Cafe for Contemporary art: WE LOVE YOU COMRADE NAVIN
140 E Esplanade, Vancouver

North Vancouver’s newest contemporary art space is a cafe and art gallery. It’s a clean space punched up with bright colours, great coffee and a ‘children’s corner’, which is presumably where you’ll find the artists.

The Navin Party Bollywood poster. Images: artnet.com

From March 23 to 24 April, 2009 the cafe has WE LOVE YOU COMRADE NAVIN on view. The exhibition presents two projects from Navin Party, a collaborative piece by Navin Rawanchaikul and cafe director Tyler Russell.

The project stems from Navin’s idea of travelling to places he had never been and interviewing people who shared his name (Navin or Naveen), thus creating a kind of community that parallels the online social tribes of Facebook or Twitter.

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Moscow-born, California-raised Daria Zhukova, 27-year-old daughter of an oil magnate and girlfriend of billionaire Roman Abramovich is the director of Russia’s newest contemporary art space, the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture. In this article, she speaks with the FT’s Peter Aspden:

“I liked (art), I liked going to Tate Modern in London and then other galleries but I was never directly involved and I didn’t take any art classes.” (Her degree, from the University of California Santa Barbara, is in Slavic studies and literature). She has assembled a formidable team of advisers for the Garage, including Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota and Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones….

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This just in: An email from Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and Aileen Carroll, Ontario Minister of Culture announcing their brand new initiative:

NOTE: VoCA has made a (very rare) mistake. We were so appalled by the possibility, that we neglected to notice that although the email we received appeared to have been sent by the Ontario government, it was in fact sent by ARTS AGENCY, an association of artists and communications management experts who think this re-branding of Ontario is a good idea. More info on Arts Agency HERE.

A survey to determine whether the province of Ontario should have a cultural nickname, wait for it….
Artcity Ontario.

A possible branding strategy for the province of Ontario. Classy, no? Image: artsagency.com

They say: “The purpose of the cultural nickname is to increase cultural tourism to Ontario.”

VoCA says: We would much rather see the McGuinty government step up commitment to the arts directly rather than spend money on cheesy branding strategies. Ontario – and Toronto in particular – hasn’t exactly been a whiz at branding itself (Toronto Unlimited, anyone?) We’d rather see the name ‘Ontario’ stand on its own as a province where the government supports culture.

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Andrew Rucklidge: The Fringes
April 3 – 25, 2009
Michael Gibson Gallery, London Ontario

Andrew Rucklidge, Accumulation Zone – Surging Glacier, 2008. Image: gibsongallery.com

There’s something about Andrew Rucklidge’s paintings…it’s their grand, otherworldly energy, the way they refer to something greater and the way you could keep looking at them for hours. They just feel incredibly modern and more importantly, they have a very modern authenticity about them, while also referring to the landscapes of Katsushika Hokusai among other references.

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How do you define art?

Well, the old definition, which many still adhere to, is that art is either a painting, drawing or sculpture exhibited inside an art gallery.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Image: toutfait.com

Others might expand the definition to include video, or anything exhibited inside an art gallery. After all, Marcel Duchamp made the point with Fountain, the mass-produced urinal that he signed with the name R. Mutt, that was refused entry to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in 1917. Since Duchamp, we know that something signed by the artist and shown in the context of art, is art, right?

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From the Guardian: Revered as the baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 16th-century painter Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique, two centuries before the formal invention of the camera…

The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also used chemicals to turn his canvases into primitive photographic film, “burning” images he then sketched on to for works such as St Matthew and the Angel…

Read the full article in the Guardian HERE.

Photographers Marco Antonio Cruz from Mexico City, Lynne Cohen from Montreal, Federico Gama from Mexico City and Jin-me Yoon from Vancouver are the four finalists for the AGO’s $50,000 annual Grange Prize this year.

Lynne Cohen, Untitled, 1980′s. Image: fototapeta.art.pl

Lynne Cohen is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

For more info on Lynne Cohen, please click HERE.

Federico Gama was born in Mexico City and has been a documentary photographer since 1988. He was won several awards including first prize in the 1st Puerto Rico Photography Biennale (1998); The National Cultural Photojournalism “Fernando Benitez” Award (1999) and Honorable mention in the 1st Photojournalism Biennale of the New Latin American Journalism Foundation in Colombia (2001).

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Stephen Rife: here lies
Léola Le Blanc: Désoreille
March 23 – April 4th, 2009
Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD

Artist Stephen Rife. Image: mnartists.org

STEPHEN RIFE

Pyrotechnic artist Stephen Rife opens at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s Anna Leonowens Gallery tomorrow, as one of several thesis exhibitors.

Rife has long been experimenting with fire and the moving image in his art, and this exhibition presents “a combination of “active installation” and “miniature film palace,” and is a rough survey of his work from the past two years.

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Four top art advisors hold a round table discussion to flesh out exactly how the recession is changing today’s art landscape:

Art + Auction’s roundtable discussion. Image: artinfo.com

ON ART ADVISORS: “Most people who do this are gatekeepers. They know rich people, they have some access to art, and they provide people who may be interested in collecting art with access. Having said that, I believe that whether it’s art advisers, dealers, curators or critics, most people in the contemporary-art field are enthusiasts more than experts.”

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Check out my article on the Art Expo, Toronto’s “kinder, gentler art fair for tough times” in today’s Globe and Mail – click thumbnail after the jump.

It’s a good place to discover work by artists who may not have gallery representation. Many are from abroad – expect to see work from India, Japan, Israel, Germany and Korea.

A mixed-media work by artist In Hyuck Song. Image: art-zurich.com

To read my article, click the thumbnail twice to enlarge:

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