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A guide to the best exhibitions and events in the visual arts
Elements of myth and reality are digitally fused into a dreamlike interpretation of the complexities of modern First Nations existence in M: Stories of Women, Niro’s latest photo series. Oct. 14 to Nov. 12. Gallery 44, 120–401 Richmond St. W.
Renewed interest in the modes and materials of abstract painting has launched a fresh cast of artists and visual perspectives on to the Canadian art scene, including the coded “fields of knowledge” of the Calgary painter Bradley Harms. Sept. 29 to Oct. 22, 2011. Angell Gallery, 12 Ossington Ave.
Riddled with hints of geometric abstraction, modernist design and a bibliophile’s passion for the book as both idea and object, Sullivan’s work creates open-ended narrative possibilities that are at once conceptually precise and purposefully oblique. The Toronto artist gets double billing this fall with new drawings and sculptures at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects and “Albatross Omnibus,” a 52-book commission for The Power Plant. Opens Nov. 12/Sept. 23 to Nov. 20, 2011. 1450 Dundas St. W./231 Queens Quay W.
The New York–based photographer, whose series on the mountain cabin hideout of Ted Kaczynski (aka “the Unabomber”) was a standout at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, presents selected works from his decade-long project Animal Logic, which documents the uneasy and at times surreal divide between artifice and the natural world as seen in the stage-set displays at natural-history museums. From Sept. 10 through 24, 2011. Bau-Xi Photo, 324 Dundas St. W., Toronto, ON.
The idea for “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” began with an installation by the Toronto artist Paulette Phillips on the architect and designer Eileen Gray. Seeing it got me thinking about the proliferation of artists who are revisiting modernism and why so many of them are focusing on a specific object, be it an iconic building or person. The works in the exhibition are not homages: they’re not naive or cynical. Architecture and design offer another way into the ideals and aspirations of modernism. Artists are aware of its contradictions and its failures, but by putting that history in a social context, they look at it anew.
Lesley Johnstone is the curator of “Yesterday’s Tomorrows.” The show runs to Sept. 6 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 185, rue Ste-Catherine O.
My current practice of rebuilding vintage motorcycles as sculptures comes from growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. The more I work with machines, the more they develop personalities. The quirkiness of each piece becomes just as engaging as making it run smoothly and efficiently. I do ride these bikes and there is an inherent sense of danger in them. That’s my idea of art with a function. After all, if they are not well-made, the risk is beyond what might happen if a sculpture critically “fails.”
Ray Lodoen is a Saskatoon artist. His exhibition “Gearheads,” with the Toronto artist Steven Laurie, continues to July 30 at AKA Gallery, 424–20th St. W., Saskatoon, SK.
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami are among today’s best-known, not to mention commercially successful, artists. The group exhibition “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” provides a historical framework for them, and others, by telling the story of a generation of artists influenced by the late career of Andy Warhol. These figures reject the avant-garde role historically associated with artists and instead choose to embrace the cultural mainstream, both in an entrepreneurial sense and in terms of viewing mass media as well as the marketplace as legitimate and appropriate platforms for getting a message out. The show allows for a nuanced consideration of artists’ “branding” and ultimately sheds light on some of the pervasive— but often unacknowledged—forces shaping today’s art world.
Jonathan Shaughnessy is Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, at the National Gallery of Canada. He is the coordinating curator of the Ottawa showing of “Pop Life,” which is on view at the NGC from June 11 to September 19, 380 Sussex Drive.
The things that we build embody our highest aspirations and basest instincts of survival. They also express our will to establish dominion over territory. “Empire of Dreams” is inspired by what I’ve noticed as a trend among artists and in certain exhibitions recently: examining ways in which we exist within our built environment—our interaction and experience with the spatial, architectural, socioeconomic, technological and, of course, physical and imaginative conditions that shape relationships to our surroundings. You could say that it’s a 21st-century variation on the classical landscape themes. It also happens to be the second of our biennial exhibitions highlighting work by Toronto artists.
David Liss is Artistic Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. “Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the built environment” is on view at MOCCA from June 19 through August 15, 952 Queen St. W.
The Fertile Void is an ongoing series of interventions on golf courses that I have been doing since 2003. For the latest work, a fairway of the Banff Springs Golf Club was visited by a cloud-like mass of pentagonal balloons. The video documentation presents an ethereal encounter with this impenetrable yet massless form. It’s interesting for me to walk on the fabricated landscape of the golf course but be surrounded by real mountains: they begin to look like they’re collaged from postcards. The images that I build on top of the constructed site then somehow seem believable, and even natural. It’s the perfect site for transformative acts that reveal the patterns that connect us through the trajectory of past and future.
Miruna Dragan is a Romanian-American artist based in Calgary. Her series The Fertile Void is on view alongside the work of the collective Noxious Sector from July 9 to August 5 at TRUCK, 815-1st St. S.W., Calgary.
Damian Moppett’s exhibition “The Sculptor’s Studio is a Painting” follows the artist’s recent six-month residency in London. The title is poignant; the exhibition will be an installation of interwoven relationships between media, where paintings collapsing off the wall take on a sculptural entanglement. Plaster and paint merge to form his well-known Caryatid figure, yet now we will view it severed, lacquered to black and suspended from a sculptural scaffold of a cage. Damian’s new work continues to explore the artist’s insertion into art history while complicating that trajectory.
Catriona Jeffries is the owner and director of Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver. Damian Moppett’s latest work is on view there through June 26, 274 E. 1st Ave.
It’s a Picasso summer in New York, with the Met mounting a landmark display of its 300 works by the European master and a complementary MOMA show of 100 prints. To Aug. 1/to Aug. 30. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave./Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St.
Quebec City’s L’Oeil de Poisson kicks off its 25th-anniversary year by taking over the village of Deschambault-Grondines for a summer festival of art interventions by BGL, Graeme Patterson and Kim Waldron, among others. June 18 to Sept. 26. Various locations, Deschambault-Grondines.
In “The Black Glove and the Peacock,” Girard takes regional folkart traditions as a starting point in a narrative suite of sculptures inspired by both public and private collections in Regina and Saskatoon. The sculptor Sylvia Ziemann fills the gallery’s Sherwood Village space with post-catastrophe survival dwellings. June 26 to Aug. 29/until July 18. Dunlop Art Gallery, 2311–12th Ave./6121 Rochdale Blvd., Regina, SK.
The exhibition “27 x Doug” tracks the shifting formal and personal concerns within more than 25 years of portrait photography by the veteran Winnipeg artist. Curated by J. J. Keegan McFadden. Opens July 15. Gallery One One One, FitzGerald Bldg., University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB.
Following its hit run at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Burtynsky’s major touring exhibition “Oil” stops at The Rooms with 50-plus large-scale photo works depicting the conflicted realities and paradoxical beauties of a petroleum-dependent world. To Aug. 15. The Rooms, 9 Bonaventure Ave., St. John’s, NL.
Full talks and tours schedule, Douglas Coupland conversation info, and magazine launch details posted for free day of activities
Applications due May 9 for $55,000 in prizes
Free art tours for high-school students to take place in April and May
New writers on contemporary art encouraged to apply by June 1
Dates already set for next year’s Toronto festival
Applications for this $7,000 student award are due April 6
Event to feature a conversation with Douglas Coupland, gallery tours, a magazine launch and more
Films on Shary Boyle, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michel de Broin and Jon Gnarr set to open the festival on March 22
Opening-night celebration and art-industry talks highlight fifth year of fair
Don’t miss the North American premieres of films on Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, happening February 23
The 85-year-old artist Arnaud Maggs nudged out Fred Herzog and Alain Paiement as winner of the second annual Scotiabank Photography Award, announced last night in Toronto. This $50,000 win follows the opening of a major Maggs survey at the National Gallery of Canada.
As one of the primary exhibitions for Contact 2012, “Public: Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces” is ambitious. Charlene K. Lau observes that the two-venue show mirrors the fractures of contemporary life: public and private, visible and invisible, place and non-place.
In this review, writer and artist Joni Murphy considers Abbas Akhavan’s current solo show in Montreal, which activates a variety of themes—war and art, destruction and nation building, human and animal—with a distinctively light touch.
Melding William Morris-style ornamentation with more contemporary concerns, artist Luke Painter detours around dry academicism for something more vibrant and visceral. Mariam Nader reviews his current Toronto show at LE Gallery, finding depth in decoration.
Frieze opened its first New York edition last week with some surprising highlights: sculptures that were free for public viewing outside the big commercial tent. Canadian Art art director Barbara Solowan was there, and brought back this slideshow.
