– LOVED:
– LOATHED:
– SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS:
– GOOD CURATING CAN:
– AN ARTIST/CURATOR PROJECT:
– CURATOR PROFILE: RHONDA CORVESE
– TALK TO US:
– AND FINALLY…

Hello,

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

-This month is short and sweet - I know you’re all very busy!

-We look at curating. What purpose does curating serve?

-This month: We loved, we loathed

-We stayed in Toronto, but we saw loads of art!

-We look at unique curatorial strategies

-We profile curator Rhonda Corvese

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. The Centre Cannot Hold - a show at the Toronto Free Gallery curated by Brenda Goldstein. The exhibition was subtitled ‘Prospects for Suburbia’ and featured some excellent young art. Much of it reminded me of work I had seen before, but not in a derivative sense.

Best was a paper ‘diorama’ drawing of a forlorn girl with curly script by Rose Bianchini, Jason van Horne’s post-nucelar miniature city on one side of the room (reminding me of Constant Nieuwenhuys “New Babylon”) complimented by a cartoonish soft sculpture city by UPBAG (Upper Parkdale Benevolent Art Guild.) Also Franco Defrancesca’s piece - a little piece of suburban garden with a fountain reminiscent of the cover of Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch.

A surprise was the Arbour Lake Sghool, a collective from Calgary which resides in a suburban house. Their video of a massive structure made from scaffolding and brown cardboard with a large red carpet being crudely pushed through a hole at the top was titled Volcano. While they were making that piece, their neighbours wrote a letter of complaint to one of the member’s parents, (in another city.) The letter was then emailed back to the collective, who used a video camera to ‘read’ the letter on the screen, line by line - with a John Baldessari-like humour.

Toronto Free Gallery

2. CONTACT Photography Festival: I love how this festival gets the city talking about photography. For the month of May, it seems everyone is going to galleries, looking at culture in a way that city bureaucrats can only hope to achieve.

3. Some Cats from Japan at Images Festival: Of a series of performances, this was my favorite. A guy sets up an overhead projector with a magnetized base, and proceeds to orchestrate a strangely Beckett-like duel between two paperclips. The sound was amplified, and the audience was riveted.

4. Melvin Charney at Nicholas Metivier. Most of my time as an undergrad at Concordia University in Montreal was spent at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and ever since then, the artist Melvin Charney (who created the centre’s sculpture garden) has fascinated me. His energetic exhibition at Nicholas Metivier gallery featured abstracted sculptures of running figures in addition to the Bodyworks series, in which enlargements of newspaper sex ads were overlaid with repetitive constructivist-style figures that the artist calls “armor-like sections of skin.”

5. Brandon Calvert’s installation Meditation on the Hollow Shell at the OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) graduate exhibition. There were cryptic posters around the building inviting viewers to experience something in room 375.

Walking down a hallway on the third floor, we were drawn toward a whooshing noise coming from a door. We peered into the small, dark fenced-in room and saw a video playing. A large skin-like organ on the floor of the video began to move, eventually giving birth to a man and a woman. Each naked figure appeared daunted by their environment, and the woman discovers a seashell. She then disappears into the wall, the same wall in which the video monitor was placed. A second installation featured two large umbrellas, under which hung a sculpture made of a hanging lightbulb inside two revolving geodesic domes.

6. Lynne Cohen at Olga Korper Gallery. Formal, disciplined, perfectly composed and well-considered, these photographs are seductive shots of interior spaces that reflect our pleasure in ordered thought.

What is the meaning behind the architecture of our interiors?

Olga Korper Gallery

7. Imaging a Shattering Earth at MoCCA - Curated by Claude Baillargeon, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Oakland University in Michigan, this stunning exhibition brings together images of environmental destruction in a seductively beautiful manner. Yes, Ed Burtynsky is included in the show, but his works are eclipsed by work by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison:

The ParkeHarrisons

And John Pfahl:

John Pfahl

LOATHED:
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1. The OCAD grad show. My overall experience of the show was that it lacked energy and modernity. It felt as if the students weren’t really aware of what was happening internationally. One exception was a great video installation by Brandon Calvert. (See above)

2. Kineko Ivic at Angell Gallery. Kineko’s a nice guy, but I couldn’t see the point of his faux-naïve robots on canvas. At least I hope they were faux. They were luscious with goopy paint, squeezed straight from the tube. The rectilinear robots sported vacuous slogans on their chests like ‘Cold Blooded’ and ‘Eye Know it’s Over.’ One four- legged creature says ‘Some day ur going 2 die’ and is decorated with peace signs (peace signs!). Oh and a number of figures had marbles glued on to their nipples. What for? Furthermore, the press release claims that Ivic’s works “bring to mind the work of..Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chris Ofili, Philip Guston and Alberto Giacometti.” No, no.

3. Bruno Billio in collaboration with Lee Kline. I love Bruno Billio’s piled furniture installations, which I’ve seen in several countries and at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. They tend to be original and inspiring. Last summer’s curated show at the Junction Arts Festival was really excellent. Here, though, in Kline’s Yorkville townhouse, Billio neglected to respond the the site as he might have done. Kline’s furnishings seem tailor-made for Wallpaper* and his pod table was a super design, but as far as the exhibition went, with a little more thought they could have created something really unique.

4. Karen Azoulay at Mercer Union artist-run centre. From the press release, there is a sense that this show might have been an enchanting, magical grotto. Yet the installation (taking up the entire right side of the gallery, while the left remained virtually empty) was hardly grotto-like, nor especially enchanting. The only allusion to a grotto were numerous ancient roman-style fountains displayed around the gallery. The grotto itself looked like a stage set in need of a performance. It was a lovely space of graduated colours reminiscent of a sunset, hung with correspondingly coloured yarn.

5. The fact that I missed the screening of Vincent Grenier’s work at Images festival and went to the Mediatheque and no one could help me when I asked if I could view the work.

Mercer Union

SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS:
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TORONTO:

Who is Collecting Whom?

Panel discussion on recent developments in the art of collecting photography.

Panelists are Alison Devine Nordstrom of the George Eastman House; Jeanne Parkin, art consultant and curator; Joe Baio, collector; Martin Barnes, curator of photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stephen Daiter, director of the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago.

CONTACT

VANCOUVER:

Access Artist Run Centre

Shadow Puncho: David Gifford

Canadian artist and magician David Gifford transforms the gallery into a cabinet of curiosities.

May 13th - June 17th, 2006 Opening: May 12, 2006 at 8 pm

Magic Show with Artist Talk following the performance: May 20, 2006 at 2 pm

Access

CALGARY:

Skew Gallery

André Ethier: New Works

“These are modern fairy tales in which happy endings tend not to count, painted with consummate ease; their intimate scale works in their favor.” - The New York Times, Roberta Smith

May 18th - June 24th, 2006

Skew

MONTREAL:

Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-garde in the 20th century

It’s hard to argue with the press release: “In the course of the twentieth century, Italian design has gradually imposed itself as a force to be reckoned with internationally.”

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

GOOD CURATING CAN:
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REINVENT A SPACE OR ENVIRONMENT:

In 1998, curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ organized an exhibition at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in the former Union Brewery, Dortmund. The show, entitled ‘Reservate der Sehnsucht’ (reservations of longing) used as a starting point one of the desolate, utterly destroyed floors of the building. It had been stripped of all usable parts, and the concrete floors, ceiling and walls were in a state of complete destruction.

Envisioning this as a sort of ‘landscape’, the curators (with a nod to Caspar David Friedrich) made a “profitable virtue from failed hope.” They converted the space into a romantic garden landscape, complete with grass and romantic hills, in a piece by Jan Peter E.R. Sonntag after Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’Herbe with Rodney Graham’s film Vexation Island and other works. The link is in German (sorry) but there are some pictures.

Hartware

PROVIDE NEW CONTEXT:

In the 2006 Whitney Biennale, curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne included a work by French artist Sturtevant, whose installation of re-created Readymades by Marcel Duchamp was useful in contextualizing the more contemporary works.

Body: New Art from the UK. How should we view government intervention in the arts? In Canada, we tend to complain about the lack of government funding for the arts, or its clumsy attempts at promotion. In the UK, the British Council has courted much controversy in its promotion of the YBA’s. In the U.S, overt government promotion of the arts tends not to be taken seriously. Curators Bruce Grenville at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Colin Ledwith from the British Council have identified an aspect of these works that moves them beyond their ‘British- ness’. I would call it a post-feminist reference to identity, and it’s really strong.

The show runs until May 28th.

Oakville Galleries

FORM A STORY:

The best-curated exhibtion I have ever seen was called Das Funfte Element: Geld oder Kunst? (The Fifth Element: Currency or Art?) at the Stadtische Hunstalle in Dusseldorf in 2000. Ancient coins, artifacts, works by Albrecht Durer and 17th century painting were combined with modern works by Giulio Paolin, Barbara Kruger, Thomas Schutte (my favorite), Tatsuo Miyajima, Bruce McLean and Yves Klein, among many others.

TAKE THE VIEWER ON A JOURNEY:

This was the case with another favorite show. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004. I wrote about the show for artnet.com and here’s some of what I said:

“Plato suggests that if the prisoner could free himself from his chains and venture out of the dark cave “into the light,” he would become “enlightened” and would recognize true reality. The progression of the exhibition from the looped works, which suggest entrapment, towards the black and white pieces, representing possibility, is thus a most welcome and successful curatorial strategy.”

ISOLATE AN ASPECT OF ART:

Man Somerlinck of Fordham Gallery, London. Somerlinck will bring his particular curtorial perspective to a show at the Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art, Belgium, May 7 - June 10. He is concerned with a certain, specific aspect of contemporary art in society.

His projects tend to be characterized by an intuitive insight in a dynamic fragment of the London art scene, a fragment that is not connected to an institutionally confirmed circuit.

Netwerk

AN ARTIST/CURATOR PROJECT:
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Toronto artist and curator Jessica Rose in collaboration with Jenn Goodwin organize The Movement Movement, an unconventional art experience in Toronto. The Movement Movement is a 5K ‘art’ run through art galleries, people’s homes, parks, private property, alleys and other unconventional routes on the last Sunday of every month. Details tbc in next month’s issue.

Although it evokes memories of those 1980’s ‘Participaction’ ads, it should unite some disparate groups. The running crowd, the art crowd..etc.

The idea: The ‘narrative’ of each run with include exploring a different course through the city in the context of a group run. As opposed to running in the middle of the road, each course is brand new terrain during which an encounter with a person, a place and a thing will occur.

Please check out these Participaction videos. They are HILARIOUS.

Participaction - The early years:

Video 1

Participaction - 1983-84:

Video 2

Participaction - Body Break:

Video 3

CURATOR PROFILE: RHONDA CORVESE
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Rhonda Corvese is a Toronto-based independent curator and an Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University.

Her interest in the examination of Canadian contemporary art within international frameworks is important to the development of the Canadian art scene, and she has introduced many excellent artists to Canada through a reciprocal dialogue. One recent project, The Idea of North, was a sound art exhibition and collaboration between curators in Norway, Iceland and Halifax (2005/2006). She also curated the Berlin booth - Berlin Constructions: Emergent Practices Today - as part of the special projects programme at the Toronto International Art Fair (2004).

She is presently working on 25sec., a continuation of a project begun in Berlin in 2003. A video portrait of art and cultural mediators, 25sec. focuses on individual positions from institutional and independent art contexts. It is a work by Berlin-based artists Angelika Middendorf and Andreas Schimanski.

SOME OF RHONDA’S RECOMMENDED ARTISTS:

Sofia Hulten

Sculpture, video, performance-related photography

Sofia Hulten

Valerie Mannaerts

Multi-disciplined artist (works on paper, sculpture, photography, installation, video, mixed-media.

Valerie Mannaerts

Shona Illingworth

Video and film

Shona Illingworth

Harold Offeh

Video, performance, installation

Harold Offeh

Saskia Olde Wolbers

Video

Saskia Olde Wolbers

Jennifer Stillwell

Installation, video

Jennifer Stillwell

Christof Migone

Sound, image and text

Christof Migone

Kristan Horton

Photography, multi-media

Kristan Horton