I came across the work of artist Julie Gladstone when I was perusing the aisles of the Artist Project for potential artists to showcase on Artbomb.

Artist Julie Gladstone. All images: VoCA

I immediately liked the unconventional colour in her work, lots of pale minty colours jolted alive with fluorescent spray paint and then brought together with strips of striped black and white. They look a bit like maps, and a bit like quilts.

When she came to see me about participating in Artbomb, (her work will be up shortly) we discussed me stopping by her studio. She rents the main floor of a house downtown, and I thought you’d like a little glimpse of her work in progress:

A view into her studio.

A large, dark painting.

And a large, pale one.

You can see quite a bit of texture in her mixed media work (which also often includes nails and spraypaint), and she explained to me that she applies paint skins (the dried surface of paint) as she builds up the work.

She begins with several colours of paint poured on board, achieving a kind of Abstract Expressionist style, which she then disguises with more paint, leaving parts that she likes showing through. The paintings end up being very layered. The road map analogy seems appropriate if you think of roads as being laid down and bits of earth showing through in between.

Her paints.

The palette.

Gladstone paints with both oil and acrylic, but as she told me (and I think I’ve got this right) oil paint on top of acrylic is archival, but the reverse is not.

A work in progress.

Paint sticks.

Two small works on a mantlepiece.

Storage.

One last piece..

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.“ – Marcel Proust

Today, I swung by Feheley Fine Arts gorgeous new gallery at 65 George Street, where ADAC (the Art Dealers Association of Canada) was hosting a lunch in honour of the upcoming exhibition Oh, Canada that will open at Mass MoCA on May 26.

A slide for Oh, Canada showing Joyce Wieland’s piece of lipstick marking our national anthem. Click on images to enlarge them. All images: VoCA

It’s a survey of Canadian art, from the perspective of Mass MoCA’s american curator, Denise Markonish, who has spent the past four years preparing for this exhibition by travelling to nearly every province in Canada, meeting artists, curators, gallery owners and writers.

A view of Feheley Fine Arts.


The piece above is fantastic, titled Cutting Walrus on the Beach, Itee Pootoogook, 2011. It’s sold, though. The lower piece, Plane Trip, 2011 by the same artist is not sold.

I met Denise, who is very sweet and Mass MoCA long-time director, Joe Thompson, who is a friendly, lovely man.

Denise has no real connection to Canada, despite having been here on a family road trip to Toronto at age twelve, when she saw some public artworks by Michael Snow. But really, she noticed that there was very little dialogue between American and Canadian art, and set out to rectify that.

Joe Thompson, Mass MoCA director, speaking at the ADAC lunch.

Some artists that you can expect to see are Luanne Martineau, Eric Cameron, David Hoffos, Ed Pien, Michael Snow, BGL, Valerie Blass, Kim Morgan and many, many others. Quite a few artists were commissioned to make works especially for this show, including Rebecca Belmore, Dean Baldwin, Daniel Barrow, Garry Neill Kennedy and many others.

There are 62 artists in the show, I believe, and most of them I had never heard of. Which is wonderful.

Of course there has been some griping from those who (or whose artists) were not included, but they need to get over it. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn about new artists in Canada, and of course the curator doesn’t owe anyone anything. Canada has grown up over the past decade (or so one would like to think.) There are many opportunities for artists and galleries these days. You’ve got to reach out for them, not complain when they don’t come to you.

Curator Denise Markonish.

One interesting thing that Denise did was to have each artist interview another, and in turn be interviewed. Each one gave their top five artists. She tells a great story of how the excellent senior conceptualist painter Eric Cameron took the list of artists, eliminated everyone he knew of, then further eliminated everyone whose gender he was certain of, and thus came up with his list of five.

Anyway, Denise thought that would be a great way to try to bridge the geographical divide of our country. I agree, and I look forward to reading the interviews in the catalogue, out in July.

For more info on Mass MoCA, check out their website HERE.

Last week I paid a visit to the studios of a young art collective called vsvsvs. The group, made up of eight young artists, most of whom are grads from Guelph University’s Fine Arts programme, live and work in a fantastic space off Cherry Street, in the port lands of Toronto.

A sculpture by vsvsvs member Anthony Cooper. Click on images to enlarge. All images: VoCA

The series of small rooms includes  an “open by chance” gallery space, where they show work by local artists and their friends. They were between shows when I visited, but should have something up again soon. You can check their website, HERE for info.

Three group members where there to show me their work when I arrived. James Gardner met me at the door and ushered me inside, passing two people who were making a solar oven, with plans to bake an apple crumble.

Two group members, making apple crumble.


The solar oven, made from an insulated cardboard box.

A number of small works from previous exhibitions were on display  on shelves along the living room wall, and they had prepared a nice spread of cheese and crackers for me.

The living room wall, with small works from past exhibitions.


A paper sculpture by Duy Khuong Pham

The cheese board.

James Gardner makes large wooden crudely painted sculptures that jut from the wall as if trying desperately to become three dimensional. They mostly are paintings of rooms, of art galleries. He uses lots of wood and lots of paint. Though none of the work was completely finished, the level of experimentation is good; my favourite thing though, was a partially deflated sculpture of balloons and foam insulation that hung from the ceiling. I look forward to seeing how Gardner’s work progresses over the next few years.

An experimental piece hanging from Gardner’s ceiling.


The studio of James Gardner, member of the art collective vsvsvs.


One of Gardner’s works.

Next was Wallis Cheung. I loved the paint chips laid out in rainbow stripes on her studio wall. Much more exacting and girly than Gardner’s work, my favourite pieces were the two densely painted works sitting on the floor and some quite wonderful miniature sculptures made of paint. They looked like otherworldly landscapes, and they were lovely.

Cheung’s studio wall, with rainbow coloured paint samples.

A very nice large painting, one of two.

An impressive, small paint sculpture.

Last was Anthony Cooper. I walked into his studio filled with wood, bits of plaster, plastic and bric-a-brac and couldn’t actually see any art. After a few minutes he pointed out these sculptures, from a series which he said was about the plinth supporting the plinth:

This is a kind of ‘poor’, minimalist sculpture that I’ve seen more of lately – Hugh Scott Douglas and Callum Schuster are also doing this kind of thing. I like it, it’s like a new kind of minimal ‘arte povera’, which itself was about questioning art and the establishment.

This is a kind of ugly art, but one that, at its best, delights in the experimentation of materials and pushing technologies to achieve a very subtle, and often very beautiful, result. It’s back to basics, but not. There’s a great article about food in the Financial Times this weekend that discusses a similar idea.

Some shelves displaying small casts of plaster-filled baggies.


This is how he envisions displaying them, but I prefer them displayed as above.

My daily online art auction project, ARTBOMB, has been up and running – very successfully! – for over three months now, so I thought I would give you a peek inside the studio.

The view of our photographer’s set-up, from the side.

ARTBOMB is a project by myself with my incredibly brilliant partners Jim Shedden and Carrie Shibinsky.

We scour Toronto for the best and most unusual emerging works of art, each of which we then showcase, for sale, for one day on artbombdaily.com. It’s an auction so you can bid on the work if you’d like to buy it. At 11 pm, the auction closes and the top bid wins the artwork.

You can subscribe for free, or if you are an artist, submit your work to me at submissions@artbombdaily.com

Please forward it to any and all Toronto artists you know. Follow @ARTBOMBdaily on Twitter, or HERE on Facebook.

The work gets photographed by Glen, our amazing photographer and then packaged up and sent out to the buyer.

The camera lens is inserted between these two black walls.

Glen is careful not to have any glare on the glass covered framed pieces, so he has constructed this set-up, which leaves only the camera lens peeking through.

The view of the camera, from behind.

The artworks are always very well packaged:

In other news, I’ll be devoting most of my time to ARTBOMB, so I’ll be busy on my twitter microblog, and less busy here at VoCA. Please follow @CARZOO.

Here are some of the works we’ve already featured on ARTBOMB. (Work by Allannah Scott, Brendan George Ko, Laura Fedynyszyn, Holly Wheatcroft, Marc Cooper & Ryan Rader – all sold):

ARTBOMB. BUY WHAT YOU LOVE.

I sat down with legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic who was in Toronto last week for the Canadian premiere of The Artist Is Present, a documentary on her work, which screened at the Reel Artists Film Festival. Click HERE to read part one of the interview.

Photo: Marco Anelli. Courtesy Show of Force.

VoCA: I asked people for some questions to ask you on Facebook, and one person wanted to know about your performance scars.  How do you feel about them today?  They mark a time in your life. Are you proud, indifferent, nostalgic?

You know I don’t even think about them. Each scar was a part of a performance. I have scars here (shows one on her wrist), but you know I never look back. Always forward. You know the only time I really feel old is when I make a book, and I have to look back at all the documentation and I say ‘Oh my god…’ I really don’t have nostalgia. It’s all about the now.

Continue reading →

I sat down with legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic who was in Toronto this week for the Canadian premiere of The Artist Is Present, a documentary on her work, which screens at the Reel Artists Film Festival this Sunday. Click HERE for tickets.

She is also setting up an institute for the preservation of performance art, in Hudson, New York. Stay tuned for more on that.

Marina Abramovic. Image: Moma.org

VoCA: Do you think we are headed toward the 4^th dimension – a new age of awareness where we go beyond the five senses?

That’s a good question. I believe we are in an entirely new system of truth. I really believe things are different, consciousness is shifting, and it’s connected. Most people don’t see these things, I mean apart from global warming, apart from the things going on with the planet. I really believe that consciousness is going to another dimension. I’m reading this science fiction book and I’m one of the characters in the book – I’m doing galactic performances on mercury or on asteroids. I asked the author how this idea came about? And he said The Artist Is Present is perfect for galactic traveling because it’s the same material.  I really feel that we have reached a point where the artist is…immaterial. It’s all about energy.

We are going to be aware of things, see things that we haven’t seen before…we on the border of creating a new system. Artists are the antennas of society, we are the function and we have a duty to deliver the messages..

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My first impression, at this year’s emerging design exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel, which is titled Come Up To My Room, was that it wasn’t quite as strong as the past few years.

UA Collective. All photos: VoCA. Click on images to enlarge.

Looking through my photos, though I’m not sure that’s the case. The work is different, more conceptual perhaps. Overall, it’s more white so at first it all appears very similar. But really there is a broad range of intriguing beginnings of ideas that one hopes are pursued further by the artist-designers who created them.

Gareth Bate. Click on images to enlarge.

Gareth Bate. Click on images to enlarge.

There was promising young artist Gareth Bate, whose installation Jewel Net of Indra consisted of portraits painted on small silver mirrored discs. Figures as varied as Bob Marley and Terry Fox were featured – their only similarity being their celebrity.

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The other day, I visited artist Paulette Phillips at her home in Toronto, to be interviewed for her upcoming artwork. Called The Directed Lie, it involved being put to the test – the lie detector test.

Me with Paulette Phillips, undergoing the polygraph. All images: Scott Barker/VoCA

Phillips has trained as a professional polygraph technician in the United States, and owns a polygraph machine, which is cleverly disguised as a suitcase, but it’s the real deal. I don’t know why, but I surprised that it was such an authentic experience, complete with blood pressure and respiration monitors, and carefully considered questions.

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I visited artist Josh Malcolm in his studio this afternoon. His large oils on canvas were everywhere, and I found them very intriguing. They are very high energy – Malcolm says he’s inspired by European and American expressionist painting. But they’re quite different, and quite challenging. At first glance, they looked, to me very modern…but sort of unfinished.

In the studio. All images: VoCA

Cartoon limbs stuck out everywhere in an homage to Phillip Guston, and there are raw, stripey brushstrokes at funny angles across many canvases. I was struck by one piece in particular. It was a black painting, with several arms tangled up and a large swipe of paint crudely smeared across the bottom of the canvas and what looks to be a palette knife a the far side. It make me think of a fist fight.  More precisely, it seemed as if the artist was fighting with himself.

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Hi everyone,

Wow – great response to THIS article in today’s Toronto Star!

To subscribe to ARTBOMB please go HERE. and click ‘SUBSCRIBE’ at the bottom of the page.

Artists – to submit your work, please email carsonandrea@hotmail.com with a link to your website or low res images and ‘artbomb’ in the subject line. Toronto artists only (for now) please. More info HERE.

Thanks!

AC