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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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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Superstar art dealer Larry Gagosian is certainly tapped into the zeitgeist, with his high-profile stable of artists, mini-empire (New York, Beverly Hills, London, Rome, Hong Kong, Athens) and recently, with his new shop that sells multiples by big-name artists in New York. The shop is new for a dealer, but not so new for the art world. It began with Claes Oldenburg’s art project The Store from 1961, and more recently, when Takashi Murakami began collaborating on Louis Vuitton-emblazoned merch, (and then opened a shop with his show at the LA MOCA.)

It’s clear that art has met fashion, and fallen in love.

The Gagosian Shop at 988 Madison Avenue. Image: selectism.com

As author Don Thompson makes evident in his observations from inside the international art world in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (a reference to Damien Hirst’s shark preserved in formeldahyde), art has become about brands. And almost no one brands more successfully than Hirst and Gagosian.

It was probably inevitable, but it seems a shame that art has been reduced to branding. When the focus is on the brand, it takes away from the value of the art.

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Peut Mieux Faire
September 4 - 9 October, 2009
Atelier Punkt, Montreal

There’s a new exhibition opening on September 4 at Atelier Punkt, the year-old space that appears to be one of Montreal’s coolest art and design spaces.

Founded by artist Melinda Pap, Punkt is effectively an artist-run centre that dedicates itself to exhibitions of work by young designers, photographers, illustrators and architects from “Montreal and the world.”

Peut Mieux Faire features work by artists, performers, graphic designers, stylists, make up artists, ceramicists, jewelers, architects, authors-composers-interpreters…each of whom have been given by Emmanuel Galland (the curator ‘professor’), a classic Canada Hilroy exercise book as a ‘canvas’.

Participating artists include Suzanne Dery, Justin Stephens, Jerome Fortin and Daniel Olsen, among many others.

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BAILOUT: The 2008 Members’ Exhibition & Sale
Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto
9 - 18 December, 2008

Sale: Thursday, December 18, 8 pm

Mercer Union’s “stimulus package to put the US bailout to shame” includes drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and multiples all priced at $149.99 from hot Canadian artists including several VoCA favorites:

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In the spirit of reflection over a year gone by so quickly…and despite our recognition of the overall futility of ‘Best Of’ lists, we have nonetheless gone ahead with VoCA’s Best of 2007, in the hopes that it may provide for some spirited discussion over the holidays:

BEST OF 2007

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Corpus, c. 1650 Image: cbc.ca

1. Bernini’s Corpus, donated by collector Murray Frum to the AGO, Toronto

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6. PLUG IN ICA – WINNIPEG

Neil Farber, Farber Drawing 683, 1999. Image: plugin.org

One of the members of the Royal Art Lodge, Neil Farber’s work features an odd cast of characters that includes waif-like children, cats, dogs, and ghosts, combining innocence with a complicated and often foreboding sense of the absurd. Farber’s drawings remind us that among the range of emotions, humor is arguably the most complicated – and perhaps the most human.

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Although VoCA won’t be thinking of Christmas shopping for at least another week, here are some ideas for arty presents that support Canadian museums, artists and artist-run centres.

After all, art has been “the new fashion” for quite some time…

1. PRESENTATION HOUSE GALLERY - VANCOUVER

Lynn Valley #2/Kleenex Mathematics. Image: presentationhousegall.com

Lynn Valley is an ongoing series of publications edited exclusively by artists, published by the gallery with Bywater Bros. Editions from Toronto.

Lynn Valley #2/ Kleenex Mathematics expands on super hot Cologne based artist Johannes Wohnseifer’s recent explorations with spam email. Working with a series of diaristic photographs taken in the past two years, Wohnseifer has overlain unedited spam texts, creating collages of word and image that blends autobiographic detail, historical allusion and dense visual puns with the found poetics of strategically designed, nonsensical language.

The book is 64 pages, softcover, edition of 1000.

For more information, please click HERE.

2. VANCOUVER ART GALLERY - VANCOUVER

A Zero-Yen House by Kyohei Sakaguchi. (This image is NOT the edition available from the VAG).
Image: inhabitat.com

The latest artwork in the gallery’s Artist Edition series is the first by Tokyo-based artist Kyohei Sakaguchi.

The work of Kyohei Sakaguchi examines the significance of non-traditional and informal architecture. In the past few years, he has documented an elaborate sub-culture of architecture that includes diverse types of temporary and semi-permanent houses built in public spaces by homeless persons utilizing scavenged materials.

Priced at $175 (unframed), each of the 65 photographs includes a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Proceeds from the sale of Artist Editions support the Vancouver Art Gallery ’s exhibitions and programming.

Please click HERE for more information.

3. THE BANFF CENTRE – BANFF, ALBERTA

Lori Blondeau, Belle Sauvage, 2005. Image: banffcentre.ca

These edition projects were commissioned by and entirely produced at The Banff Centre. Prints from these editions are available for purchase at The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. All proceeds from the sale of the editions support Visual Arts at the Centre, and provide ongoing opportunities for professional artists.

As a Cree/Saulteaux artist, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice continues to explore the influence of popular media and culture (contemporary and historical) on Aboriginal self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. The title of the work, Belle Sauvage, references the central subject; a persona Blondeau has assumed in her performance art.

Lori Blondeau, Belle Sauvage, 2005, edition of 16, $500. A six-colour silkscreen print on BFK Rives 100 per cent cotton rag paper.

For more information, please click HERE.

4. PAUL AND WENDY PROJECTS – TORONTO

The Royal Art Lodge, Poster Making, 2007. Image: paulandwendyprojects.com

Paul Van Kooy and Wendy Gomoll have met and worked with a community of contemporary artists over the
years. The ambition of Paul + Wendy Projects is to produce limited edition art works by these artists whose work they love.

Poster Making, By the Royal Art Lodge. Handprinted Serigraph on acid free archival paper. Edition of 75, numbered, signed, embossed and date stamped by the artists. $250 CAD

The current members of The Royal Art Lodge are Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber. The group was founded in Winnipeg in 1996. Since 2003, they have focused on painting as their main collaborative output.

Please click HERE for more information.

5. MARTHA STREET STUDIO - WINNIPEG

Simon Hughes, Some Icebergs, 2006. Image: printmakers.mb.ca

MPA was formed in the spring of 1984 by a group of Manitoba print artists. Now a non-profit organization, the studio has become one of the largest, best equipped and most diversified open printmaking facilities in Canada. New editions include work by Micah Lexier, Paul Butler, Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline and Michael Dumontier.

Simon Hughes, Some Icebergs. 2006, edition of 15. The portfolio of 3 images is hand-printed on Magnani Pescia paper using a multi-layered silk-screen process.

For more information, please click HERE.