“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.

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.

One of Canada’s most important collections of vintage and modern photography will go on view at the University of Toronto Art Centre in the new year.

Peter Henry Emerson. A Stiff Pull, ca. 1886, photomechanical process, photogravure. Image:utac.utoronto.ca

The Malcolmson Collection, which I can tell you is a spectacular, very special selection of rare photographs,  is comprised of work dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and includes work by Gustave Le Gray, Eugene Atget, Man Ray and many others.

A Man Ray photograph from the Malcolmson Collection. Image:meandmymamiya.com

The exhibition, which will feature selections from the collection, is curated by Heather Diack to examine the relationships “that are created between individuals and photographs and between individuals within photographs.”

On top of that, it’s good to think about the earliest days of photography, long before digital processes and consider all that was involved for these artists to capture an image. There was a connection to the experience and an artistry that we just don’t see as much anymore. It’s as if they were in awe of their subject, and I guess they were. Today technology allows us to dominate nature – you can see it everywhere in contemporary art. I wonder what the effects of this will be. What would McLuhan say?

In any case, this should certainly be a show worth seeing. More information is HERE.

Cindy Sherman, the American artist known for her Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980 and subsequent self-portraits in which she transforms herself, through hair, makeup, prosthetics and costume, into various female characters from the seductive to the grotesque, is all about disguise.

Cindy Sherman for MAC Cosmetics. Image: heartymagazine.com

She’s been working this way for decades and is one of America’s best-known artists. In fact, she now holds the record for highest price paid for a photograph at auction when her work Untitled #96 was sold for $3.8 million at Christie’s in May.

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Although I don’t blog about public art in Toronto, since it could create a conflict with my position on the City of Toronto Public Art Commission, that doesn’t stop me from blogging about public art elsewhere.

The entrance to the new Sofitel Hotel in Vienna. Image: VoCA/Scott Barker

I was in Vienna, Austria recently and saw the most fantastic use of art in Jean Nouvel‘s new Sofitel hotel. Surprisingly unremarkable from the outside, there was an artwork by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist that greeted us at the hotel entrance and really wowed us on the rooftop restaurant. I’m not sure if they have a percent for art program there, which we have in many cities across North America (it gives one percent of project costs over to public artworks in newly built properties) but the hotel owners really gave an impressively enormous amount of space and visibility over to the artwork.

The awning over the hotel’s entrance was lit up from underneath with an image that has viewers peering into Pipilotti’s magical ‘heaven’. You literally see up her nostrils. Then, you enter the very black elevator up to the roof top lounge and restaurant.

The restaurant ceiling. Image: VoCA/Scott Barker

The entire restaurant – from the chairs to the carpet, walls and bar is covered in matte, dark grey. The only colour exists in a spectacular ceiling mural by the artist that covers the ENTIRE ceiling, which is also punctured with small circular video screens. Through the screens you can see Pipilotti cavorting around, sticking her fingers down to pull you up into the ceiling.

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As the summer gallery season gets underway, here are my picks for the country’s best blockbuster exhibitions:

THE COLOUR OF MY DREAMS: THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION IN ART
Vancouver Art Gallery
Through September 25, 2011

Man Ray, close up of The Kiss, 1930. Image: ultraorange.net

The VAG has organized the most comprehensive survey of Surrealist art ever to be shown in Canada. With 350 works by all the masters (Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Dali and Andre Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto), it also will “reveal the Surrealists’ passionate interest in indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest.” Given that the exhibition will include works from the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the MoMA, the Reina Sophia, the Georges Pompidou and the Tate, it should be pretty good.

Shary Boyle, Lovers, 2009. Image: canadianart.ca

Is Surrealism having a ‘moment’? The work of much celebrated Canadian artist Shary Boyle comes to mind, as does the work of several of this year’s Sobey Prize shortlisters (hello, Zeke Moores and the excellent Manon de Pauw)

Manon de Pauw, L’atelier d’écriture, a video and sound installation, and performance from 2006-7.

From de Pauw’s website: “In (this) video series, groups of artists are gathered in silence around a table, and given basic choreographic instructions. Throughout the session, the act of writing is transformed into line, drawing, collage, and audible rhythm.”
Check out the VAG’s website, HERE

CARAVAGGIO!
Caravaggio and his followers in Rome
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
17 June – 11 September 2011

John the Baptist, by Caravaggio (1571-1610). Image: wikimedia.org

Canada’s first exhibition devoted to the work of the truly brilliant Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a little late – after numerous shows of the artsts work circulated in Europe over the past few decades he has rightfully become the hottest, and arguably the most modern of the Old Masters.

But better late than never, and it’s always a joy to see these dramatic works, in this case juxtaposed against works by painters whom he inspired, including Peter Paul Rubens and Orazio Gentileschi. If you haven’t seen Caravaggio’s works in person (and even if you have), this will surely be a must-see show!

Click HERE for the gallery’s website.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST NEW YORK
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Through September 4, 2011

Franz Kline, Cardinal, 1950. Image: friendsofart.net

This show, coming from MoMA to Toronto features over 100 works by major American masters including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko (a play about whom, incidentally, is coming to Canstage soon after having rave reviews in NYC) and, from what I hear, some fantastic Franz Klines. Of course, it’s always nice to see de Kooning’s work, though I also hear there aren’t as many as have been reported in this show.

A scene from John Logan’s play, RED about artist Mark Rothko. Image: artknowledgenews.com

These are works by artists who are, to put it mildly, darlings at auction. Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 de Koonings Woman III went for the second highest price, $137.5 million a few days later.

As the AGO notes, this is “a generation of artists who catapulted New York to the centre of the international art world in the 1950s,” reason enough to see the show.

Click HERE for more info.

I thought I’d share with you a photograph that was recently given to me. It’s quickly become one of my favorite things.

It’s a photograph of Andy Warhol examining a Polaroid. It must have been taken in the early sixties, and it was taken by a friend of mine, a German art collector, whose daughter Warhol was doing a silkscreen of.

Image: VoCA

In the photo, one of several taken surreptitiously by my friend, Warhol is examining a test, soon to become one of his famous silkscreen portraits. Click HERE to read more about the process he used to create the portraits.

The critic Arthur Danto wrote, in The Nation in 1989: “I think eventually people competed to be portrayed by Warhol because that appeared to give them instant immortality of the sort usually enjoyed only by the greatest of stars or the most celebrated products, as if they were also part of the common consciousness of the time.”

Which, of course, they were.

Well it’s that time of year again. The long list for Canada’s major annual art prize, the Sobey Art Award has been announced.

Zeke Moores, Axes, 2009. Image: zekemoores.com

It’s true that many of Canada’s fine young artists remain hidden from media attention or public view in other parts of the country. So I look forward to the Sobey longlist so that I can discover new talent.

There are fewer names that I recognize off the bat this year, so I was happy to discover some great works by a newer crop of young Canadian artists. I’ll take a closer look at other regions finalists soon, but for now, here is a glimpse into the work of the first group of finalists, from Atlantic Canada.

ZEKE MOORES is an Ontario-based artist, originally from Newfoundland. Much of his work involves creating perfect replicas of urban detritus and utility objects like cardboard boxes in bronze, traffic cones in steel, plastic milk crates in aluminum and a shiny polished bronze full-size dumpster. The fabrication looks to be excellent. But my favorite piece is called Axes, a series of cast aluminum axes installed as if they were chucked into a white, spotlit gallery wall.

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VoCA contributor Bill Clarke, a collector of art and artist books (see previous VoCA posts HERE and HERE) has come back once again with a wonderful post in honour of International Women’s Day.

Here is his blog post on a number of artist books by women artists that he has in his increasingly envy-inducing collection:

Dorothy Iannone: The Story of Bern (or Showing Colors), 1970. Self-published with Dieter Roth. Signed and numbered by Iannone (431/500 copies).

Dorothy Iannone’s colourful and boldly erotic paintings from the 1960s and early 70s seem to be gaining recognition lately. Her work was included in the revealing (in all senses of the word) “Women Pop Artists” show that toured the U.S. last year. Iannone met the artist Dieter Roth during a trip to Iceland in 1967, and they remained together until 1974. Drawn by Iannone in the format of a graphic novel, this book tells the story of the removal of Iannone’s work from an exhibition in Bern, Switzerland in 1969 because the gallery director, Harald Szeemann, felt that the sexual content would draw the attention of police. Roth stood by Iannone, threatening to withdraw his work from the exhibition if hers was not shown. Iannone’s work was removed, and this book documents the strained friendships, including Roth’s with Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri (who sided with Szeemann), that resulted.

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If You’re in the Hood….

Scott Massey, Two Yellow Lines, 2006. Image: Helenpittgallery.org

In Vancouver, I just got word of a video projection exhibition that will happen on March 18 at W2 Storyeum, 151 W. Cordova.

The show is the work of a new not-for-profit called Drop Out Video Arts that has brought together artists, artsworkers and musicians to create this one-off event. Expect 30 projections, alongside installation and interactive artworks.

And if you’re an artist, submissions are still being accepted until Monday. Check out their website at the link above and the submission form HERE.

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