1. DONIGAN CUMMINGS: EX VOTOS

MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax

21 June-10 August 2008

One of Donigan Cumming’s collages. Image: canada-culture.org

Montreal-based artist Donigan Cumming is known for his staged portraits of the aging, ill and socially assisted poor, in the form of photographs, videos and, best of all, his photographic collages.

Cumming’s work deliberately attacks the objectivity claimed by traditional documentary media. His disturbingly intimate images have been influenced by Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty,” Surrealism and cinema verite, among other historical art forms.

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HALIFAX:

Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven at MSVU art gallery
Continuing through 1 June 2008

Kelly Mark, I Really Should…(Neon) - 2001. Image: kellymark.com

Kelly Mark is a VoCA favorite, and this exhibition, which originally showed at Toronto’s Hart House gallery, is now touring. We have seen it and it is great. Mark makes funny, whimsical pieces that say a lot about human nature and the way that societal constructs shape our behaviour. She uses her cat, and often her television to create her multilayered pieces.

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Celebrated Halifax-based conceptualist David Askevold passed away on January 23, 2008.

David Askevold, Love Mansion - 9 Matrix. Image: pageandstrange.com

As a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the 1970’s, David Askevold developed and led what he called the Projects Class. During this period, Askevold selected artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, Lucy Lippard, Joseph Kosuth, and Mel Bochner, and invited them to submit projects that he and his students would then carry out.

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1. VANCOUVER
Contemporary Art Gallery

Robin Peck, A Shallow Flight of Stairs, 2007. Image: Scott Massey/Contemporary Art Gallery

ARTIST TALK: Robin Peck

Thursday, May 17, 7pm
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LIVING CITIES: The paintings of John Hartman

On now through Sunday at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Mar. 5 to Apr. 22, 2007

John Hartman, Owen Sound, 2005. Image: tomthomson.org

The city is usually known as a pulsing, living space containing the grey and the dark, the vibrant and the diverse. As depicted in the current show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the city displays a new voice. John Hartman paints a fusion of the roiling energy of the city and a fantastical candy land of bubble gum hills and lavender sugar drop skies. This show, entitled Cities, covers two floors of the gallery with Hartman’s vibrant large-scale oil paintings on linen, many on multiple panels.

John Hartman, Halifax, 2006. Image: metiviergallery.com Continue reading →

1. SHEN YUAN at Centre A, Vancouver
April 6 – May 5, 2007

Shen Yuan, Blue Freeway, 2003. Image: centrea.org

Curated by Hank Bull, Makiko Hara, this exhibition offers a preview of the artist who will represent China at this year’s Venice Biennale. The exhibition features four major installation works from the late 1990s to the present that bring together several cities including Beijing, Paris, Venice, Istanbul, Brussels, San Francisco and Vancouver. Continue reading →

FIVE NICE THINGS:

#1. Canadians in MIAMI:

Miami, during “art week” (December 7 - 10) can be almost unbearably overwhelming, with all the art fairs (11 this year!) not to mention the design district. Nonetheless, it offers an unbeatable opportunity for Canadian galleries to expose their artists to international collectors, media etc.

Some of the galleries taking this opportunity are:

ART BASEL MIAMI:

-Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto and Vancouver
-Corkin Shopland Gallery, Toronto
-Landau Fine Arts, Montreal
-Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
-Art Metropole, Toronto

And a Canadian magazine:
-Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vancouver

SCOPE (Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that it was better than the disaster in New York during last year’s Armory Show and the non-event in London this past October):

- Angell Gallery, Toronto
-Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto
-Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
-Greener Pastures, Toronto
-Katharine Mulherin, Toronto

AQUA ART MIAMI:

-Othergallery, Winnipeg
-Blanket Gallery, Vancouver

PHOTOMIAMI:
-Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto
-Peak Gallery, Toronto
-Skew Gallery, Calgary

BRIDGE ART FAIR:
-Birch Libralato, Toronto
-Newzones, Calgary
-Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal

#2. THE SEPTEMBERISTS, a video by Anthony Goicolea made in collaboration with superhot menswear designer Thom Browne.

Showing at the Monte Clark Gallery Toronto until January 17, it is a poetic, superbly produced film bearing echoes of Thomas Eakins, early photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden and Ralph Lauren advertisements.

(We love the young art star in the ad above.)

#3. CANADIAN MAGAZINES! After the demise of Parachute, VoCA urges everyone to give subscriptions of great Canadian magazines like Border Crossings for Christmas. It’s excellent writing and fantastic interviews (not that I’m biased…but I do write for them…)

#4. There’s A GOOD ART VIDEO:

RIGHT HERE

#5. Winnipeg wunderkind MARCEL DZAMA has hit the really big time, with a page in this month’s Vanity Fair alongside Julie Mehretu and fellow former-Canadian Terence Koh (aka AsianPunkBoy).

Remember the days when his drawings were selling for $500 Canadian in Toronto? It wasn’t so long ago…in 2000 at Artcore Gallery.

Now you can buy all kinds of Dzama-designed products, like these cool Melting Snowman cannisters…

And these action figures:

VoCA RECOMMENDS

FIVE UPCOMING SHOWS:

1. NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA:

Art Metropole: The Top 100
December 1, 2006 - February 25, 2007

Just when former General Idea member AA Bronson is making a major comeback with his own installations and as director of Printed Matter Inc. in New York, here’s further evident of his prescience.

Art Metropole was founded in Toronto by artist collective General Idea in 1974 as a non-profit artist-run archive and distribution agency for artists’ publications and other materials. The exhibition is selected from the collection of over 13,000 works spanning three decades and featuring work by James Lee Byars, Gilbert and George, Meret Oppenheim, Rosemarie Trockel and others.

Read more about the show HERE

And about Art Metropole HERE

2. OAKVILLE GALLERIES:

David Altmejd: Metamorphosis
January 27 - March 25, 2007

Get a sneak peek at next year’s Venice Biennale contribution with the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Canada outside Montreal. In a project specific to Oakville Galleries’ unique space, Altmejd will respond to the domestic nature of the site.

Read more about the show HERE

3. PLUG IN:

Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping
December 8, 2006 - February 17, 2007

Drawing on her history of migration - from India to Britain to Canada - Dhaliwal brings together works on paper and installations from over fifteen years in an assemblage of signs, symbols and languages.

Read more about the show HERE

4. PRESENTATION HOUSE:

Tichy
November 18, 2006 - January 14, 2007

An overview of the recently discovered Czech photographer, Miroslav Tichý, the first exhibition of his work in a public institution outside of Europe. The show features images of women from Tichy’s hometown of Moraviea, captured with his cameras hand-made from old tins, toilet rolls and cigarette boxes, which are also on view.

Read more about the show HERE

5. ART GALLERY OF NOVA SCOTIA:

Graeme Patterson: Woodrow
January 20 - April 9, 2007

Video installations by the Saskatchewan-based artist of one of the fast-disappearing small farming communities that once thrived on the prarie landscape. Through stop-motion animation and robotic figures, Patterson represents key elements: a barn, a grain elevator, a church, the hockey rink.

Read more about the show HERE

Interesting and little-known Canadian art fact #2:

Michael Snow was one of the four performers of the rarely performed Steve Reich piece Pendulum Music on May 27th 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The other performers were Richard Serra, James Tenney and Bruce Nauman.