Recent responses to VoCA:

I just sat down…and read your blog and savoured it all.
I got to tell you - its fabulous!! Informative, fun, entertaining and
very smart. What can be better. Thanks for filling in some big holes.
-Marnie Fleming, curator, Oakville Galleries

Hope you sent this (October 27 post) to the editors at the Post, good sleuthing!
-Robert Birch, Birch Libralato Gallery

Congratulations, it’s long overdue!!
-Michael Awad, Artist

boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!

Happy Halloween courtesy Toronto fashion designer Lydia K - part of Unholy Alliance: Art and Fashion Meet Again at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Tell it like it is is a fashion show on Thursday, November 2 at 9PM at MoCCA.

Featuring clothes by Canadian Designers from boutique le trou, Dean Horn, Lydia K and others. A performance by Ulysses Castellanos and music by Buck 65. It’s free!

LOVED:

In Sit You by Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, at the Toronto Sculpture Garden. You can sit in front of this work and contemplate it, as you would a Rothko or a Barnett Newman. But of course any ‘aura’ that might have existed in a painting has been erased by the tri-vision billboard.

So what are you contemplating? The pretty colours? The neat way the stripes merge into one another? The relationship between art and industry?

The relationship between art and industry continues over at the exhibition of photographs by Steven Meisel at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. MoCCA is showing the latest work by the famous fashion photographer, who, having made his name shooting just about every ad campaign that matters, now shoots primarily for the industry’s creative bible, Vogue Italia.

Somehow he has managed to retain his artistic integrity.

We first saw his work at Milan’s Corso Como 10 in 1993 during the grunge years:

And again - anticipating Desperate Housewives - at the White Cube gallery in London in 2001:

The MoCCA images are beautifully shot and composed, though perhaps less interesting than those shown at the White Cube. They show models as plastic surgery patients, a theme that recalls work by Helmut Newton and David Cronenberg, to name the most obvious examples.

Ostensibly about plastic surgery, the underlying message is one of sadomasochism. In this it recalls work by Nobuyoshi Araki:

Interesting that Meisel should have selected Linda Evangelista, one of the industry’s erstwhile superstars, in this role. By conflating the surgery (an outward expression of inner dissatisfaction) with a slickly produced photo shoot where there is no evidence of trouble or angst, the work draws attention to the high artifice of fashion images.