“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.

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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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I was in New York last weekend, to see friends but also to see the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective the day before it closed. It has gotten quite a bit of attention for its unusual installation. The work was hung entirely from the ceiling, down the central atrium, with absolutely nothing on the walls of the notoriously difficult gallery. It transformed Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum into a theatre, which made strangely perfect sense.

The viewer/audience on the ramp, looking into the atrium. All images: VoCA. Click images to enlarge.


The atrium, filled with works hung from a metal scaffold. Click images to enlarge.

The show had been hailed as a must-see by art critic friends of mine, but also panned by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.”

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