One of VoCA’s favorite artists, Yoko Ono, speaks with the FT on the eve of being awarded the prestigious
Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement - along with John Baldessari - at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens this week.

Read the full article HERE.

John and Yoko. Image: mmfa.qc.ca

Her exhibition sounds well worth seeing, if you’re in Venice.

If you’re not, check out Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko, on view through June 21 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Click HERE for the Montreal Museum website.

Click HERE to watch Yoko Ono’s famous Cut Piece from 1965.

How relevant are art schools today? Do artists really require education beyond basic technical training? Do art institutions hinder, rather than help the creative expression of artists today?

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967.
Image: truthinart.wordpress.com

And what does Bruce Nauman think?

Read my opinion piece on the brand new news website, The Mark.

Click HERE.

Kalup Linzy: Recessed Depressed… Child Just Tell Me…
May 8 - June 13, 2009
Parisian Laundry

Kalup Linzy. Image: artnews.org

One of the hottest names in video art, Linzy’s best known work is a series of video art pieces satirizing the tone and narrative approach of television soap opera. Linzy performs most of the characters himself, and was once described as ‘Part Richard Pryor, part RuPaul.‘

Click HERE for more info on Linzy, and some great videos.

Click HERE for Parisian Laundry’s website.

COMING UP!
Michal Rovner: Particles of Reality
DHC Art Foundation
May 21 – September 27, 2009

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Well, it’s down to five.

Who will win the $70,000 Sobey Art Prize this year?

After last years win by Vancouver superstar Tim Lee (stolen, we think, from Winnipeg’s excellent Daniel Barrow) and won the year before by Montrealer Michel de Broin (who we interviewed HERE and whose pedal powered Buick we covered HERE), this year it’s down to this group:

WEST COAST AND YUKON: Luanne Martineau, whose fuzzy felted pieces we really like for their craft element and references to Minimal art and painters like Philip Guston.

Luanne Martineau, Dangler, 2008. Image: akimbo.ca

PRAIRIES AND THE NORTH: Marcel Dzama, he of the much-copied naive drawings that were so much in vogue several years ago. From Winnipeg, where he lived, Dzama seemingly influenced all of Brooklyn. Now he lives in New York and shows with David Zwirner Gallery, where he’s been making sort of awkward dioramas.

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We’ve written a lot about the excellent public performance group Improv Everywhere HERE, and about one of our favorite films, the Spanish mock-umentary Noviembre HERE, in which street theatre performers tread a dangerous line between reality and fiction (In once case, a performer feigns collapse and the unknowing public calls an ambulance in desperation).

This past weekend, we received THIS video, in which performers break into a fantastically kitsch song-and-dance rendition of Do-Re-Mi from the Sound of Music, charming an unsuspecting public in Antwerp station.

The Sound of Music in Antwerp station. Image: theinspirationroom.com

Now that artists are taking to the streets more than ever in ways not specifically revealed as art projects, we wonder what the effects of this trend will be.

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As much as possible given the time and space allotted is an exhibition at the Leornard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia Unviersity in Montreal. It was curated by Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross, who VoCA featured as an artist to watch from the Quebec Triennale last year.

As much as possible given the time and space allotted, Installation view. Image: David K. Ross, 2009

The premise of the show is, we think, quite interesting. The idea is to move has many works as possible from the gallery’s storage vault into the gallery and install them, in systematic order, before disassembling them and returning them to the storage.

The process – installing, de-installing – then becomes a kind of ongoing performance. The gallery is put on display (as a theatre) and the viewer also becomes privy to the behind-the-scenes, the inner working of an art gallery.

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Cafe for Contemporary art: WE LOVE YOU COMRADE NAVIN
140 E Esplanade, Vancouver

North Vancouver’s newest contemporary art space is a cafe and art gallery. It’s a clean space punched up with bright colours, great coffee and a ‘children’s corner’, which is presumably where you’ll find the artists.

The Navin Party Bollywood poster. Images: artnet.com

From March 23 to 24 April, 2009 the cafe has WE LOVE YOU COMRADE NAVIN on view. The exhibition presents two projects from Navin Party, a collaborative piece by Navin Rawanchaikul and cafe director Tyler Russell.

The project stems from Navin’s idea of travelling to places he had never been and interviewing people who shared his name (Navin or Naveen), thus creating a kind of community that parallels the online social tribes of Facebook or Twitter.

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Photographers Marco Antonio Cruz from Mexico City, Lynne Cohen from Montreal, Federico Gama from Mexico City and Jin-me Yoon from Vancouver are the four finalists for the AGO’s $50,000 annual Grange Prize this year.

Lynne Cohen, Untitled, 1980’s. Image: fototapeta.art.pl

Lynne Cohen is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

For more info on Lynne Cohen, please click HERE.

Federico Gama was born in Mexico City and has been a documentary photographer since 1988. He was won several awards including first prize in the 1st Puerto Rico Photography Biennale (1998); The National Cultural Photojournalism “Fernando Benitez” Award (1999) and Honorable mention in the 1st Photojournalism Biennale of the New Latin American Journalism Foundation in Colombia (2001).

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1. Canada’s $70,000 Sobey Art Award has announced its longlist

Stay tuned for the shortlist announcement on May 1.

Ilan Sandler, Tactlility, 2005. Image: Ilansandler.com

WEST COAST AND YUKON
Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky; Luanne Martineau; Keith Langergraber;Evan Lee; Julie York

PRAIRIES AND THE NORTH
Paul Butler; Marcel Dzama; Sarah Anne Johnson; Jon Pylypchuk; AltheaThauberger

ONTARIO
Shary Boyle; Christian Giroux & Daniel Young; Luis Jacob; Kelly Richardson; Derek Sullivan

QUÉBEC
David Altmejd; Raphaëlle de Groot; Manon De Pauw; Pascal Grandmaison; Adad Hannah

ATLANTIC
Alexandra Flood; Tara K. Wells; Ilan Sandler; Graeme Patterson; Joe
McKay

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TORONTO
2 of 2 Gallery
Jeremy Bailey: Machine Ego
Saturday, March 14, 6-7 pm

Jeremy Bailey, still from VideoPaint 3.0. Image: http.uk.net

For his first solo show at 2 of 2 Gallery, Jeremy presents some of his most recent works including Video Terraform Dance Party, VideoPaint 3.0 and SOS, alongside new works.

In these new videos Bailey continues his research in melding productivity and art by creating new satirical interfaces for office related tasks that also help a user create unique works of art; think 3d digital bricolage calculator. Jeremy will also present a live performance at the opening, featuring a demo of some of his most recent software.

For more information, please click HERE.

MONTREAL
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
PRESENTS: A film by Michael Snow
Thursday, March 19, 2009

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