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A guide to the best exhibitions and events in the visual arts
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.
A group exhibition curated by Shauna McCabe finds common ground among collaborative projects based on sustainable land use and local identity. Until Sept. 22. Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 145 Richmond St., Charlottetown, PEI.
The Ontario-based artist duo unveils a new set of long-running installations that embody the ”commonplace magick” of their instantly recognizable witchy aesthetic. From June 26. Rodman Hall Art Centre, 109 St. Paul Cres., St. Catharines.
Vast watery expanses, indeterminate ports of call and an inherent sense of longing set the stage for “a visual meditation on the state of transit in a geographical no man’s land” in the French-Algerian artist’s video work MiddleSea. Until July 24. Prefix ICA, 124–401 Richmond St. W.
A new tongue-in-cheek conceptual project has the artist developing a “custom environmental wellness fragrance” to offset the destabilizing effect of ongoing gallery renovations on the Southern Alberta Art Gallery’s staff and patrons. Cal Lane’s remarkable domestic/ utilitarian/ornamental hybrid sculptures follow in “Sweet Crude.” Until June 20/June 25 to Sept. 5. 324–5th St. S., Lethbridge.
Join us on Thursday, September 23, and Saturday, September 25, for exciting events that celebrate the visual arts.
Canadian Art’s under-40 patron group launches its second year with a program of extraordinary behind-the-scenes art events.
Congratulations go to winner Pandora Syperek and runners-up Deirdre McAdams and Vency Yun.
The Canadian Art Foundation, with RBC, is pleased to announce the 15 semifinalists in the 12th annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
In this video, recorded on Saturday, May 29, 2010, as part of the Canadian Art Gallery Hop in Vancouver, Kitty Scott, director of visual arts at the Banff Centre, and Douglas Fogle, chief curator of the Hammer Museum, joined artists Lisa Anne Auerbach and Althea Thauberger to offer their thoughts on the artist’s role in the world.
Canadian Art is currently seeking an Online Production Manager to join its team. Applications are due September 10, 2010.
Canadian Art magazine is currently seeking an editorial professional to join its team. Applications are due September 15, 2010.
Canadian Art’s under-40 patron group had a fun make-your-own dining experience with one of Toronto’s hottest young artists
Learn about the influences that shaped the PS1 curator’s thinking as he prepared for his exhibition “The Talent Show”
Join us September 23 for a gala benefit and September 25 for a free day of talks at galleries citywide
In recent years, both the Dia and MASS MoCA have mounted tribute exhibitions to late American artist Sol LeWitt. This week, Mercer Union wraps up its own notable homage, which recreates a 1981 wall drawing LeWitt did for the then-fledgling space.
For the past number of years, there's been controversy regarding the future of Halifax’s Khyber Arts Society. Seen by many as a key venue locally and nationally, the Khyber was back in the news this month as a city report recommended a new three-year plan for its space.
Play and strife come together, DIY style, in Todd Tremeer’s Little Wars (Make Me), an interactive project that debuted this month at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. In it, viewers can collaborate on a wall-sized battle mural and “bring the war home” via paper-cutout soldiers.
Summer is often marked by contrasts, a dynamic that the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery seems to pick up on in its current pairing of solo shows: John Kissick’s manic, multifaceted paintings and Gwen MacGregor’s calm, geoscience-toned fieldwork.
MKG127 acknowledges Toronto’s above-average summer temperatures with “Heat,” an exhibition that ironically offers some cool respite while displaying works that evoke bubbling tar, existential crises and blistering guitar solos.
