VoCA was at the opening of Joshua Neustein’s contemporary response to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the fascinating new show now open at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. Despite having had some trouble with the powers at the ROM, who apparently wanted to place stanchions everywhere, the artist and curators were able to get the installation up and it looks great.

Margins, Neustein’s installation that responds to the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum, presented by the ICC and the Koffler Centre of the Arts. Image courtesy the artist.

Neustein lives in New York and Tel Aviv, and is known for his environmental installations and Post Minimalist torn paper works, as well as his series of large-scale map paintings. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Environmental, Conceptual Art into the Israeli scene.

He is known for his 1971 Jerusalem River Project action, a site-specific “sound sculpture” made for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in which 55 speakers installed across 2 kilometers of a desert valley played the looped sounds of a river.

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Andy Warhol had it right…the notion of celebrity speaks volumes about our culture and VoCA thinks it’s important to be aware of the implications. How will this change our culture in future?

Michael Jackson by Andy Warhol made the cover of Time. Image: timeinc.net

Some interesting notes:

Aside from whether heart attack or impending media pressure killed Michael Jackson, it took 18 minutes (!!!) for the story of his death to break. Jackson died at 2.26pm, LA time. At 2.44pm, TMZ informed the world of his death (more on that HERE.)

Click HERE for a slide show of Michael Jackson immortalized in art.

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Saturn Return 30th Anniversary party
Mercer Union, Toronto
Friday July 10, 2009
Earlyish ’til lateish

These days, when it’s so important to think local, it’s especially important to support your local art scene. Mercer Union Artist Run Centre in Toronto is celebrating it’s 30th anniversary on July 10 with Saturn Return.

Come out and support Toronto’s artists – Mark your calendars now!

In astrological terms, a 30-year interval equals the full orbit of Saturn around the sun.

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Conceptual artist Ian Wallace is a very big deal in Canada, particularly in Vancouver where he is regarded as the father of the conceptual photography movement – his students included Jeff Wall and VoCA favorite Rodney Graham. Wallace has won the Molson Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts.

His works often bring together the photo, the painting and the object.

A piece by Ian Wallace. Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

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In The Trees: Works from the Battat Collection
Battat Contemporary, Montreal
July 2 – August 15, 2009

Ed Pien, Night Gathering, 2005. All images courtesy Battat Contemporary.

Montreal’s newest collector-led art space, Battat Contemporary, run by the collector Joe Battat, opened in March 2009 and has quickly made a name for itself by mixing Battat’s interest in Old Master drawings with cutting edge contemporary pieces.

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VoCA went to Montreal and by far the best thing we saw was Michal Rovner’s wonderful installation Particles of Reality, her first solo exhibition in Canada, at DHC Art Foundation. The exhibition, which opened in May and runs through September 27, begins with the same video works projected onto Petri dishes that the artist showed at the 2005 Venice biennale’s Israeli pavilion.

Michal Rovner, a close up shot of Datazone, 2003. Image: musesphere.com

We were struck by her work then, but this exhibition is even better. Rovner’s videos of tiny, abstracted human beings, swaying and dressed in black derive meaning from the way they are exhibited. The people are choreographed in patterns so that in Data Zone (2003), a group of long tables embedded with illuminated Petri dishes, they look like Chromosomes.

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Thomas Kneubühler, installation view: ‘Brise Soleil’ éclairant ‘Mount Hortons’ & ‘The Mountain (Switch)’, “Electric #1″, 2009 and “Electric #3″ , 2009. Image: projex-mtl.com

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Burning Cold
18 June – 30 August 2009
The Ottawa Art Gallery

For a while now VoCA has been interested in the new Inuit art – in fact, we interviewed Inuit art dealer Pat Feheley about it HERE. Feheley speaks eloquently and knowledgeably on the “sea change” that occurred once Cape Dorset artists discovered that they could depict the world around them.

Shuvinai Ashoona, Scary Dream, 2006. Image: ottawaartgallery.com

Previously, they had been limited to what the ‘market’ dictated – cliched images of bears, seals, old-fashioned hunting scenes etc.

We recommended Noise Ghost, curator Nancy Campbell’s exhibition at the Justina M Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto that pairs Ashoona with super hot multi-media artist Shary Boyle in a two-woman show, and now we recommend Burning Cold, a show curated by Scott Marsden, that pairs Ashoona’s work with other Canadians including BGL, Tania Kitchell and Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby.

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Paulette Gagnon, chief curator of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, has been given the top job at the gallery.

Paulette Gagnon. Image: newswire.ca

She will replace Mark Mayer, who left last year for the bigger top job at the National Gallery of Canada.

Paulette Gagnon is the 9th director general of the museum, and the third woman to occupy this post.

Gagnon has been as the MACM since 1992 and gets VoCA’s thumbs up for organizing exhibitions that included VoCA favorites Isaac Julien, Louise Bourgeois and Attila Richard Lukacs.

At first glance, you can’t help but wonder about the point of it all.

A group of artists travel to the world’s biggest art party to…well, party, paddle around in canoes, drink lots of prosecco and generally live it up in a rambling palazzo. Oh yes, and make whatever ‘art’ takes their fancy. The Canadian off-pavilion contribution, Reverse Pedagogy, was the second installation in a residency that seeks to break down the walls of institutionalism, whether by the art school, the museum or the biennale See clarification in the comments, below.

Roman Ondák’s Loop in the Czech and Slovak pavilion. Image: washingtonpost.com

The trip was sponsored, each canoe emblazoned with the name of a Canadian art supporter, so people are obviously supporting the idea.

So is pointlessness a new trend in art? Continue reading →