HALIFAX:

Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven at MSVU art gallery
Continuing through 1 June 2008

Kelly Mark, I Really Should…(Neon) - 2001. Image: kellymark.com

Kelly Mark is a VoCA favorite, and this exhibition, which originally showed at Toronto’s Hart House gallery, is now touring. We have seen it and it is great. Mark makes funny, whimsical pieces that say a lot about human nature and the way that societal constructs shape our behaviour. She uses her cat, and often her television to create her multilayered pieces.

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VoCA recommends General Idea: Art, AIDS and the fin de siecle, a fantastic new film by Annette Mangaard, screening at Toronto’s Hotdocs festival on April 20 and 26, 2008.

General Idea. Image: aabronson.com

It’s a wonderful look at the history of the Canadian artist collective General Idea. Group members Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and A.A. Bronson were active from 1969 to 1994. After Partz and Zontal died of AIDS, Bronson reinvented himself as A.A. Bronson: Healer.

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Javier Téllez, Production still from Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See, 2007.
Image: whitney.org

1. THE WHITNEY BIENNALE - VoCA says – thank god for Javier Tellez! His video Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See (2007), which premieres at this year’s Whitney, showed a group of blind people experiencing an elephant through touch. It was an incredibly moving piece that injected much-needed reality into a show that – let’s be honest - had a few too many LA-inspired modernist junk sculptures.

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Norman White. Image: wikimedia.org

“I have little interest in artistic creation which expresses things about me or the world that I had previously known. I have turned to computers for this work because they give me ample possibility for eluding my own contrivance.” – Norman White

Born in Texas and raised in Boston, Norman White has been based in Toronto since 1967. He taught himself electronics in the late 1960s and has since been recognized for his pioneering work in kinetic electronics.

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Lisa Klapstock, Picture 9-Toronto, 2008. Image: jessicabradleyartprojects.com

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Kristan Horton is a prolific artist – and his work is strikingly well constructed. Horton doesn’t seem to do anything in half measures.

Just look at this piece, Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk from 2006. The six minute stop motion animation shows how a package of Canadian cigarettes transforms - as if by magic – into a can of Coke.

Kristan Horton, Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk, 2006. Image: kristanhorton.com

Kristan Horton, Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk, 2006. Image: kristanhorton.com

This work begs the question: What is the difference between the can of coke and the simulated can of coke? You might say, the experience of “the real thing”.

Artists like (VoCA favorite) Gregor Schneider, Christoph Buchel and Mike Nelson have been re-creating reality as art for a while now, and with this work, Horton seems to be suggesting that the approach works on a smaller scale too.

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1. David Rokeby: Plots Against Time at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

March 1 – 26 April, 2008

David Rokeby, Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent), 2007. Image: courtesy the artist

New media artist (and VoCA favorite) David Rokeby is showing new work at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.

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David McCallum is a Toronto based media artist and musician. His is characterized by a playful appropriation of everyday technology towards idiosyncratic and often performative ends. He has a background in physics and Music and received a Masters in Art and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

His Warbike project was featured as one half of Sound Cycles and Mobile City a show held at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto this past fall.

David McCallum, Warbike , modified bicycle, 2005-2007

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Pixel power: Virtual art online commands high prices in the real world

An MFA graduate exhibition in Second Life. Image: www.deanterry.com

Second Life, the virtual world that mimics the real world, has held art auctions fetching big prices. And curiously “real world” galleries have sold artworks based on online creations — capturing the image, enhancing it and transferring it to canvas. (Those pieces reportedly sold for $10,000 each.)

Read the full article HERE

1. RE-ENACTMENTS AT DHC ART FOUNDATION, MONTREAL

February 21 – May 25, 2008

Harun Farocki, still from Deep Play, 2007. Image: mustekala.info

Re-enactments gathers six media artists whose works ‘re-enact’ - in some way critically re-stage media spectacles, performance art or films – cultural events of the past – to pose compelling questions about the present.

Including work by Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer and Kerry Tribe.

Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) garnered significant attention at last year’s Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Even if you don’t care in the least about football (soccer) – the work is mesmerizing. Twelve synchronised video projections in real time variously show the unprocessed feed from TV networks, motion traces of players, coaches evaluations, schematic depictions of passes, abstract computer-generated representations of the game, kinestesiology, visualisations, as well as soundtracks and commentary of all quantifiable events from the Berlin Olympic Stadium, police radio and TV production teams.

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