1. RE-ENACTMENTS AT DHC ART FOUNDATION, MONTREAL

February 21 – May 25, 2008

Harun Farocki, still from Deep Play, 2007. Image: mustekala.info

Re-enactments gathers six media artists whose works ‘re-enact’ – in some way critically re-stage media spectacles, performance art or films – cultural events of the past – to pose compelling questions about the present.

Including work by Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer and Kerry Tribe.

Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) garnered significant attention at last year’s Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Even if you don’t care in the least about football (soccer) – the work is mesmerizing. Twelve synchronised video projections in real time variously show the unprocessed feed from TV networks, motion traces of players, coaches evaluations, schematic depictions of passes, abstract computer-generated representations of the game, kinestesiology, visualisations, as well as soundtracks and commentary of all quantifiable events from the Berlin Olympic Stadium, police radio and TV production teams.

Whew!

Harun Farocki, Deep Play as installed at Documenta, 2007. Image: fartguide.blogspot.com

Deep Play depicts the endless tactical and personal choices of the flow of play, as well as all the other commercial, institutional and psychic forces at work which determine the action and its consumption as a massive media spectacle watched by over a billion people.

For the DHC-ART website, please click HERE
2. MIKE GRILL: PEOPLE, PLACE AND THINGS AT JEFFREY BOONE GALLERY, VANCOUVER

January 30 – 2 March, 2008

Mike Grill, Haystacks, 2007. Image: vananodyne.blogspot.com

Rumor has it that Mike Grill is a photographer to watch – and his pictures are in the Vancouver Art Gallery permanent collection. Now is your chance to snap one up at the Jeffrey Boone gallery.

Interestingly, in December, Vancouver curator Christopher Brayshaw wrote a piece about Grill’s image Haystacks, 2007 in which he compared it to Prospects, Philip Guston’s 1964 painting.

Philip Guston, Prospects, 1964. Image: vananodyne.blogspot.com

He suggests that Grill’s photograph represents the news of a declining medium – insofar as the news that photography is dying is news, anymore. See the work of Tacita Dean, Chris Gergley and the recent exhibition Death of Photography at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Tacita Dean, still from Kodak, 2006. Image: frithstreetgallery.com

Brayshaw says: “Grill is skeptical of the usefulness of the medium he has inherited from history. But working in a “belated” medium, with all its flaws and contradictions, is still preferable to surrendering to a historical situation like the one we find today, one in which all aesthetic criteria have been suspended, a post-medium phase in which Duchamp’s injunction to “Do whatever” has been universalized and codified as law. Grill summarizes his dilemma with an image of fragments, held terribly and precariously together.”

Click HERE for the full text on Brayshaw’s blog.

For more images of Mike Grill’s work and the gallery website, please click HERE
TOMORROW: Winnipeg and Calgary go head-to-head for BEST ART SCENE!