyn, allows for larger installation pieces.

The current show, appropriately titled 247 East 1st, features work by Kevin Schmidt, Geoffrey Farmer, Ian Wallace, Brian Jungen, Damian Moppett, Germaine Koh, Jerry Pethick, Christos Dikeankos, Judy Radul, Roy Kiyooka, Arni Haraldsson, Alex Morrison, Myfawny MacLeod, Ron Terada and gallery newcomer Isabelle Pauwels.

Exhibtion continues until July 8.

More on Isabelle Pauwels:

Isabelle Pauwels

-London-based film artist Stuart Croft is part of How I Finally Accepted Fate, at New York’s EFA Gallery. Curated by Jason Murison, the show is about “objects and images which function through memoir.” Also featuring work by Jennifer Cohen, Angela Dufresne, Maureen Duncan, Ilana Halperin, Sarah Hirzel, Matt Keegan, Keith Mayerson, Noah Sheldon and the wonderful Carolee Schneemann.

Exhibtion continues to July 28th.

Exhibition press release

SOME OF MY UPCOMING WRITING
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-A catalogue text for My Lies by Toronto- based Swedish artist Gunilla Josephson at Archive Gallery in Toronto. Gunilla Josephson tells the naked truth about her experiences in the resistance during the Second World War, her traumatic relationship with her famous film director father, and her double life with her French Viking twin. If you like Pipilotti Rist, you’ll probably love this show. The exhibition opens on June 9, the catalogue launch and artist talk will take place June 24.

-A review of Body: New Art from the UK at Oakville Galleries in the summer issue of Border Crossings.

-A review of Ulf Puder’s recent show at Artcore in the current (June) issue of ARTnews.

ARTnews

PROFILE: PAUL BUTLER OF THE OTHER GALLERY
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Paul Butler runs The Other Gallery, a web-based art gallery from Winnipeg, where he presides over a constantly evolving schedule of satellite gallery shows and Collage Parties at venues across North America and Europe.

Paul’s circle includes artist friends from college, mostly producing small, affordable artworks in the same vein as Marcel Dzama of the Royal Art Lodge. His Collage Parties developed as a way of recapturing an art school energy. They are nomadic, informal and flexible, an basically involve a bunch of magazines, scissors and glue, friends and beer.

Paul says: “Collage parties function as creative incubators for all involved.”

Upcoming events include a number of shows using Catherine Mulherin’s space on Queen Street West in Toronto, as well as the following Collage Parties:

“Footprints on the Moon” White Columns, June 23, 2006, NYC

“Paul Butler’s Collage Party” ZieherSmith, June 25-29, New York, USA

“Paul Butler’s Family Collage Party” MoCA LA, July, Los Angeles, USA

“Paul Butler’s Collage Party” Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, August, Toronto, ON

Paul Butler

ARTISTS TO GOOGLE
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SARAH ANNE JOHNSON

Currently showing at Plug in Winnipeg:

SARAH ANNE JOHNSON

ELIZABETH FEARON

Showing with Rob Waters and Jason Kronenfeld at MOT London:

ELIZABETH FEARON

GEORGINA BRINGAS

Mexican artist showing at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto:

GEORGINA BRINGAS

RICARDO RENDON

Another Mexican at Diaz Contemporary, Toronto:

RICARDO RENDON