Some thoughts on the role of women in the visual arts: American artist Barbara Kruger makes the cover of W magazine’s Art issue, via the famous-for-nothing Kim Kardashian. The opening line of the article goes like this: “Kim Kardashian can’t sing, act, or dance, but she’s found the role of a lifetime in the fine art of playing herself.”

Image: highsnobiety.com

Meanwhile, a new feminist art documentary is about to come out this fall. It’s called !Women Art Revolution, and it’s by artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. Watch the trailer HERE.

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Here’s my review of Ross King‘s excellent book on the Group of Seven, in the current issue of Quill and Quire. It’s also at the Quill and Quire website, HERE.

Image: mcmichael.com

Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven

by Ross King

From a young age, Canadians learn about our country’s most famous painting movement in art classes, yet the Group of Seven’s dramatic landscapes and blazing depictions of Canada’s wilderness still don’t seem to get the respect they deserve.

Ross King, the best-selling author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and, more recently, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, redresses this imbalance by situating the group of artists within a larger historical context. His compellingly detailed account begins in 1912, as the painters were just meeting, and continues through the Great War, culminating with the group’s eventual disbanding in the 1930s. King’s elegant prose is a joy to read as he introduces each figure, giving the reader a rare glimpse into the lives of young men who were united by the desire to create a distinctly Canadian painting style at a time when critics, collectors, and the public were hostile toward the aspiring modernists.

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I spoke with Lethbridge artist David Hoffos a few days ago on the eve of his excellent, magical exhibition Scenes from a House Dream, a long term, five-phase series of illusionary installation works that premiered in 2008 in Lethbridge, Alberta at The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, before going to the National Gallery in Ottawa (where I saw it.) The show is now at MOCCA in Toronto and will soon head to Calgary’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery. The touring exhibition is curated by Shirley Madill and circulated by Rodman Hall Art Centre.

Scenes from Scenes From The House Deam, Phase Two: Airport Hotel. Image: seemagazine.com

Scenes from a House Dream
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)
Toronto
September 10 – 31 December, 2010

Another still from Scenes from a House Dream. Image: Viewoncanadianart.com

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Often, the spotlight eludes excellent artists who aren’t showing with the right galleries, or for that matter, any gallery. So…here’s an off-the-radar artist who is doing lovely, sensitive work about place and memory.

All photos courtesy Sandra Hawkins.

We met Ottawa-based artist Sandra Hawkins M.E.S., B.F.A., C.F.A., B.A. soc. through Facebook, and have been interested in her work for some time.

Now she will be showing an installation and series of prints @Reference, on Queen Street West in Toronto next door to the Drake Hotel, for three days from Tuesday, March 30 until Thursday April 1.

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Takao Tanabe was born in British Columbia in 1926 and was interned with other Japanese-Canadians in BC during World War II.  He studied in Winnipeg, London and Toyko, and in New York at the Brooklyn Museum Art School where he was taught by the famous German-born American abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman.

The artist Takao Tanabe. Image: gov.bc.ca

Takao Tanabe was awarded the Emily Carr Foundation Scholarship in 1953,a Canada Council Fellowship in 1959 and a Canada Council Senior Fellowship in 1969.

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VoCA went to Georgian Bay this past weekend, and we were surprised to discover a work of contemporary art sitting on a rock overlooking the water.

Robert Murray, Pointe au Baril II, 2003. Image: Scott Barker

The sculpture is by the artist Robert Murray, who has a cottage nearby and sits next to a lighthouse that marks the original township/community of Pointe au Baril.

The Georgian Bay community of Pointe au Baril was originally located on the north east corner of Lookout Island and the mainland, where the lighthouse presently stands. Together these two land bodies form part of the entrance channel which begins in open water to the west and threads its way through small islands to Pointe au Baril Station and Shawanaga Bay, a protected body of water that extends south to Snug Harbour and the entrance of Parry Sound.

Robert Murray grew up in Saskatoon. He attended the Regina College School of Art and studied with Ken Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Roy Kiyooka, Wolfram Neissen and Richard Simmons. He also studied at the Emma Lake Artists Workshops with Jack Shadbolt, Barnett Newman and Clement Greenberg.

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Painter Graham Peacock has been teaching painting at the University of Alberta since 1969, when he arrived in Canada from England.

Graham Peacock, Valor, 2003. Image: grahampeacock.com

Perhaps not strictly speaking underrated, Peacock has been exhibiting throughout Canada on a regular basis since 1971. In 2003 he had an exhibition of recent work at the New New Painting Museum in Toronto, and in 2005 had a retrospective at the Ernest Poole gallery in Edmonton.

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Québécoise painter Marcelle Ferron was a member of Les Automatistes, a group, led by Paul-Emile Borduas, that believed that painting should be a result of the abstract workings of the inner psyche released subconsciously.

Marcelle Ferron. Image: nfb.ca

She became well known also for her stained glass pieces, which she learned in Quebec and pursued further while living in Paris from 1953 – 1966; the Metro station Champ-de-Mars in Montreal contains one of her windows.

She was awarded the Paul-Émile-Borduas medal for the visual arts in 1983, and in 1985 was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. She was promoted to Grand Officer in 2000, one year before her death.

Marcelle Ferron, Les barrens, 1961- Image: artnet.com

“The only woman to sign the Réfus Global, Ferron championed an approach to art that rejected the figurative and formal traditions of her Beaux Arts training. Her early canvases are visceral studies of the post-war psyche that bare witness to a period of re-birth and reinvention in French Canadian Art.”
(AJ Lloyd, 2009)

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“Art is my life, and the life of my people. I want my work…to live and carry on the rich tradition of our people. I have always felt the importance of passing on my knowledge and my skills….Our art connects us to our past and intertwines us in the present and makes way for the future.”

First Nations artist Walter Harris. Image: canadacouncil.ca

Canadian First Nations artist Walter Harris was hereditary chief from the Gitksan First Nation in northwestern British Columbia. He worked in silver, gold, metal, limestone, silk screen graphics and wood, as well as carving totem poles for his home village of Kispiox in 1971, 1972, and 1978 and for Ottawa, Paris, Japan and Vancouver.

In 2003, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts and in 2005, Walter Harris he received Officer of the Order of Canada.

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Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal Artists

31 OCTOBER 2008 – 22 MARCH 2009

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa

Kent Monkman, Emergence of a Legend, series of 5 portraits of Miss Chief in various performance personas.
Image: pfoac.com

(Click image above to enlarge)

This group exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the National Gallery of Canada, explores representations of Aboriginal people by Aboriginal artists.

Carl Beam, Einstein and Sitting Bull, ca. 1991. Image: archives.gov.on.ca

Artists include KC Adams, Carl Beam, Dana Claxton, Thirza Cuthand, Rosalie Favell, Kent Monkman, David Neel, Shelley Niro, Arthur Renwick, Greg Staats, Jeff Thomas and Bear Witness.

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