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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Here’s my piece on the New York artist Ryan McGinness, who showed his graphic paintings and incredible perspex sculptures - which, we think are a near-perfect marriage of dynamic form, colour and transparency delivered with frothy lightness - at Artcore in Toronto in October. It’s in the current issue of Azure magazine.

Ryan McGinness, In-progress maquettes for sculptures, acrylic on acrylic, 2008. Image: ryanmcginness.com

Click the thumbnails, and click again to enlarge the text:

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Check out my reviews in the special Toronto section of the December 2008 issue of ARTnews.

Image: artnewsonline.com

Click each thumbnail twice:

Click HERE to go to the ARTnews magazine website.

This book is devoted to Canadian women artists from the 19th to mid 20th centuries. It should be necessary reading for anyone who is interested in Canadian history, and/or Canadian art.

Please don’t let the cover design dissuade you! Keep reading!

Independent Sprit, by A.K. Prakash. Image: fireflybooks.com

“It’s tempting to assume that Canadian women artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries were second-rate, given taht the male-dominated canon of art history has portrayed them as such, simply by exclusion. Independent Sprit helps dispel such tendencies. A.K. Prakash, art advisor to the Thomson family, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Canada Council, and UNESCO, among other, argues convincingly - at times reverentially - for the significance of the 36 artists profiled in this revealing four-part compendium…”

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Click HERE for my article on the sculptors for Azure’s DesignLines magazine. They’ve just reworked the language of the traditional children’s jungle gym for their new city commission at Lee Centre Park in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. Their design-y pieces reference Modernism using such unusual materials as Ikea furniture and bicycle tire.

Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, Mao, 2008. Image: cdgy.com

Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, Fullerene, 2003. Image: aceart.org

Click on thumbnail to enlarge my article:

Click HERE for the artists website.

CDGY are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary - click HERE.

VoCA sat down with Christian and Dan to talk about their work:

VoCA: How would you describe your artistic practice? You have made many sculptures, but also a film and a comic-book inspired print.

CG: We are primarily sculptors.,,our collaboration is born of shared sculptural interests. Our concern is still sculpture, but we’re not confining ourselves to making objects. It’s a hard question. Have we taken a sculptural approach to film? Yes. It’s a typology of comparison between the vocabulary of building construction and the sense of a moment of life in the city. Not just form but the social parameters that shape that form…Also in the history of sculpture…we research how we go about making work. It doesn’t always come naturally. It’s a way of thinking about forms.

DY: We’re interested in the fabrication process..the fabricators – we represent their realm, the industrial base. As you get to know a tool, it guides your process. No one masters anything anymore, it’s all super specialized.

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Last night, Magenta Publishing launched it’s latest issue of Flash Forward - an annual compendium of young photographers from the US, the UK and Canada. The launch kicked off with a well-curated exhibition of winners at Lennox Contemporary last night in Toronto. (Don’t let the image of a wax Celine Dion put you off!) The show runs until October 26, 2008.

I wrote the foreword, and in the coming days VoCA will be featuring a selection of our favorite artists featured in the book.

Jolie Dobson, Nuclear. Image: joliedobson.com

Jolie Dobson, Deadland. Image: joliedobson.com

Please see below for my introductory text:

From photography’s earliest days, when W.H. Fox Talbot experimented with Calotypes at Lacock Abbey, England, to the exotic imagery of 19th century travel photographers Maxime du Camp and Auguste Salzmann through to its application in 21st century news media, the camera has functioned, as Marshall McLuhan observed, as an extension of the eye. With this extension came a transformation of the world from a personal time-based experience into a series of singular, consumable moments whose original context is always lost to the ambivalent gaze of its recipient.

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Le Kick, Yves Tessier, casein on wood, 3.5 x 5.5 inches, 2001-07. $800 at Projex-Mtl at TIAF.

Have a quick read of my piece in today’s Globe and Mail on all the things to see, do and purchase at this year’s
Art Toronto, which runs October 2 - 6, 2008:

Click HERE for my article or click on the thumbnail below:

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Gwenaël Bélanger, Chutes (amas), 2003. Image: graff.ca

In this piece for Art Review magazine, we single out our picks for “Next Great Quebec Artist” from the recent Quebec Triennale in Montreal.

Read our full review on artreview.com, HERE

Manon De Pauw, Fantasmagorie lumineuse, 2008. Image: canadianart.ca

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Check out the short videos that we produced for the Canadian Art Foundation:

Just click right HERE.

Woman with the Devil, Drawing by Annie Pootoogook.
Image: sitemedia.ca/Feheley Fine Arts

• Dealer Wil Kucey of Le Gallery talks about his hot young artists and his prescient interest in illustrative, grafitti and street art

• Dealer Pat Feheley discusses the new Inuit art. It’s not soapstone sculptures of bears anymore, since Annie Pootoogook’s drawings were included in the last Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

• Artist Kim Dorland welcomes us into his studio as he talks about his influences, his recent work and how he hopes the viewer responds to his paintings.

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Toronto writer Don Thompson’s book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art subjects today’s global art world to an economic analysis.

Image: akademika.no

Thompson, an economist and professor of business who regularly lectures on art, attempts to de-mystify the value of contemporary art - why such exorbitant prices (nearing $150 million) are paid for works which are, ostensibly, nothing more than paint on canvas, dead animals, unmade beds and other flights of artistic fancy…

Click on the thumbnail to read my review in Quill & Quire:

Buy the book - in our opinion a must-read - right HERE.