1. Pierre Arpin, the Director of The Winnipeg Art Gallery announced that he will be departing the WAG on November 9, to take on the position of Head of Visual Arts for the Canada Council for the Arts, in Ottawa.

Gordon Gage, Chairman of the WAG’s Board of Governors, expressed his thanks: “Pierre has had a huge impact here at the WAG and while the Board and I regret his departure, we understand the significance of his new position just as the Federal government has announced an additional $30 million for the Council.”

Read more HERE

Damien Hirst, The Explosion Exalted, 2006. Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Image: igagosian.com

2. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, speaks to the Village Voice:

“I’d take one of these,” Schjeldahl said, considering a DAMIEN HIRST butterfly print encrusted with diamond dust….”There’s a large section of the middle to upper part of the market that likes name cachet and the decorative,” he explained. “And I don’t much care one way or the other.”

Read the rest of the article HERE

Jakub Dolejs, Escape to West Germany, 1972 (2002). Image: jakubdolejs.com

VoCA first came across Dolejs’s work at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, where his pieces Escape to West Germany, 1972 and Caspar David Friedrich Sketching My Homeland, 1810 were included in the excellent exhibition Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre.

Incidentally, the catalogue from this show is well worth buying. You can find it HERE.

The works were particularly appropriate to the exhibition because they were essentially images of stage sets – a painted backdrop in front of which a character posed – together uniting the image in a reference to the history of painting. Caspar David Friedrich Sketching my Homeland may be seen as a direct reference to Friedrich’s 1818 painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818. Image: wikimedia.org

Jakub Dolejs, Caspar David Friedrich Sketching my Homeland, 1810, (2003). Image: jakubdolejs.com

Looking at these photographs, you feel as if you’re necessary to these works, the way an audience is necessary to the theatre. The artist provided the background and middle ground, and you, the viewer, are supposed to provide the foreground, completing the piece.

Great stuff.

At Dolejs’ new exhibition (at Angell Gallery, Toronto, September 14 to October 13) we found the installation piece La Nuit Americaine, (a tongue-in-cheek reconstruction of a corner of a Louvre gallery, complete with re-painted masterpieces) in the front gallery to be a little kitch, but never mind, the three photographs hanging at the back of Angell Gallery have a similarly intriguing effect to those at the National Gallery. The images, satisfyingly symmetrical mini stage sets, appear to have been shot in the prop department backstage at a theatre, but are in fact carefully constructed sets in the artist’s studio.

Jakub Dolejs, Breach, 2006. Image: jakubdolejs.com

Jakub Dolejs, Enlightened Parts, 2006. Image: jakubdolejs.com

Jakub Dolejs, Spectacle, 2006. Image: jakubdolejs.com

Dolesj says that when he was in Paris last year (doing the Canada Council residency) he visited a lot of 18th century mansions and admired the seductive crumbling of the interiors. His work is about the signifiers that shape this kind of opulent decay.

Of course the idea of decay is one that can refer to the cycle of nature and the human life cycle: growth and decay. That is precisely what makes these works so strong, that like all good art, we can see ourselves in it.

Breach suggests anticipation, as if the actors have yet to appear on stage. Enlightened Parts, looks as if - as a collector at the opening observed - it is “waiting for my mother”. And in Spectacle, the action has occurred, and the audience – that’s you – is applauding.

Mike Patten, Mondrian’s Garden, 2007. Image: newzones.com

1. Mike Patten: Mondrian’s Garden at Newzones, Calgary

September 15 - October 20

Mike Patten, Mondrian’s Garden, 2007. Image: newzones.com

In his installation, Patten uses green masking tape to mimic paint. His use of green alludes to the famous Dutch De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, who famously taped his grid paintings to achieve perfection, and avoided the use of the colour green.

Here’s VoCA’s favorite painting by Mondrian:

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3. Image: moma.org

2. FUZZ: Dionne, Goldman, Kubis, Lannoo, Rdest at Newzones, Calgary

September 15 - October 20

Aleksandra Rdest, Something Had to Give, 2007. Image: Newzones.com

Work by five Canadian painters is on view here, including Aleksandra Rdest, who is shortlisted for this year’s RBC Painting Competition.

Stay tuned for the announcement of this year’s winner - on September 26th.

Other artists included in the show are Marie Lannoo, Suzan Dionne, Nicole Goldman and Anda Kubis.

Aleksandra Rdest, Tandem, 2007. Image: newzones.com

Alberto Giacometti, Three Men Walking II, 1949. Image: metmuseum.org

1. Walking Life

The Gladstone Hotel, Toronto

September 5 - 4 October, 2007

VoCA applauds the curators of Walking Life, an exhibition celebrating the experience of walking - for their press release:

“The goals for Walking Life are by no means profound….We’???d like to inspire people to reclaim (aka: use!) the sidewalks as public space. We???d like to inspire people to think about the pedestrian experience. And, we???d like people to contemplate the environments in which they walk…the creative process has been known to stimulate contemplation, interesting discussion and even innovation.”

The exhibition serves as a prelude to the International Walk 21 Conference, which will take place in Toronto from October 1 - 4.

2. The Movement Movement

Art Gallery of Mississauga, Toronto

November 3, 2007 (during the Viktor Tinkl: Making Things exhibition)

Kasimir Malevitch, Running Man, 1932-34. Image: sai.msu.su

The country’s hottest (and sweatiest) public art movement, the Movement Movement runs through art institutions. They have run the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and have plans to continue their Canadian Art Tour and, next year, the Ontario Art Marathon.

Register on their website HERE

1. Call to Artists for Expression of Interest
PUBLIC ART COMPETITION - TADDLE CREEK PARK

The City of Toronto is holding a public art competition for a new permanent artwork at Taddle Creek Park.

The Taddle Creek Revitalization design team and the City of Toronto are seeking to commission an artwork that celebrates and commemorates the original Taddle Creek. Located at the corner of Bedford Street and Lowther Avenue, Taddle Creek Park is a small, well-used community park in the Annex, named in honour of the now buried stream that at one time ran through the core of the city.

The art production budget including all fees, materials, technologies, fabrication and applicable taxes for this project is $125,000.

For more information including submission requirements, please contact:
Andrew Davies
@ Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 414
Toronto, ON M5T 2C7
E-mail: adavies@andrewdaviesdesign.com
Telephone: 647- 284- 4581

Submissions must be received by October 1, 2007, 4 pm.

Ettore Sottsass, “Carlton” room divider, 1981. Image: metmuseum.org

2. ETTORE SOTTSASS

He’s not Canadian, but he is one of VoCA’s favorites. 90-year-old Italian architect Ettore Sottsass, founder of the 80’s design movement Memphis (in our opinion vastly underrated by the general public) is showing:

*NEW WORK*

September 19 - 27 October.

Created over the last three years, this body of work has never been shown publicly in its entirety. It marks the culmination of a series of limited edition furniture and glass works that Sottsass has spent the last fifteen years designing which have rarely been shown outside of museums.

The glassworks, Sottsass’ first in five years, combine various shapes and colors into his most intricate and dynamic exploration of the material. Sottsass first began working with glass in the early 1970s on the Venetian island of Murano. Fascinated by its pre-formed fluid nature, glass became his most artistic vehicle for experimentation with color and form, and remains so today. Contradicting prevailing modernist conventions, he began using wire and glue to assemble pieces together in the mid-1980s. This now iconic method is employed in many of the works in the new collection.

Ettore Sottsass, Cabinet No. 54, 2003. Image: businessweek.com

One of the most significant counter-forces to modernism in the history of design, Ettore Sottsass has made monumental artistic contributions to every decade since his life in design began in Italy in 1945. His remarkable career has produced a provocative body of work, including architecture, furniture, industrial design, glass, ceramics, painting, photography and a wealth of writings. With this work he has consistently intellectually and aesthetically challenged the conventional wisdom of forms and proportions for over 65 years.

For more information on Sottsass Associati, click HERE or, if that’s not available, read about the Memphis Group HERE, or visit Friedman Benda Gallery HERE.

‘Super lamp’ created by Martine Bedine for Memphis Group. Image: design-technology.org

Skywalkers - Art Blimp Parade, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2006. Image: vinylpulse.com

As the international art fair season begins…courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Click HERE.

VoCA will preview the highlights of the Toronto International Art Fair (October 25 - 29) in mid-October.

Tim Schouten, the treaty 3 suite (outside promises). Image: timschouten

Wanda Koop, Green Zone (infrared) , acrylic on canvas, 2005. Image: harbourfrontcentre.com

1. Scratching the Surface, Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg

September 14 – November 17, 2007

Public Opening: Friday, September 14 @ 8:00pm

This major exhibition explores the changing landscape of the Canadian Prairies, and in particular Winnipeg’s social, cultural, and physical character.

Sylviamatas, Warm Rain, 2004. Image: sylviamatas.com

Esther Warkov, Samples, In the House of Pear. Image: kensegalgallery.com

Many Canadian artists have and continue to be been inspired by their immediate landscape (Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Ron Kostyniuk, Gershon Iskowitz, Peter von Tiesenhausen…)

Scratching the Surface: The Post-Prairie Landscape provides a multi-generational look into this transition.

The exhibition will bring together emerging, mid-career, and established artists including Keith Berens, Sylvia Matas, Doug Smith, Melanie Bone, Kazuteru Miyauchi, Jennifer Stillwell, Paul Butler, Kim Ouellette, Ewa Tarsia, Daniel Dueck, Robert Pasternak, Esther Warkov, Simon Hughes, David Perrett, Calvin Yarush, Jean Klimack, Tim Schouten, Collin Zipp and Wanda Koop.

Kim Ouellette, Mountains with Black Clouds, 2004. Image: marciawoodgallery.com

Highlights include Paul Butler’s public art project that transforms lampposts into an urban forest via applications of veneer tape, Jennifer Stillwell’s sculptural work that engages the artificial production of geology and Esther Warkov’s epic paper cityscape.

Collin Zipp, PIXEL 15. Image: collinzipp.info

2. Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven, Hart House Gallery @ U of T, Toronto

Kelly Mark, 33 Minute Stare, 1996. Image: ireallyshould.com

Kelly Mark is one of those artists whose sophisticated, elegant, disarmingly simple and surprisingly effective work is also accessible - she makes lots of multiples and unlimited editions - and so should be coveted by young and beginning collectors.

In 2005, her Power Plant commission Glow House transformed a mansion on Palmerston Boulevard into an eerily haunted looking house every evening whose windows were lit up by the flickering blue glow of televisions.

Read what I wrote about it HERE.

Kelly Mark, Glow House #3, Installation: Apr 13, 2005. Image: mocoloco.com

This exhibition at U of T showcases Mark’s sense of humour in a number of strong works. VoCA has often quoted Bruce Nauman: “Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.”

Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, c 1966. Image: artcomgroup.com

Nauman, like Kelly Mark, Maurizio Cattelan and others, uses humor to engage the viewer in deeply serious art.

Favorite pieces included the new film installation REM, the self-explanatory video 33 minute stare and the melancholy, amusing audio recording I Really Should…1000, wherein Mark repeats phrase after phrase beginning with the words “I really should…”

“…I really should…stop using the phrase Gaylord…I really should…read something utterly tragic…”

Kelly Mark, REM, 2007. Image: courtesy the artist

Check out the artist’s website HERE.

Green

UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, Canada

More info HERE

September 14—October 7, 2007

Opening reception: Thursday September 13, 8—10pm

VoCA suggests you keep an eye out for these emerging artists:

KRISTINA LEE PODESVA, in an offshoot of her project, colourschool, has operated since November 2006 as a free school devoted to a speculative study of five colours and has attempted to develop a colour consciousness through presentations, screenings, reading groups, listening labs, and performances, among other activities.

Kristina Lee Podesva, Affection (image from Google Emotional Index)
Image: kristinapodesva.com

Check out her website HERE

SARAH TURNER unhinges meaning from a fixed origin—via sculptural processes, installation and intervention—she questions authority, authorship and artistic subjectivity

MARILOU LEMMENS and RICHARD IBGHY will present their work There was a bandstand, a two-channel video installation consisting of text, images, monochromes, and voice.

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens,Panic Attack, 2005. Image: 312.ca

NICOLE BRABANT’s video and photographic works employ golf as a vehicle to enter into a multi-axial critique of contemporary society. In her work Adaptation (Lesson), Brabant documents a staged golf lesson in an attempt to discuss broader issues of racism, classism, and neo-colonial aspects of globalization.

PAUL KAJANDER uses humour and provisional materials to critique contemporary experience.

Paul Kajander, Drawings for a University (study), 2007. Image: front.bc.ca

ELIZABETH MILTON explores how self-transformation can challenge and articulate the distorted sense of reality that consumes our culture of simulation.

COLIN MINER’s new sculpture and paint based works allude to themes of stillness and terror as connected to the vampire. The works build upon his interest in the gothic and the film noir genre, while playing with ideas of anxiety in a search for meaning and context in our present time.

Colin Miner, Banana Peel, (colour photograph), 2005. Image: ahva.ubc.ca

1. Magenta, Canada’s art publishing house, will launch their newest book next week. The stunning book, Phantom Shanghai by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, documents China’s transition in otherworldly colours and with an elegant eye. Featuring a foreword by William Gibson and introduction by Leo Rubinfien.

Greg Girard, 600 Things, 2005. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

You can order it online HERE

Greg Girard, Fuzhou Lu Mailboxes, 2005. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

Greg Girard is represented by the Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto and Vancouver.

2. The Artcity 2007 Festival of Art, Design and Architecture takes place in the heart of Calgary from September 7-16. Artcity brings art and architecture into the spaces where the public lives and works. This year’s theme is “Rupture”.

The Festival aims to open possibilities in Calgary for conversations, debates and realizations about how and what artists, architects and designers do and how they see and shape the world around us.

“Not so much bent on audience development in the traditional sense, but rather concerned with the artistic zeitgeist, Artcity is indebted to contemporary artists who consistently provide citizens with new means of engagement,” says programming director Wednesday Lupypciw.

VoCA recommends some must-see installations:

-BOOM

WHO: The Arbour Lake Sghool: Andrew Frosst, John Frosst, Justin Patterson, Scott Rogers, and Aaron Sereda

WHERE: Roaming distribution on the Stephen Avenue Pedestrian Mall. Also available at Truck Gallery, Stride Gallery, 809, McNally Robinson Booksellers, Skew Gallery, the Alberta College of Art & Design, Triangle Gallery, the University of Calgary, ArtCentral, and the Glenbow Museum Discovery Room.

WHEN: Duration of festival

The Arbour Lakers will bequeath the city with thousands of free artist multiples in the form of balloons emblazoned with a custom ‘BOOM’ logo.

Collect your very own variety of deflated and helium-filled ‘BOOM’s on the streets and in conjunction with other Artcity-affiliated events.

Read more on VoCA’s favorite Calgary art collective right HERE

-FREE BOWL CALGARY INVITATIONAL

WHO: Michael Coolidge

WHERE: City Hall Lobby, 800 MacLeod Trail SE

WHEN: 9am-9pm daily

Michael Coolidge (Free Bowl Founder and conceptual artist) has organized a week-long prize tournament that will span the downtown core of Calgary.

Similar to Bocce and Lawn Bowling, the objective of Free Bowl is to bowl closest to a marker ball. Free Bowl players, however, must negotiate and determine their own courts, selecting from a vast array of existing urban spaces. One match leads to another, as the game and its players traverse the various landscapes of the built environment.

-SWINTAK

WHO: The Urban Quicksand Association

WHERE: Stephen Avenue Pedestrian Mall, the Alberta College of Art & Design, and Eau Claire Shopping Centre

WHEN: Throughout the festival

Making appearances at trade shows, festivals, colleges, and shopping malls, the UQA will distribute goodies such as the “Do-It-Yourself Quicksand Kits for Condo Dwellers”, clear up the popular confusion between actual quicksand and so-called ’slow dirt’, and argue on interesting topics like “Why Solids and Liquids are Over-Rated: The Curse of Binary Thinking in Urban Planning”.

-THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A THINK IS MAINTAINED (?): PART II

WHO: Doug Scholes

WHERE: Olympic Plaza, 228 8th Avenue SE

WHEN: 24/7

Scholes will build towers that, by their very nature, will self-destruct. Onsite each day throughout the festival, the artist will manipulate thousands of hollow beeswax bricks in a futile attempt to maintain the towers as seemingly stable structures. Highly susceptible to sun, rain, wind, and outright vandalism, the constructions put into relief the ‘everything-proof’ standard that Calgarians have come to expect from concurrent architectural projects.

-YARNOVER CALGARY (YO CALGARY!)

WHO: Suzen Green

WHERE: Family of Man and Family of Horses

WHEN: Sep 7-16, 24 hours

During Artcity, a series of public monuments in the downtown core will be clad in custom designed scarves, socks, hats, and mittens. The temporary interventions are designed to encourage Calgarians to reconsider the innocuousness of the sculptures and what they stand for.

Suzen Green’s pieces will be located at the Family of Horses sculpture (City Hall, 800 MacLeod Trail SE), the Family of Man sculpture (West of the Calgary Board of Education building, 515 MacLeod Trail SE).

-KIND OF SORT OF YOURS BUT ACTUALLY MOSTLY MINE

WHO: Paul Atkins (Out Of My System), Noel Bégin (Cinemaphidic Obliviolution - beta 0.3, 2007), Aleesa Cohene (Why me? #1, 2007), Lee Henderson (Revelations, 2005), Deirdre Logue (excerpts from Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes, 2003-2005), Stacey Watson (The Icecave, 2007)

WHERE: Glenbow Museum

WHEN: Sep 14, 6:30pm (directly before the ArtTalk panel discussion)

Combining appropriated and original footage, silence and booming soundtracks, the works on view include everything from messy relationship endings to the goings-on in a backyard aphid invasion.

-GUIDED TOURS

WHERE: Art Gallery of Calgary (117 8th Avenue SW, Calgary

WHEN: Sep 8 & 15, 1pm

FREE guided tours of the 2007 Artcity festival. Please meet the tour guide outisde the main entrance of the Art Gallery of Calgary.

Find more info on Artcity Calgary 2007 right HERE.

Future Projections is TIFF’s new programme of film-related art installations throughout Toronto for the duration of the Film Festival…and sometimes beyond.

It’s all free all the time! Find more info right HERE

They’re all good, but VoCA particularly recommends checking out the following ones:

1. Tyranny, Ryan Sluggett, Canada, 2007

Ryan Sluggett, Judges and their Pedestals, 2006. Image: trepanierbaer.com

Vancouver-based artist Ryan Sluggett appropriates the wide-screen look of advertising and a range of painting styles in his latest short animation, which radically extends his painting and collage process. The hypnotic video installation presents a new, experiential form of moving images and minimalist sound of unparalleled intensity.

Sluggett writes: “Tyranny…is composed of about five thousand digital stills that run at six frames per second while a swinging pendulum/speaker plays a soundtrack. One must unfocus (one’s) vision, lose the specifics of the physical in order to find the image, and ‘read’ the montage.”

Ryan Sluggett shows with Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary.

Presented in partnership with and exhibited at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 140. During the Festival, the exhibit will be open from 11am to 6pm (including Sunday and Monday), and after September 15 from 11am to 5pm, closed Sundays and Mondays. Admission is free.

Click HEREfor more info.

2. Best Minds Part One, Jeremy Shaw, Canada, 2007

Jeremy Shaw, detail from DMT (Video still), 2004. Image: presentationhousegall.com

Calgary-based curator Wayne Baerwaldt (and one of VoCA’s most influential Canadians this year – click HERE)

Jeremy Shaw’s artistic practice engages with youth subcultures and cultural deviance. This piece juxtaposes the violent dancing of straight-edge youth with Shaw’s melancholic, time-warping score inspired by William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops.

Clint Burnham writes, “The video shows us kids slowed down – the dancers are simultaneously ballet-like and frenetic – but we are also witnessing a dirge, a funeral, twinned with Shaw’s music like a lament for a scene that is now so over (or maybe just a parody of itself). And in this last moment of historicity, we also see a strong connection to the literary heritage – the Beats – established by Shaw’s title, which refers to the first lines of Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl,’ itself a lament or dirge for the institutionalization of both his friend Carl Solomon and his mother Naomi.”

Presented at Thrush Holmes Empire, 1093 Queen Street West.

Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Shaw is represented by Tracey Lawrence Gallery

3. Darfur/Darfur, various artists, USA, 2006

Dies Irae in Sudan, Ron Haviv/VII, Image courtesy darfurdarfur.org/brown.edu

Curator Leslie Thomas has gathered over 150 colour and black-and-white images captured by seven renowned photojournalists – Lynsey Addario, Mark Brecke, Helene Caux, Ron Haviv, Paolo Pellegrin, Michal Ronnen Safdie and Ryan Spencer Reed – plus former United States Marine Brian Steidle. Accompanied by music, the images are organized into three video loops of about six minutes each. The first two loops introduce the narrative of the Darfur conflict, while the third uses portraiture to bring viewers closer to the people living through it right now. The idea is to bring the images up close and personal – so that we can no longer put them out of our mind.

Screening at the Royal Ontario Museum. Viewings will be held from dusk to 11pm every evening with a special Opening night event on September 7 at 8pm. Admission is free.

More info on the film HERE

4. Death in the Land of Encantos, Lav Diaz, The Phillipines, 2007

Lav Diaz (left) and Paul Tanedo. Image: sensesofcinema.com

Super Typhoon Durian devastated the the Bicol region of the Philippines late last year, burying entire villages. Death in the Land of Encantos is a mournful work of landscape art. Shooting in rich black and white, Diaz composes his film using barren trees, rocks and even the wind to build an image of loss. The traces of narrative concern a fictional exiled poet returning to wander through his ravaged former world, meeting old friends and lovers.

A nine-hour work running in a continuous loop, Death in the Land of Encantos offers an immersion into a region that has literally been erased and rewritten.

Screening at Spin Gallery, 1100 Queen Street West, 2nd Floor.
An Artist Reception will be held on September 12 (8pm to 1am).

5. Wildflowers of Manitoba, Noam Gonick, Luis Jacob, Canada, 2007

Luis Jacob, A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice…(Video still), 2007. Image: birchlibralato.com

Wildflowers of Manitoba is a performative installation of four short films and sound presented in a furnished geodesic dome. The films feature four young men living off the grid in an idealistic survivalist camp on the shores of Lake Winnipeg during the summer of 2006. The music by visionary seventies Québécois rock band Harmonium suggests the potential for sexual and political freedom.

Presented in partnership with and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West.

Luis Jacob is represented by Birch Libralato Gallery, Toronto.

Wildflowers of Manitoba will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), 952 Queen Street West, from September 8 to 16, between 11am and 6pm. Admission is free.