The Canadian Art Foundation––where I work––recently hosted Peter Eleey, curator at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, for a lecture when he was in Toronto.

David Lamelas, Limit of a projection I, 1967. Theatre spotlight in darkened room. Image: spruethmagers.net

In THIS excellent video, Eleey, formerly curator at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, gives a fascinating account of his curatorial influences when preparing The Talent Show, a recent exhibition for the Walker, that “examines a range of complicated relationships that have emerged between artists, audiences, and participants in light of the competing desires for notoriety and privacy that mark our present cultural moment.”

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Last week, we attended a cocktail party in honour of the new director of Canadian Stage (CanStage) – Matthew Jocelyn. He has just announced his programme for the 2010-2011 season in Toronto, and it sounds FANTASTIC.

Merce Cunningham dancers performing against a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg.
Image: nytimes.com

I spoke briefly with Mr. Jocelyn, who is interested in encouraging multidisciplinary artistic collaborations a la Merce Cunningham/John Cage/Robert Rauschenberg.

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Curator William Huffman of the Toronto Arts Council has, in collaboration with the Art Dealers Association of Canada (ADAC) organized some 200-odd Canadian artworks to be displayed to foreign dignitaries during the G8 and G20 summits.

After the fake lake brouhaha, this comes as a better bit of G20 art news, as my fellow blogger Leah Sandals acknowledges in her post HERE.

Gershon Iskowitz, Midnight No. 3 (B244), 1986. Oil on canvas. All images courtesy of ADAC.
Image courtesy Miriam Shiell Fine Art and the Estate of the Artist.

The works, which include one of Brian Jungen’s hockey masks and a sculpture of bears – front and back – by Dean Drever hanging in the Prime Minister’s Office, have been specially chosen by Huffman and a crew of 12 people to represent the breadth of contemporary Canadian artistic practice. Also on display in the PMO will be 2 landscapes by Winnipeg painter Ivan Eyre. There will be a stunning Riopelle in the leader’s lounge, and work by legendary Quebecoise artist Francoise Sullivan. Alongside these will be works chosen by the Ontario Crafts Council.

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Here’s a quote from Nancy Bauer’s opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday, which asks Are Lady Gaga and the women who identify with her confusing sexual power with self-objectification?:

Lady Gaga. Image: ftweekly.com

“There is nobody like Lady Gaga in part because she keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is. She has been praised for using her music and videos to raise this question and to confound the usual exploitative answers provided by “the media.” (Journalist Ann) Powers compares Gaga to the artist Cindy Sherman: both draw our attention to the extent to which being a woman is a matter of artifice, of artful self-presentation. Gaga’s gonzo wigs, her outrageous costumes, and her fondness for dousing herself in what looks like blood, are supposed to complicate what are otherwise conventionally sexualized performances.”

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Alex McLeod, Twilight Terror, 2010. Image courtesy MOCCA.

We’re looking forward to this Saturday’s opening of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s summer exhibition in Toronto. Titled Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the built Environment, Contemporary Artists from Toronto, it will be on view from June 19 to August 15, 2010.

Prepare for much debate and derision, as is always the case when a local institution decides to highlight a group of local artists. Nevertheless, it’s healthy for the art scene to celebrate (some of) its own.

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The finalists for the 2010 Sobey Art Award were announced today. The artists, selected by a jury from each region of Canada, are competing for the Award’s $50,000 top prize. Bendan Tang may be the newest kid on the block, but our money’s on Duke & Battersby or the excellent Daniel Barrow, who was passed over in 2008.  Do we have wonderful artists in this country, or what?

The 2010 Sobey Art Prize shortlist:

• West Coast and Yukon: Brendan Lee Satish Tang

A work by Brendan Lee Satish Tang. Image: illusion.scene360.com

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Michelle Kuran has written an excellent article on the state of Canadian art criticism, in the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Read the article HERE.

Young, and determined critic Naja Sayej. Image: torontoist.com

Though Ms. Kuran did contact VoCA for our perspective, we were out of town and didn’t manage to make the interview happen.

Quoting everyone from R.M Vaughn to Artstars’ Nadja Sayej to Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes and Eye magazine’s David Balzer, the article is an interesting insight into the ‘criticism-by-omission’ that dominates today, and not only in Canada, of course.

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Here’s a fascinating article by Ben Lewis from Prospect magazine. It’s definitely worth reading.

In it, he presents the case for “compelling parallels between much of the contemporary art of the last two decades…and French rococo, a movement that extolled frivolity, luxury and dilettantism, patronised by a corrupt and decadent ancien régime.”

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Image: rawartint.com

“Boucher’s art represented the degradation of the baroque school’s classical and Christian values into a heavenly zone of soft porn, shorn of danger, conflict and moral purpose. Similarly, (Damien) Hirst’s work represents the degeneration of the modernist project from its mission to sweep away art’s “bourgeois relics” into a set of eye-pleasing and sentimental visual tropes.”

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The 2010 Power Ball, the annual fundraiser for Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery, took place June 3, and took as its theme ‘The Ball that Started it All‘, which, it turned out, worked well!

All photos VoCA/Scott Barker.

Billed as “a carnivalesque line-up of amazing art, extraordinary entertainment, and spectacular prizes“, it aimed to “remix the best of the best from Power Ball’s glorious (and often notorious) past.”

Click below to see lots more photos…

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