Toronto artist Micah Lexier is everywhere these days.

A view of Micah Lexier’s installation I Am the Coin, at BMO in Toronto.  Image: iamthecoin.com

Not only did he have new work in a recent show at his Toronto dealer, Birch Libralato, he has a just-opened year-long installation at the Bank of Montreal’s Project Room titled I am the Coin – click HERE to check it out – along with several upcoming collaborations.

-Twelve of One: A Series of Twelve Consecutive Vitrine Displays is on view at Art Metropole, and will change each month over the course of one year. Click HERE for more info.

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Scott Treleaven was born in Toronto, Canada and graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) in 1996.

Scott Treleaven, My Ever Changing Moods, 2009, ink, photographs, watercolour. Image: kavigupta.com

Now based in Paris, he has shown in Chicago at Kavi Gupta, in New York at John Connelly Presents and has had a limited edition book published by Printed Matter Inc.

He is probably best know for his film The Salivation Army (2002), which caught the attention of the Village Voice in 2003, screening worldwide, most notably in the official Art Basel film program in 2004 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006.

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What is it about the increasingly popular art that brings together illustration, graphic design, graffiti and cartoons? It’s a huge trend that you might say was begun, in its most recent form, by the American painter Philip Guston in the 1970s, when he abruptly dropped Abstract Expressionism for his own style that he’s now most famous for.

Philip Guston, Story, 1978. Image: artnet.com

Marc Bell, Spore Spredder. Image: comicsreporter.com

Guston made the change because he was looking for an art with more meaning. Speaking of his feelings in the late 1960s when America was at war, he said “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. (I thought) what kind of man am 1, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. [..] I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid…. Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt.”

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Just found this on Luxist.com:

Louis Vuitton’s new book: Art, Fashion and Architecture. Image: luxist.com

“A seductive anthology of the famed French fashion house’s collaborations with an international group of elite artists, architects, designers, and photographers, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, Takashi Murakami (whose updated LV monogram is featured on the cover) Richard Prince and Stephen Sprouse.”

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Alberta is seeing a lot of cultural action these days.

There’s Santiago Calatrava’s controversial bridge, Lethbridge’s own (and VoCA favorite) David Hoffos with a large retrospective coming up this fall at the National Gallery of Canada, and Nigerian artist El Anatsui giving a talk tomorrow at the Glenbow Museum, courtesy of the Canadian Art Foundation, to name just a few things going on.

Burtynsky’s new book. Image: rsvppost.com

Not to mention the Art Gallery of Alberta, which is currently under construction and set to open in early 2010 with Edward Burtynsky: Oil.

From October 9 - December 12, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design launches 2 exhibitions by an American and an Irish artist, that explore the issues associated with the idea of the North and related ideas of the West.

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The article, which you can read HERE, is a highly entertaining read, designed to promote Saatchi’s new book, My Name is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic, out in the UK on Sept 8.

An image from The Revolution Continues at the new Saatchi gallery. Image: guardian.co.uk

Some nice quotes from the article:

“There’s no crime in art being decorative.”

“When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it’s sublime.”

“Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.”

You’ll soon be able to order the book HERE.

With so much writing being done online, books have taken on a precious new meaning.

That’s no different in the art book world, or more specifically, the luxury book market as defined by Benedikt Taschen, the German publisher who in 1999 famously published SUMO, a retrospective of the work of iconic photographer Helmut Newton.

It was the largest book produced in the 20th century and now sells on Ebay for $15,000.

An image by the late, great Helmut Newton, from SUMO. Image: livresphotos.com

“…books can themselves become their own pieces of highly sought-after art. “The making of the titles is a collaboration with the artists,” (Taschen) explains. “Their ideas are at the centre of the work and they are involved all the way through the process, making the books original, personal and desirable – like great art should be. Why shouldn’t an art book be something to be revered?”

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“With their artists competing on an international stage, Canadians can no longer complain of their country as a cultural backwater nor luxuriate in the nostalgic charm of provincialism. In art as in political, social and economic activities, Canada is fully involved in the world of today,”
– Dr. R. H. Hubbard, former Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada.

Guido Molinari, Untitled, 1964. Image: artnet.com

Walking down Bloor Street in Toronto last night, we stopped at a bookshop’s outdoor display and there, right in front of us, on sale for $1.99, was a copy of Canadian Art Today, originally published in 1970 by Studio International.

Edited by William Townsend, a professor at the University of London, the slim book is filled with contributions from Canada’s art elite at the time: R.H. Hubbard, then chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Doris Shadbolt, then curator of the Vancovuer Art Gallery, curators Dennis Reid, Pierre Theberge and David Thompson.

“Canadian artists were dependent for generations on the artistic traditions of France and England and it is only since the last war that contemporary American influences have made a decisive impact,” writes Townsend.

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Doug Wright’s most famous character, Nipper. Image: calgaryherald.com

The graphic artist Seth has designed and co-edited a gorgeous coffee table book on the erstwhile celebrity cartoonist, whose Nipper comic strip became a huge hit across the country in the 1960s.

This book is a wonderful object and a highly entertaining read, even if you’re not into graphic novels, or comics.

Read my review, in Quill and Quire, HERE.

Karen Engle’s book Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination takes an intriguing, and - she argues - much needed look at the artworks and ephemera that surrounded September 11.

Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman. Image: artnet.com

You probably haven’t given much thought to Eric Fischl’s sculpture Tumbling Woman, which was placed and quickly pulled from Rockefeller Centre when it became clear that a woman in mid-fall wasn’t an appropriate memorial (no closure).

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