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.

There’s all kinds of art out there.

One of the things that I find so exciting and inspiring about my new project ARTBOMB is seeing art by such varied artists, from the not-so-art-educated to the very highly educated. There is an enormous range of work, which is what makes art (as a language) so incredible and potentially mind-opening.

All work by Erika Stanley at Galeria Valanti. All images: VoCA

Another thing that achieves this is travel. Seeing art being made in other locations, with other influences for other markets is often inspiring. This was definitely the case years ago when I first saw contemporary Chinese art for instance. And again when recently in Costa Rica, where I was introduced to the Galeria Valanti.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

I went to see the new show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art the other day.

I discovered that since they have begun collaborating with the National Gallery of Canada, they no longer allow dogs inside, which was an unfortunate discovery for Hudson, who was with me.

Faith La Rocque, Crystal Ladder, 2011. All images: VoCA

Anyway, I found the work on view to be fresh and exciting! When all of a sudden you see work like this you realize something special is going on. There’s an energy here that I haven’t seen in the city for some time. Bravo to curator Camilla Singh for bringing it all together.

Continue reading →

The other day, I stopped in at the studio of Toronto artist Francisco Gomez.

A detail from Empire of Dust, Macca, 2009. All images: VoCA

Born in Caracas Venezuela, he moved to Canada in 1991 and studied at OCAD. Gomez generally works in ink and pastel on mylar – an unusual combination that Gomez tells me is difficult, since the pastel resists the mylar after a certain point, but it’s a very clean, effective look. I can see why he likes it.

Continue reading →

The other week I dropped in to see one of my new favorite galleries, General Hardware Contemporary, in Parkdale. Not only was owner Niki Dracos super friendly, happily accompanying me in my rush around the gallery (I was late for a talk at Art Toronto) but I was really impressed by the work.

Paintings by Anahita Rezvani-Rad. All images: VoCA

R.M. Vaughn is right, in his Globe and Mail review, that we don’t see these kinds of shows often enough in Toronto and when we do, it’s with relief to those of us who deplore the art scene’s typical back-patting. As Vaughn points out, what makes it so vital is that it is work “seen through the eyes of artists experiencing displacement (internal or geographic) from their homelands.”

Continue reading →

I stopped by the studio of young painter Rob Davidovitz the other afternoon. Rob doesn’t paint in the traditional sense, though. Instead he uses paint to create these textile/painting hybrids.

A woven painting by Rob Davidovitz. All images: VoCA

He mixes paint colours in a kind of pastry tube (more on that below) and squeezes it out in long lines, like thread. Each ‘thread’ incorporates its own mix of colour that blends nicely in the final piece.They he lets the paint dry and weaves the strips, which he attaches to board. Pretty simple.

Another view.

The work may not be terribly mature (yet) -  he’s a young guy, but it’s beautiful, and an interesting approach when you consider other artists who have used paint in a sculptural way – I’m thinking of Kim Dorland‘s earlier work, for one. It’s also interesting that Davidovitz cites the poured paint sculptures of feminist artist Lynda Benglis as an influence. His woven paintings do come off as strangely feminist, meaning that one can comfortably view them through the lens of feminist art–weaving being a traditionally ‘feminine’ craft.

The works are seductive – Davidovitz encourages you to touch and bend them; they’re not delicate.

The back of the work. The paint is glued to the board.

Davidovitz went to art school with plans to be a photographer. Believe it or not, he was working in a bakery, making a cake when he came up with the idea of pushing paint through a piping bag. Shortly thereafter he began experimenting, and eventually perfected the technique..

Three smaller finished works.

Are the works paintings or textiles? “I weave paint,” says Davidovitz. He’s been showing here and there (including at Toronto’s Textile Museum) since he graduated in 2005 and is currently preparing for a group show titled Hard Twist at the Gladstone Hotel which opens on November 25th. The exhibition, all textile-based work by 40 artists, will feature his largest work to date, an enormous piece that weighs over two hundred pounds and involved over twenty gallons of paint to create.

This is good – he should be encouraged to think big and beyond, the way Benglis does.

The artist with a single strand from his Gladstone Hotel piece.

Some small strands.

The weaving process.

An early, experimental work.