CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

ARTBOMB IS NOW OPEN TO MONTREAL ARTISTS.

Beginning in June 2012, ARTBOMB will make occasional road trips to Montreal to pick up work. We will meet artists at a specific location to assess and receive their work. Artists will sign a contract and we will return with the works to Toronto, where they will be photographed and put in the line-up. Work that does not sell is returned to artists on our next trip.

SUBMIT YOUR WORK!

Artists interested in participating (Toronto and Montreal artists only, for now) may contact ARTBOMB at submissions@artbombdaily.com. Please include a link to your website or low resolution images of your work, putting ARTBOMB in the subject line.

More information:

ARTBOMB is a carefully curated daily auction featuring an artwork by a rising Canadian art star. It’s like Groupon for art!

Launched in December 2011 in Toronto, ARTBOMB is a brand new way for artists to expose their work to thousands of potential art buyers.

ARTBOMB is a fresh approach to art buying that allows busy professionals a daily peek into a carefully selected cross-section of Ontario and Quebec’s most exciting art by delivering one work into their inboxes, 5 days a week. Bidding opens at 6 am and closes at 11 pm. Subscribers bid on the work and at the end of the day, the highest bid wins the piece, which is delivered to the buyer the following week.

The artwork – including painting, prints, photography, sculpture, drawing, mixed-media and video art – is designed to reflect a broad cross-section of Ontario and Quebec’s most exciting talent, and is selected by Andrea Carson Barker, an expert in contemporary art and the accomplished founder and publisher of one of Canada’s most widely read culture blogs, http://www.viewoncanadianart.com. Artworks are mostly priced at under $1000. All works are delivered ready to hang.

ARTBOMB is a project by Jim Shedden, Carrie Shibinsky and Andrea Carson Barker.

SUBSCRIBE NOW! To receive our free daily e-blast, please go to Artbombdaily.com and click ‘subscribe’. We do not share any addresses.

ARTISTS: Please promote ARTBOMB to your artist friends! Forward this link!

Contact: Andrea Carson Barker, Jim Shedden, Carrie Shibinsky: contact@artbombdaily.com

ARTBOMB. Buy what you love.

Over the past ten years, artist Max Dean has collected other people’s photo albums. He’s got about 500 of them, which are being used as part of his latest project at this year’s CONTACT Photo festival in Toronto.

Artist Max Dean hands me the album that I chose, wrapped in an archival box. All images (except Google map) by VoCA.

The project is called Album, and it involves Dean loading up his customized VW Beetle – the Foto Bug – with boxes of albums and driving around town to various locations during the month of May. People can come an choose an album, of which they then become ‘custodian’. As artist Michael Awad dryly commented, when I saw him at one of the stops, “it’s a lot of responsibility.”

Max Dean, he of the Robotic Chair, is a fantastic artist, no question. What I love about this project is how actively it engages the curiosity and imagination of all the participants. I’m noticing more work recently about ‘imagination’ – in fact, a film that I’m going to see next week at Hot Docs, is about an art project called Herman’s House, which is truly amazing the way it harnesses the imagination of a man in solitary confinement, in prison. But that’s another blog post.

The Foto Bug parked outside the University of Toronto Arts Centre, earlier tonight.


Boxes sit almost empty in the front seat. Every outing, they take as many boxes as they can.


People gather round as curator Sophie Hackett has them sign some paperwork, after choosing their album.


My nice little album!


It was a birthday gift, for ‘Jim’ from ‘Mum’ on June 25, 1950.

Here’s a selection of images from the album. I believe the shots were taken in and around Toronto in the mid 1950s. One image is titled ‘Keswich’ (sic) Beach, which is in Ontario. Others refer to ’74 Marjory’, which when I Googled Mapped it, shows up as this house (on the left.)

74 Marjory Avenue, Toronto.


I love the free, sexy attitude of this girl.


And this guy’s clearly proud of his car, and his beers…


I love the kid in back.


This is my favourite shot.


The end.

Tasman Richardson’s immersive installation at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, is on until April 1st in Toronto and I recommend you see it.

Tasman Richardson, Memorial, 2011. All images courtesy the artist.

Conceived in collaboration with curator Rhonda Corvese, the exhibition may make you reconsider what you had previously assumed about video art. The works in the exhibition use his micro editing technique, Jawa whose name is taken from scavenging characters in Star Wars, who according to Richardson “lived by stealing and rewiring old technology for personal use and for profit.”

The installation is very dark and you move between screens, across what feel like bridges and into room after room. None of the pieces have a concrete narrative; rather it’s about stopping in the presence of each one. There are six works in total: ANALOG TIDE, in which the viewer walks through a group of static-y televisions; FOREVER ENDEAVOR, an installation between two screens, each showing a woman from a movie (Poltergeist and the Ring) staring at one another. The third work is PARASEC, where dots of light speed down a hallway, creating optical distortions.

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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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My experience with Thomas Hirschorn’s work is that it’s often about overkill. And It calls attention to the fake-ness of things, as if to suggest that what we assume is solid isn’t in fact all that stable. It’s just held together with tape, or made from cardboard.

Thomas Hirschorn, Das Auge, at the Vienna Secession, 2008. Images: artnews.org

Thomas Hirschorn, Das Auge, at the Power Plant, Toronto 2011. Images: artsynch.ca

He has said, “I’m interested in the ‘too much,’ doing too much, giving too much, putting too much of an effort into something. Wastefulness as a tool or weapon.”

I would describe his installation, Das Auge at Toronto’s Power Plant, as altogether too much. It seems as if Hirschorn is trying to incite the feeling one gets of being bombarded by too many advertisements, protests, commodities, soundbites, messages etc.

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So, Vancouver artist Steven Shearer will represent Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens June 4 and continues until November 27, 2011.

Steven Shearer, Nash, 2005. Image: museomadre.it

Torontonians might recall an exhibition of Shearer’s work at the Power Plant in 2007, which I believe was curated by former Power Plant curator Helena Reckitt (now critic/curator in residence at the University of Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand).

So what might visitors to Canada’s pavilion expect to see?

Shearer is going to build a nine-metre high, free-standing mural that will act as a false front for the rather dimminuitive Canadian pavilion, bringing it up to the scale of the surrounding British, German and French pavilions. I’ve always thought it strange that our pavilion was designed by an Italian architect. It’s embarrassing as its size next to the others (it was built in 1958) insinuates Canada’s place as ‘only’ a colony.

More, after the jump…

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Over the past few years, I’ve often mentioned, and championed, regional art galleries in Ontario and Canada.

Artist Luke Painter and one of his works. Image: blogto.com

CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener and Area) is a regional not-for-profit arts organization whose mission it is to “present innovative art within a public space.” It has evolved from a small, regional festival in 1996 to an organization that offers year-round programming, featuring international and national artists.

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Here is another example of how art and life – through design – are drawing closer together all the time. Mirror has a long history in art going back to at least the Renaissance and of course more recently the wonderful pieces by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Michael Snow, David Altmejd and Jeff Wall, among many, many others. Over the past few years, I’ve been predicting the return of mirror as a material in art, and now it’s seemingly everywhere.

Sweden’s Tree Hotel has a room called Mirrorcube. Image: geeknewscentral.com

I came across this awesome hotel room that looks very similar to one of Michel de Broin’s sculptures, his Superficial from 2004, which is essentially a large mirrored rock that he installed in a forest in Alsace, France and then documented. I love the idea of using mirror to create camouflage.

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Are art galleries and museums the new churches? What is the relationship between art and faith? Does art that can inspire us to that degree even still exist?

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Image: artblat.com

Emily Carr, Wind in the Tree Tops, c. 1936-1939. Image: heffel.com

I was marveling with a friend the other day at how in the early 20th century – only 100 years or so ago – people were profoundly shaken by bright colours and loose brushstrokes in painting. I was speaking specifically about the reaction of Torontonians to the early work of A.Y. Jackson and other painters who had been influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch and the Impressionists in Europe.

A.Y. Jackson, The Red Maple, 1914. Image: yorku.ca

And then today on CBC Radio’s Q, today the Reverend Jennie Hogan spoke about the relationship between faith and art, and how the Mark Rothko room at the Tate Modern can have such a profound spiritual effect on people.  Is art, she asks, replacing religion?

James Turrell’s Roden Crater Project. Image: 1.pb.blogspot.com

At a time when religion indeed seems to be on the wane, is art able to replace it? Or is art that powerful (I’m thinking Rothko, Barnett Newmann, James Turrell, even Emily Carr, even still being produced?)  Much of today’s art, as Hogan put it, unfortunately seems to be no more than a knee-jerk reaction to things.

Maybe it’s architecture, though, not art. If museums are the new cathedrals, as Hogan argues in THIS Guardian article, then maybe it’s not the art but the architectural space that now provides the sublime experience.  This is something that was brought up after Gehry built Bilbao and architecture fans flocked there like catholic pilgrims to Lourdes.

If at first glance it seems unlikely that art has replaced religion, I can think of two artists who have the power to create a faith experience, one in the positive (inspiring belief), and the other in the negative. Canadian David Rokeby’s award-winning interactive sound installation Very Nervous System (1986 – 1990) is an  invisible computer interface that sets body movements to music. Imagine walking down the street and suddenly your body movements begin to create sound! Though I haven’t seen it in the flesh, on THIS video, it seems sublime. Click that link also to find out how it works.

Secondly, and on the other side of things, is Gregor Schnieder, possibly the greatest German artist of his generation. His numbingly claustrophobic, absolutely terrifying basement installation, Weisse Folter at the K21 in Dusseldorf in 2007 shook me so profoundly that it still haunts me now, years later.

Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter. Image: 3.bp.blogspot.com.

So great art hasn’t lost any of it’s power. It may seem like more of a challenge for art to generate an almost spiritual reaction, but it’s still there. Perhaps it’s just harder to see, with so many mediocre artists clouding our view of it.

Speaking of Americans (see below), we just came across this very cool project in Detroit.

The Ice House Detroit. Image: Greg Holm/dwell.com

A collaboration between photographer Greg Holm and architect Matthew Radune, the Ice House Detroit is just what it seems to be. A completely frozen house.

Read more about the project on their blog, HERE

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