Your Cultural Concierge! VoCA offers critical commentary on the Canadian art scene, with a focus on Toronto. Featuring exhibition previews, critics picks, interviews and in-depth articles on art in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax.
In April, the Toronto-based artist Kelly Mark was commissioned to design a shopping bag for Art Metropole to present at the Basel Art Fair, as they have done for years.
Hildegard Spielhoffer, of Tweek Lab, models the 2003 Maurizio Nannucci shopping bag.
Image: www.artmetropole.com
Mark’s design inverted the Canada council acknowledgement and logo that CC-supported artists and institutions are required to display on their invitations and press releases.
Kelly Mark’s design used the CC logo in a Gucci-like pattern across the bag, with a play on words at the bottom – in miniscule, barely visible type – that simply read:
The Canada Council for the Arts
gratefully acknowledges the support of Kelly Mark
Somehow…the text was sent to the Canada Council for translation. The CC, apparently incensed, forbade Art Met to use the logo in such a way, despite it having been reworked by a well-respected Canadian artist.
Though the Art Met board fully supported Kelly Mark, in fact encouraged her to print the bag anyway, according to the artist “it was an awkward situation since it was meant as a ‘gift’ which the CC didn’t want.”
In April, the Toronto-based artist Kelly Mark was commissioned to design a shopping bag for Art Metropole to present at the Basel Art Fair, as they have done for years.
Hildegard Spielhoffer, of Tweek Lab, models the 2003 Maurizio Nannucci shopping bag. Image: www.artmetropole.com
Mark’s design inverted the Canada council acknowledgement and logo that CC-supported artists and institutions are required to display on their invitations and press releases.
Kelly Mark’s design used the CC logo in a Gucci-like pattern across the bag, with a play on words at the bottom – in miniscule, barely visible type – that simply read:
The Canada Council for the Arts
gratefully acknowledges the support of Kelly Mark
Somehow…the text was sent to the Canada Council for translation. The CC, apparently incensed, forbade Art Met to use the logo in such a way, despite it having been reworked by a well-respected Canadian artist.
Though the Art Met board fully supported Kelly Mark, in fact encouraged her to print the bag anyway, according to the artist “it was an awkward situation since it was meant as a ‘gift’ which the CC didn’t want.â€
2. Canadian and International sculpture at Diaz Contemporary:
2 August - 1 September 2007
James Carl, Take-Outs (1995-ongoing). Image: yorku.ca
The show includes work by Mowry Baden, Michelle Bellemare, Daniel Borins & Jennifer Marman, James Carl, Carlo Cesta, Patrick Coutu, Christian Giroux & Daniel Young, Allison Hrabluik, Kristiina Lahde, Ricardo Rendon, Andrew Reyes, Francine Savard, Oona Stern, Flavio Trevisan and Dallas Wehrle.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, In Sit You, 2006. Image: akimbo.biz
The Sculpture Group Show at Diaz Contemporary includes a selection of works by sculptors working in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, New York and Mexico City.
The show presents a wide spectrum of stylistic, formal and conceptual tendencies and highlights diverse approaches to materials and techniques that challenge preconceived notions of contemporary sculpture-making.
1. Mercer Union, Toronto: TONIGHT, for the closing of Seducing Down the Door, Dean Baldwin has constructed a fully stocked mini-bar in the back gallery, from which he will serve tiny cocktails, in a welcoming but somewhat claustrophobic Alice-in-Wonderland environment.
Baldwin was born in the year of the bull in Orangeville, Ontario, and is based in Toronto. Recent projects include a commissioned signature cocktail for artist-run centre YYZ called the “The Why Why Cocktail,†and “The Cooked Book,†an eight channel video installation at Harbourfront Centre as a part of the Images festival.
2. Plug-in ICA, Winnipeg: From July 26 to August 18, Theo Sims’ The Candahar will fill the front half of the gallery with a place that is simultaneously an artwork, a theatre, a prop, and an intersection between art and life.
Theo Sims’ bar. Image: plugin.org
Named after an artist-friendly street in Belfast, this seemingly humble, modular structure assembles into a fully functional Belfast pub complete with alcohol, wooden bartop, seating, television, framed pictures, ceiling panels, and an authentic Belfast barkeep.
Chris Roddy is an artist as well as a former bar-owner in Belfast, and will be manning the taps from July 26- August 2.
3. The following is from an interview with Marina Abramovic by Katy Deepwell - from a conversation with Marina Abramovic at her home in Amsterdam in September 1996.
Marina Abramovic, The Onion, 1995. Image: migraine-aura.org
Marina Abramovic:If you look in history, the most difficult thing is to work in a simple way but if you succeed you can reach everybody. I’m not sure how many artists do this but I start with hundreds of ideas running around in my baroque mind and then I start reducing, reducing.
Can I say one thing with twenty things, then with four, then 3 - finally can I say it with just one thing - a economic art. I was in the symposium Art Meets Spirituality in an Economy where there was much discussion of pollution but I think we should definitely be aware of art pollution.
There are today, thousands and thousands of artists producing all kinds of art. The studios are stuffed with works - like a postoffice - producing, producing but when you think how little work really matters, how little art makes real sense, its incredible. All the really important artists of this century can really change the way society thinks, Duchamp did it, Malevich did it, Rothko,Klein,Pollock - certain key points and then the rest, you have thousands of people following their work.
Katy Deepwell:These are all artists who distil ideas, reduce to pure form.
Marina Abramovic:Yes, you need to reduce to the essence but it is a question of how to get the essence out? But then you see how their work comes from a very deep personal level and they succeed in shifting this experience into something else.
See Abramovic’s The Onion at the Power Plant, Toronto this summer. Click HERE for more info.
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July 26th - September 16th, 2007. For more information please click HERE.
Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland presents a series of collages titled The Penguins that look at the relationship between books and visual culture. He examines the period in human history - beginning in 1935 when Penguin Books were initially published in England - when the novel carried more frieght than it does now.
OPENING RECEPTION: THIS THURSDAY, JULY 26, FROM 6 - 8 PM.
MR. COUPLAND WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE.
In June, Douglas Coupland was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa from Simon Fraser University, BC and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
From September 8 - 20 October, a sculptural installaiton entitled Fifty Books I Have Read More Than Once will go on view at the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery, Burnaby, BC.
Douglas Coupland, Solitude, 2007. Image: coupland.com
Douglas Coupland, Stardust, 2007. Image: coupland.com
The third edition of Artefact takes place in Montreal through September 30, 2007 on the Ile Sainte-Helene.
20 urban sculptures by Canadian and international artists have been set up on part of the 1967 World Expo site, as a celebration of the 40th anniversary of EXPO 67.
Stephen Schofield , Hedging. Image: artefact-montreal.com
With its convoluted facture, modest dimensions and mooring in a small pond in the shadow of Buckminster Fuller’s majestic dome, this erudite and inventive sculptor’s polysemic structure may be, among other things, both a critical and a nostalgic commentary on the universal modernism of Expo 67. Continue reading →
A video projector mounted on a dolly travels along a length of track progressively revealing the image of a desolate virtual landscape.
It is through the implication of opposing and obsolete processes that Rainer Eisch addresses both the romantic history of the landscape and its subsequent mediation.
This “pointillist†landscape; artificially composed from millions of pixels, weaves together a geography that passes in front of our eyes.
The best artwork that VoCA has seen since Gregor Scheider’s Weisse Folter at Dusseldorf ’s K21 last month (see previous post below) is Andrea Fraser’s video Official Welcome, 2001 in the Power Plant exhibition Auto Emotion: Autobiography, emotion and self-fashioning, on through August 19 in Toronto.
Andrea Fraser, Official Welcome, 2001. Image: muhka.be
It’s free all summer and worth the trip down just for this one piece.
In 2004, documentary maker ERROL MORRIS won an academy award for best doc for The Fog of War in 2004, an extended interview with former US Secretary of Defence Robert MacNamara. It is one of VoCA favorites – we highly recommend it. See more HERE
Roger Ebert says: “Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.”
Morris’s newest film “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure,” is a documentary about the photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Inside Abu Ghraib prison. Image: cbc.ca
Click HERE for Errol Morris’s favorite films that blend fact and fiction, including a 1922 movie, ‘Nanook of the North†of an Inuit family in the Canadian arctic.
Nanook of the North. Image: filmreference.com
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Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...
