Newsfront
"Newsfront," Spring 2010, pp. 21-22
GG Award Season: Szilasi, Sherman, Davidson & More
The recipients of the 2010 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were announced March 9 in Montreal. The First Nations artist Robert Davidson, the filmmaker André Forcier, the painter Rita Letendre, the new-media artist Tom Sherman, the photographer Gabor Szilasi and the painter Claude Tousignant were recognized for their distinguished career achievements. The glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson received the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts while the long-time art dealer Terry Ryan was honoured for his outstanding contribution to contemporary Inuit art. The official awards ceremony takes place at Rideau Hall on March 31, and works by all of this year’s laureates are featured at the National Gallery of Canada beginning April 3. In other prize news, the Vancouver artist Rebecca Belmore and Anthony Kiendl, curator of Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA, recently received the 2009 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards, established by another Governor General, the late Ramon John Hnatyshyn.
Stepping Up: Hyland to run the show in Oakville
Oakville Galleries has appointed Matthew Hyland as Director of the twin exhibition spaces that anchor the western edge of the Greater Toronto cultural scene. Hyland has been Oakville’s Interim Director since early 2009 (he has been on staff since 2006); his confirmation means stable leadership for a gallery that has a history of top-notch programming.
“Our immediate plans call for playing a bigger role in Oakville,” he says. “We are establishing a new off-site program that will bring artists to libraries and seniors’ centres. It’s based on recent contemporary-art programs in France; we will link with artists there in a program called ‘Burbs to Banlieues.’ Another emphasis will be the revitalization of our award-winning publishing program, which has slowed down. We will also introduce some multimedia elements to the website.”
The permanent collection is also a priority. “Oakville Galleries has been collecting since the 1960s, but the bulk of our acquisitions date from 1991 onward, when Marnie Fleming joined the staff as a curator. Annually we pull together about $60,000 for new acquisitions, from the Canada Council, the city and other fundraising. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the end result is an impressive permanent collection that was recently appraised at $2.8 million.”
Triennial Starmaker: Marie Fraser’s Montreal Move
In June, the art historian and independent curator Marie Fraser moves from her teaching post at UQAM to a new position: Chief Curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Fraser, whose research focuses on narrative performance in contemporary art, will begin her post at the MACM by organizing the second edition of the Québec Triennial, slated for fall 2011. She hopes to expand the show beyond the venue of the museum to include public spaces in Montreal. Fraser states that her aim at the MACM is to unite her academic and curatorial work and “respond in a credible way to the internationalization of contemporary art” by framing the gallery’s local and international reputations “not as contradictory, but as continuous and compatible with one another.”
Lethbridge Expansion: SAAG blooms in the park
In late 2009, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery broke ground on a major expansion and reconfiguration of its premises on 3rd Avenue in Lethbridge (exhibitions have been presented in a temporary space since early 2009). Along with upgrades to the main galleries and new state-of-the-art, user-friendly library and classroom spaces, the refit will see the building better integrated with Galt Gardens, the park it sits adjacent to, and the addition of a well-equipped multi-purpose gallery that will, as the SAAG’s Curator, Ryan Doherty, puts it, “greatly expand the types of shows we are able to present. We envision it serving as an open studio or workshop space as well as an inviting venue for lectures, screenings and other special events the building could not accommodate as well before.” The museum staff plans to move back into the expanded space over the summer and reopen the gallery in fall 2010 with a multi-generational exhibition focused on Alberta artists entitled “On Your Marks.”
Goodbye NYC: Caitlin Jones to Western Front
As a final development in a roller-coaster year for the B.C. arts scene, Caitlin Jones took up the post of Executive Director at Western Front in December. Jones returned to Vancouver in the summer of 2009 after ten years in New York City, where she worked at the Guggenheim, wrote for the website Rhizome, organized the Variable Media Network (a consortium dedicated to the preservation of video, performance and installation art), coordinated exhibitions for Madison Square Park and lectured at institutions including P.S.1/MOMA.
Jones values her American experiences but is excited to be working in a context that is more distant from market influences. “My feeling here is simply that the conversation doesn’t always have to come back to ‘Who is your gallery? Did you sell anything at Frieze?’ It is a much better situation.”
Once a few vacant positions are filled at the gallery, she hopes to plan programming around the early Web artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied and continue to support works relating to Western Front’s history, like Reece Terris’s Another False Front, on view to March 27.
Prefix Prospects: McLeod curates 2011 Photo Fest
Scott McLeod, Director of Prefix ICA in Toronto, will spearhead the next edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal. McLeod explains that the twelfth version of the biennial photo extravaganza, scheduled for September, 2011, is to be presented under the theme “Spectral Light” and will “explore the place of light in the technological and conceptual evolution of contemporary photographic art, as well as the fundamental role that light plays in our concepts of knowledge and understanding.” Touted for years as North America’s premier photography festival, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal has promoted contemporary photography and emerging curatorial talent through wide-ranging programming since its inception in 1989. The event’s previous guest curators include Vincent Lavoie, Martha Langford, Marie Fraser and Gaëlle Morel.
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