Check out the short videos that we produced for the Canadian Art Foundation:

Just click right HERE.

Woman with the Devil, Drawing by Annie Pootoogook.
Image: sitemedia.ca/Feheley Fine Arts

• Dealer Wil Kucey of Le Gallery talks about his hot young artists and his prescient interest in illustrative, grafitti and street art

• Dealer Pat Feheley discusses the new Inuit art. It’s not soapstone sculptures of bears anymore, since Annie Pootoogook’s drawings were included in the last Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

• Artist Kim Dorland welcomes us into his studio as he talks about his influences, his recent work and how he hopes the viewer responds to his paintings.

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The Art Gallery of Ontario is set to re-open in November with a brand new renovation by architect Frank Gehry, a new curatorial strategy and a new logo.

VoCA likes the Warhol-esque new logo. We read it as the white letters sitting on top of a colourful background of (art) history. It seems appropriate.

The logo. Image: artmatters.ca

Not everyone agrees, though. Click HERE to read what Sarah Nicole Prickett had to say on Torontoist.com, and some of the ensuing commentary.

In the interest of fairness, VoCA spoke with AGO logo designer Kevin Sugden, of Bruce Mau Design about the gallery’s new identity:

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Courtesy of Designboom, we have found an interview with German photographer Barbara Probst, whose work is represented by Jessica Bradley Art & Projects in Toronto.

Read the full article HERE

Barbara Probst, Exposure #27, N.Y.C. 249 W. 34th Street, 05.25.04, 9:27p.m., 2004. Image: themorningnews.org

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Wil Murray: the strange space that will keep us together

At the Belkin Satellite Art Gallery, Vancouver

8 March to 6 April 2008

Wil Murray, Casual Friday Morning Coming Down, 2007. Image: belkin.ubc.ca

We’ve got to say it: VoCA loves Wil Murray’s paintings!

A novel mix between painting, sculpture and collage, with echoes of Jessica Stockholder, James Rosenquist and Rauschenberg, they’re not gimmicky. If vision could equal sound, this might be it.

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David McCallum is a Toronto based media artist and musician. His is characterized by a playful appropriation of everyday technology towards idiosyncratic and often performative ends. He has a background in physics and Music and received a Masters in Art and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

His Warbike project was featured as one half of Sound Cycles and Mobile City a show held at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto this past fall.

David McCallum, Warbike , modified bicycle, 2005-2007

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VoCA recently caught up with 2007 Sobey Art Prize winner Michel de Broin, by phone from Berlin, where he is now based.

The Montreal artist has a Toronto court case coming up this spring to contest charges brought against the driver of his increasingly notorious pedal powered Buick, the Shared Propulsion Car, which was recently on view at Mercer Union.

The public is invited to the hearing, which will take place in Toronto on April 3rd, in courtroom R at 60 Queen Street West
at 3 pm. Watch this space for more info.

Michel de Broin, Solitude. Colour Photograph, 2002. Image: micheldebroin.org.
The project consists of suspend a mobile home in isolation but in the centre of traffic for a retreat.

VoCA: There seems to be something of a contradiction between Western society’s desires - for a healthy planet, for example - and our cultural behavior. Your work seems to harness this contradiction, to make objects that somehow embody that contradiction.

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VoCA wishes you a very Happy New Year!

While we were sunning ourselves in beautiful Costa Rica, Bill Clarke, writer, collector and FoV (Friend of VoCA) caught up with Toronto artist Robert Waters in Mexico City, where Waters currently resides.

Since receiving his BFA, with honors, from York University in 1998, Waters’ work has been exhibited in Spain, Mexico and Canada.

Waters’ drawings are influenced by his interest in collage. In his best-known work, Waters begins with brown packing tape and uses it as a background for portraits and life drawings drawn with thick black line using permanent marker. Waters adds highlights to his figures by cutting away areas of the tape, revealing the paper beneath.

Robert Waters, Beauty and the Beast, 2007. Image: pmgallery.ca

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ONE TO WATCH: ADAD HANNAH

Adad Hannah, Traces, 2007 (video still). Image: Courtesy the artist

Montreal-based artist Adad Hannah makes video installations in which the videos appear to be still, when in fact they are videos whose subjects hold their poses…sometimes. The work holds the viewer - who is expecting some forward movement - in suspense.

VoCA caught up with Hannah after his installation Traces had been deemed one of the most successful installations at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. He also exhibited Recast and Reshoot, based on Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal during Mois de la Photo, 2007.

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Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Italian artist extraordinaire Francesco Vezzoli’s exhibition, which includes the North American premiere of his new 22-minute fake television show Marlene Redux : A True Hollywood Story!, opens at Toronto’s Power Plant on September 7th.

The exhibition also features a series of film posters that the artist has commissioned from long-forgotten, Italian film-poster artists; and a number of his embroideries.

Vezzoli reformulates this classic film as a sensational fake television programme about art, fame and the deconstruction of a public persona.

Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: thepowerplant.org

VoCA CAUGHT UP WITH VEZZOLI AS HIS WORK WAS BEING INSTALLED AT THE POWER PLANT:

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Grand Gestures: An Exhibition in Three Parts by 640 480 video collective is showing at Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video (TSV) and the public space in between.

September 6 – 13 October, 2007.

Each of the three projects uses the aesthetics of public memorials and museums to discuss the preservation of video and its inherent value system.

Beginning at TSV with an installation of hundreds of memorial pins made from VHS tape that recall Memento Mori, the visitor will then walk to Gallery TPW. Along the route ten “memorial” style bronze plaques have been installed, each containing a partial transcript from a personal video (sourced from Youtube). Finally, at Gallery TPW, these ‘throw-away’ memories are preserved into an everlasting state – as diamonds.

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