First, there is the winding ride to UBC’s bucolic, suburban-feeling campus. Then, the walk into what recent signage tells you is Musqueam territory, past busloads of German tourists on a cultural excursion, and into one of Arthur Erickson’s greatest buildings—a soaring modernist triumph overlooking a Pacific cliff.

Once past the elegant threshold of the Museum of Anthropology, there is the descent into its great hall full of totems and ancestral spirits and down again into the museum’s eastern edge, where the Audain Gallery, opened in 2010, ushered in a new focus on contemporary art. Perched beside a much more ethnographic section full of masks, Pacific-island costumes and First Nations artifacts, “Safar” could easily be overlooked. But those who notice it will be glad they did.

“Safar” is located in MOA’s Audain and O’Brian galleries, and the delineation between the galleries marks a natural division between the two parts of the exhibition—the Audain is full of more visceral works, while the O’Brian houses the more ephemeral pieces.

This sense of duality also suits an exhibition that plays with ideas of place and displacement, absence and presence, penetrable and impenetrable via contemporary works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists.

While there are elements of the survey show in “Safar” (the Arabic and Farsi word for “voyage”), it’s largely an attempt by curator Fereshteh Daftari (formerly of MoMA) to present works that challenge traditional Orientalist visions of the “Middle East” (as Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi has famously asked, “Middle to whom?”). By presenting contemporary works, Daftari hopes to free the artists from the burden of exposition and ethnography, situating them firmly within the often-itinerant global art world as free agents of self-expression.

As interest in contemporary Middle Eastern art has grown in tandem with recent invasions and “interventions”—one of the ironies always pointed out to me by artists who still live and work in Baghdad—it has become as hot a commodity, to my mind, as West Coast real estate.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a scenario today like the one that unfolded in the wake of 9/11, when a group show of Canadian artists of Arab origin at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau was threatened with closure—largely due, it’s been said, to a video work by Jayce Salloum that featured an interview with an ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter. That exhibition was saved at the 11th hour by the outcry of then-prime minister Jean Chrétien.

Still, in regards to “Safar,” its coordinating curator and MOA curator of education and public programs Jill Baird did confess to a moment of panic in the wake of the Boston bombings.

But Baird needn’t have worried. There is nothing overtly “political” about “Safar” that might inflame easily outraged North American sensibilities—which isn’t to say much of its context and subtext isn’t politically charged. But “Safar” is much more an exploration of how we perceive the “Middle East,” with the onus for explanation and examination returning back to the viewer in an elliptical fashion.

While visitors can begin at either gallery, most seem to gravitate to the Audain first. Here, they are greeted by two different versions of the world: the first, a 2007 work by Shiraz-born, California-educated, Paris- and Tehran-dwelling artist Farhad Moshiri called Yek Donya (One World), the second, internationally celebrated Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s 2006 sculpture Hot Spots.

While Moshiri’s gleaming, optimistic map of a borderless world embedded with thousands of blue and gold Swarovski crystals reads like shiny new Byzantium cartography, it can also register as a subversive kick at the privileged, “it’s a small world after all” presumption. Hatoum’s glowing neon globe speaks to a world of crisis capitalism emergencies, caged and violent, yet also linked by issues that affect us all, like global warming.

On an adjacent wall, one finds Tehran-born, New York–dwelling artist Ali Banisadr’s The Merchants—a Bosch-meets-Persian-miniature ode to the world of commerce, inspired partly by the 2008 financial crisis, but also in this context perhaps an unwitting reference to the global art market. Speaking of which, this is the one conventional (i.e. oil-on-stretched-cloth) painting in the entire show, and it is by one of seven Iranian artists (an unsurprising proportion in light of Vancouver’s significant Iranian community, and the involvement of prominent local arts patron Nezhat Khosrowshahi as chair of the exhibition’s volunteer committee). This situation made me wonder why the work of exiled Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah—whose tableaux depicting ravaged Iraqi flags and maps, slashed and burned, manage to achieve a subtle poignancy—was not included.

One of three Palestinian artists in “Safar,” Gaza-born, Paris-dwelling artist Taysir Batniji travelled to Vancouver to install Hannoun, a work he recreated specially for MOA. A carpet of pencil shavings recalling poppies (the “martyr’s flower”) are strewn over a slightly raised white platform contained by a cube. On the other side of this fragile border hangs a photo of the artist’s workshop in Gaza, often rendered inaccessible due to bombings and border closures. It is an engaging work, playing with absence and presence and the act of creation amid the frustrations of political geographies.

At a diagonal to Hannoun, Nazgol Ansarinia’s 2009 subversion of the Persian carpet, Rhyme and Reason, offers unexpected images of contemporary Tehrani life hand-woven in silk, wool and cotton. Fusing the otherwise strictly delineated public and private spheres, depictions of a family on a motorbike frame its edges, while street fights and school girls in Islamicized uniforms form vignettes. At its centre is a mandala-like circle of chadored women sharing food, stories, gossip and possibly a mourning ritual.

A few feet away stands Parviz Tanavoli’s bronze sculpture Oh Persepolis II. The only “Canadian” in the show, Tanavoli is one of Iran’s most famous modern sculptors and divides his time between West Vancouver, where he lives in comfortable obscurity, and Tehran, where his family-home-turned-museum was shut down by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was only a mayor, not a president. A 1975 element of the work features rows of a private pictorial language referencing cuneiform script, and it may be read at once as an ode to Persia’s pre-Islamic glory and a possible comment on its exploitation by a decadent shah. In 2008, this work was given a bronze frame, evocative of an almost nostalgic sense of protection for a pre-Islamic past neglected by the current regime.

On an adjacent wall, Y.Z. Kami’s 2007 work Konya offers a visual ode to the city where the poet Rumi lived and died. Panels of photographs juxtapose old stone walls embedded with Sufi script, mausoleum domes, and other images, managing to convey a sense of mysticism with a textural flourish. Next to it is Mitra Tabrizian’s staged photograph of working-class Tehranis, poised in the midst of daily rituals, in a dystopian landscape framed by a giant billboard of Khamenei and Khomeini extolling “revolutionary” values. Caught between internal politics and external threats, this portrait of Iran’s sanctions-plagued have-nots is oddly reminiscent of the Vancouver school.

Susan Hefuna’s Woman Cairo 2011 infuses traditional Egyptian mashrabiya latticework with a subtle use of more modern signage. And Lebanese artist Ayman Baalbaki’s installation Destination X that recreates a family car in flight, its roof-rack piled high with bedding, baskets and furniture, evokes Lebanon’s civil war as well as the 2006 Israeli bombardment. The work and its evocations also find tragic resonance with today’s Syrian crisis.

The only Iraqi in the show, Helsinki-based artist Adel Abidin, offers a fake travel-agency video installation called Abidin Travels. Inspired by his trip to post-invasion Iraq where a US marine greeted him with a friendly “Welcome to Baghdad,” he subverts a traditional “exotic” travelogue voiceover about his hometown’s many charms with scenes from the height of the mid-2000s violence. Visitors are encouraged to take home video-still posters proclaiming “Welcome to Baghdad” that include images of women in mourning, US soldiers dancing, and victims of kidnappings and roadside bombs.

As you exit the Audain Gallery, grisly posters in hand, Moshiri’s golden, idealized map offers an ironic wink.

Works in the O’Brian Gallery include Egyptian/Australian artist Raafat Ishak’s Responses to an Immigration Request From One Hundred and Ninety-Four Governments, where he diminishes the power of state bureaucrats by creating egg-shaped national emblems with responses in stylized Arabic script (Canada’s was “please refer to our website”). There’s also a series of self-portraits by Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist Tarek Al-Ghoussein juxtaposing an image of the artist veiled in a keffiyeh against different landscapes (including one of him staring out at his homeland from the Jordanian banks of the Dead Sea, for which he received a special visit from local police). Nearby is a video piece called Sundown by Hamed Sahihi, a young student of Abbas Kiarostami, that inserts a ghostly figure onto a day at the beach on the banks of the Caspian Sea, and I Will go to Paradise, Self-Portrait, Hyeres 2008, a series of hand-coloured photographs by Egyptian Youssef Nabil who slowly vanishes into the Mediterranean.

“Safar”’s parting gesture is, fittingly, a haunting video loop: Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman’s unedited 20-minute journey across the desert plains of Erzincan, in eastern Anatolia,  in 2009.

In what was once known as Mesopotamia, source of so much human culture and site of present-day conflict, the artist wanders blindfolded and wobbly, a solitary black figure against the barren landscape, holding out his hands for balance. Gradually, he disappears into the horizon, drawing the viewer into his Don Quixote–like journey, refusing to offer any safe narrative certainties, demanding complicity.

The post Safar Redraws Middle Eastern Art Map at UBC’s MOA appeared first on Canadian Art.

So might one describe the performance persona of on-the-rise Toronto artist Jeremy Bailey—actually, his persona prefers the moniker “Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey.”

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed watching Bailey’s augmented-reality YouTube videos as an escape from the über-seriousness of the art world.

In the absurd digital scenarios Bailey creates for his naive and narcissistic persona—changing the settings on a stock portfolio by dancing to a pop song; creating a new land mass by nodding his head; turning his face into an interactive TV set—the downcap-a artist demonstrates a simultaneous mastery and contempt of technology and its touted ability to solve our problems.

The tensions in Bailey’s videos—between expertise and amateurishness, man and machine, self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation—often collapse into satire (Bailey’s) and laughter (the viewer’s).

(Disclosure: Many moons ago, when we were both students, Bailey curated one of my works into an open-call program I submitted to via post, but I feel my enjoyment of his work has more to do with his work than that instance of generosity.)

And so, it was with great expectations that I headed to Bailey’s recent exhibition at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery—and encouraged others to as well.

But when I viewed the show, I felt disappointed. And then I felt bad for feeling disappointed.

In that exhibition, Bailey did a worthy artistic thing: he took a risk. In his case, the risk involved heading into a more collaborative, social and object-oriented zone than the silly solo-performance-for-laptop videos I’ve loved to watch.

Unfortunately, as with any kind of change, it’s possible that Bailey’s new strategy hasn’t yet caught up with the proficiencies of his past work.

***

The exhibition “Important Portraits” included one of Bailey’s hallmarks: a video originally posted online in which he, clad in a white turtleneck, speaks with enthusiasm about his latest project.

As is common in Bailey’s videos, shapes and images float across the screen in an augmented-reality manner controlled by Bailey’s body movements.

In this video posted to Kickstarter—done, unlike the great majority of Kickstarter videos, at the invitation of the site’s art-program director Stephanie Pereira—Bailey talks about a “problem”: the fact that people who support artists on crowdfunding sites are represented with generic icons or tiny JPEGs.

This 21st-century patron-imaging convention, Bailey explains, is an affront to art-world tradition. (Though Bailey doesn’t mention it in the video, Kickstarter distributed more funding last year than the National Endowment for the Arts.)

“I’ve been around long enough to know that art is always about who pays for it!” Bailey enthuses in the video. That’s why, he says, there is a long history of artists producing “grand portraits of great men with great power…who have destroyed entire civilizations. And women, too!”

To correct this “problem,” Bailey proposes a “solution”: he will produce glorious augmented-reality portraits of his own Kickstarter donors.

The text on his Kickstarter page (also written exuberantly) describes the levels of glory donors receive—ranging from a revamped student ID card for the $49 student-patronage rate to a “42×58 limited edition archival print” and “personal one on one 30 minute augmented reality skype chat” for a rate of $1,999 or more.

The rest of the exhibition consisted of 13 C-print portraits that resulted from the Kickstarter foray, a pile of green-and-pink pins that proclaimed the wearer to be a “FAMOUS NEW MEDIA ARTIST!” and a wall text that listed the 100-plus people who funded the project on Kickstarter.

***

In many ways, “Important Portraits” differed from what Bailey has done before.

The works at Pari Nadimi Gallery were mostly still images, not moving ones; they mostly depicted other people, not the artist; they referenced art of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries rather than the art of just of the 20th and 21st; they involved collaborations with others, rather than solo practice; and they showed objects resulting from a performance, rather than the performance itself.

To explain further, each patron portrait in the show was based on a historical portrait—mostly ones from the 1500s and 1600s. According to the amount each Kickstarter donor paid into the project, they received a certain degree of time or attention from Bailey in selecting the historical piece that would be referred to in their augmented-reality portrait. Then, the subjects were photographed in that historical pose or (if they paid less) sent Bailey a photograph of themselves in that pose. Finally, Bailey added various digital flourishes to each still image, turning paintbrushes into MS Paint swooshes and frilled collars into fractal arrays.

In the show, for instance, we saw Bailey himself striking the same pose that Dürer did in his famed Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old—but with floating pink cones, green spheres and blue polygons taking the place of the original’s lush fur collar. There was MOCCA director David Liss done up as one half of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the skull in the foreground no longer anamorphized, but rendered in a pale pink. And there was art-tech critic Michelle Kasprzak reframed as per Jacob Adriaensz Backer’s Portrait of a Lady as the Muse Euterpe, a digitized feather pen, rather than an iPhone, in her hand.

There were also portraits of people quite close to Bailey—his wife, who did a lot of work on the project and brought in many of the historical references, depicted as Rosetti’s Lady Lilith; his sister and her wife, imaged in the vein of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait; and his mother and father portrayed in a manner based on John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow. Though Bailey has mentioned some of these people in his videos before, they have never been pictured in his work, as far as I can tell, until now.

***

While I was touched by the portrayal of community and connectedness in “Important Portraits,” my disappointment was linked to a few factors.

For one thing, I wanted to see all 100-plus of Bailey’s Kickstarter-donor portraits, not just 13. That won’t be possible until July, because the commissions are currently in progress.

I also felt the absence of the Kickstarter page in the exhibition—the writing of that text is the product of a performance too, and it would have added helpful context for drop-by viewers.

Visually, it felt anachronistic to me that, with all the powers of today’s Photoshop at his disposal, Bailey would create augmented-reality still-image graphics that look like they are from the 80s and 90s.

And while I love the humour Bailey usually integrates into his work, I found myself chuckling a lot less at “Important Portraits.” What amusement I did find was tied to recognizing some of the people in the portraits—like Liss, Kasprzak or Bailey himself.

Finally—and here is a truly impossible request—it would have been great to have Bailey there during gallery hours talking about the work, how he sees it, and whether the people in the portraits see it the same way he does.

***

Jeremy Bailey is a smart guy. If Canada is to have a standard-bearer for the future of web-based art, we’d be lucky if he accepted.

Bailey has been passionate about computers, and programming them, since the age of six when he received his first Mac. At 10, his parents remortgaged their home so he could upgrade.

“I remember having a computer that was buggy and I would hug it to get it to turn back on,” Bailey once told me of his childhood. “So I actually thought of my machines as sort of emotional human ways—which I think, hopefully, is apparent in my artwork too.”

Bailey is adept at negotiating theories behind his work. For instance, he cites Rosalind Krauss’s essay “The Aesthetics of Narcissism” as an influence. Where Krauss wrote about implications of performing for a video camera in the 1970s, Bailey elucidates implications of performing for others through devices in the 2010s.

“More and more, the way we perform for other human beings or the way we interact with them is time-delayed on a device, and more often than not it’s actually just for ourselves,” Bailey says. “So we’re communicating with other people by communicating with our reflection, which I find an interesting state of being.”

Bailey also has tech bona fides—by day, he is a creative director at Freshbooks, a Toronto software company, and he considers YouTube his context. The culture around demonstrating new technologies is also a major influence.

“Demo culture was a big inspiration to me—that idea that it’s about the demonstration [of the technology], not about anything else. But in my case, I thought, ‘What if it wasn’t about the demo? What if it was all about the person giving the demo and the demo part was actually really bad?’ That ended up becoming my performance strategy.”

In terms of the 80s/90s style in the “Important Portraits,” Bailey explains that the graphics in his videos are always rendered in real time, which limits their sophistication given the processing power of his laptop. He designed the “Important Portraits” graphics so they wouldn’t be “orphaned” from his video style, and he also noted a nostalgia for the era in which he was most creatively invested in computing—the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet Bailey’s work raises questions that reach even further back, like, How different is a performance artist from their persona?

One thing Bailey notes is that his performative working process is based on a Stanford design-thinking model that he uses regularly at Freshbooks.

“The things I do sincerely during the day, I try and satirize at night,” he says. “That has become the balance for me.”

***

This issue of satire, so crucial to Bailey’s practice, also led to some confusion for me regarding “Important Portraits.”

I was uncertain of how satirical the portraits were—and whether the people portrayed in them (besides Bailey) understood them to be satirical or not. A satirical quality has been clear in Bailey’s past video work, and it was certainly present in the Kickstarter video and text, but in the “Important Portraits” stills, it was less clear.

Talking with one of the portrait subjects, I discovered he found the satire a slippery matter as well.

“I began the process thinking, I want to be part of a deconstruction of the art world,” says UK curator Omar Kholeif.

Kholeif knows well the critical aspect of Bailey’s practices; he has curated Bailey in multiple projects and he recommended Bailey to Kickstarter’s art-program director.

While Kholeif went into the Kickstarter project well aware of the satire at hand, he says, “when you become the object [of the project] you become engrossed in the power dynamic. When you are being directed and asking for direction and deciding how you want to upgrade your photo, you forget the satire, you really do.”

Though Kholeif says the finished work generated some “shock” for him and his partner (it was a double portrait, and he says, “we wanted to know why he was covering up so much of our faces… and why he had us so intertwined”), he remains supportive of Bailey’s work.

“Supporting Jeremy to do this project means it might encourage others to take themselves slightly less seriously,” he says. “If that happens, I will be really happy, because so many of the experiences I go through in the art world lend themselves to humour.”

***

During his Toronto exhibition, Bailey’s activities elsewhere continued apace.

On April 14, he did a performance at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam via Skype. On April 17, the New Museum launched a Bailey project as part of its First Look program, a monthly series of innovative online works. On April 20, Bailey participated in Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, which pairs “seven leading artists with seven influential technologists” to develop something new.

All of these were deemed successful by various outlets, and as a Bailey fan, I’m happy that’s the case.

Still, I remain intrigued by the issue of changes in life and art, and Bailey’s attempt to negotiate it via “Important Portraits.”

Last month, Bailey mentioned to me that he was trying to do things “in real life” as much as possible these days as opposed to online.

This seemed quite a statement for a web-based artist, so I followed up via email to ask him why. Here is part of what he wrote back:

“In general, people really value real-world experiences. I don’t think that means we have to pretend we don’t spend 12 hours a day looking at screens (that’s popular culture now), but I’m definitely looking for ways that allow me to exist in both places at once.”

Reconsidering these comments, I recognize one reason it took me so long to write this review—namely, I see Bailey’s desire to achieve balance between the “digital” and “real” worlds to be a wish myself and many others share.

In this light, to express disappointment about Bailey’s efforts in “Important Portraits” might feel like a betrayal of a healthy wish for balance.

But expressing disappointment might also indicate just how difficult is for any of us to excel at “existing in both places at once”—as “Important Portraits” suggested, at least for me, it even remains a challenge for one of the brightest and most promising artists in Canada.

The post Jeremy Bailey Aims at Change with Important Portraits appeared first on Canadian Art.

Famed Chinese conceptualist Ai Weiwei is slated to headline, with a Toronto version of his Forever Bicycles sculpture.

The work promises to consist of more than 1,000 bicycles, and will be shown in the city’s Nathan Phillips Square.

Ai’s “According to What?” survey, with an opening date scheduled for August 17, will run concurrently at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

French curator Ami Barak will curate Ai’s piece, along with work by other artists around City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square.

Barak’s Nuit Blanche exhibition theme relates to the centenary of Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade art installation.

Other artists scheduled for Barak’s exhibition include Toronto’s Kim Adams, Montreal’s Michel de Broin, Japan’s Tadashi Kawamata and Belgium’s Pascale Marthine Tayou.

Toronto curator Patrick Macaulay is organizing “PARADE,” which occupies the area between Charles Street West and Queen Street West along University Avenue.

Artists set to participate in Macaulay’s project include Canadians Max Dean, David R. Harper, Libby Hague, Claire Ironside and Ruth Spitzer.

Ontario curators Ivan Jurakic and Crystal Mowry are due to present an exhibition along King Street from Yonge to John entitled “Romancing the Anthropocene.”

Brendan Fernandes and Kelly Richardson—both Canadians based abroad—and American Janet Biggs are among the artists due to participate in the latter exhibition.

Nuit Blanche officials say that full programming details will be announced in August.

The post Ai Weiwei Bicycle Sculpture to Headline Toronto’s Nuit Blanche appeared first on Canadian Art.

Those who have visited the Venice Biennale might recall the unusual character of the Canadian Pavilion. Built by Italian architects in 1958, the wood, steel and glass building is surrounded by lush greenery and discreetly nestled between the pavilions of Germany and Great Britain. Its design was inspired by the architectural rationale that a structure should be harmoniously integrated into its natural environment. In Venice, the space was built around an ancient tree encased in glass that sprouts in the centre of the room and shoots out through the pavilion’s spiralled roof. The walls are awkwardly curved to form an octagonal shape, with windows that allow panoramic views of the foliage outside. It is almost as if one has unexpectedly entered a treehouse- styled shrine to the great outdoors instead of an exhibition space.

For David Altmejd, the artist representing Canada at the 52nd Venice Biennale, the eccentricities of the Canadian Pavilion were a crucial starting point for The Index and The Giant 2, the two monumental sculptures he unveiled at the opening. When Altmejd, a native Montrealer, received the news that he had been selected for Venice by the Canada Council for the Arts following a successful proposal by Louise Déry, Director of Galerie de l’UQAM, he visited the space for inspiration.

Altmejd is fascinated by the architecture of strange and imagined spaces, from mythical labyrinths to complex minimalist sculptures to the secret hiding places invented by children. After visiting the pavilion, he was drawn to how “there was an ambiguous relationship between what is outside and what is inside.” Rather than playing down the building’s unusual shape, Altmejd was moved to transform it into an otherworldly aviary. The space, and the light of Venice, caused him to consider, as he puts it, how “I could shift the power over to the birds.”

At just 32, Altmejd has already established a reputation for his opulent fantasy worlds, in which glittering werewolf heads comfortably inhabit pristine geometric forms. His work draws on popular culture as much as it relates to the history of sculpture. He references the lavishness of the baroque movement, the glamour of Ziggy Stardust, 19th-century Romanticism and modernist architecture as well as the monsters that pervade B horror movies and science fiction.

Within an art-historical context Altmejd is difficult to categorize, in part because of the symbolic richness of his work. His practice has been related to everything from the minimalist sensibility of Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd to the fragmentation of the body in the works of Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois to the postmodern narratives of Matthew Barney and the intuitive vision of William Blake. Early on in his career, Altmejd looked to external sources for inspiration. By now, however, he has built up a complex iconography of images and materials that has allowed him to work in his own distinct visual language.

Over the last decade he has established this language by collecting an intriguing range of objects that have become motifs within his practice. The artist recognizes that there is a fetishistic quality to the way he works with materials. “Fetishizing precious-looking objects and wanting to display them and take care of them has always been very present in my work,” says Altmejd. “I used to collect crystals as a kid and I think I am still doing that.” Some of the recurring elements include bones, raw minerals, graffiti, Plexiglas, delicate gold chains, handmade birds, costume jewellery and silk flowers, as well as hair, resin and fractured mirrors. In the artist’s chimerical world, the grotesque and exquisitely beautiful intermingle.

Altmejd first rose to international prominence after participating in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003 and the Whitney Biennial in 2004. With the Whitney show, he grabbed public attention for the evocative way his sculptures displaced the mythical figure of the werewolf within architectural structures. As part of his contribution, two of his sculptural works, Untitled (Bluejay) and Untitled (Swallow), were exhibited in New York’s Central Park. These pieces were oversized, decapitated werewolf heads that glistened with crystals, pearls and rhinestones. Both of these enchanting creatures were contained within Plexiglas cubes, and their presence—enhanced by the natural setting—haunted unsuspecting passersby.

While the werewolf figure reflects cultural anxieties within the genre of horror, for Altmejd nothing is more disturbing than the creepy simplicity of a minimalist structure. His sense of worry concerning these forms stems from his interest in the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose meandering tales of labyrinths and archives illuminate the uneasy relationship between infinite and finite spaces. Altmejd finds minimalist shapes eerie because of their never-ending, mazelike potential. Captivated by this Borgesian complexity, he explains, “I like to create spaces inside of objects because this suggests that spaces inside can grow infinitely.” The excesses of a Gothic nightmare could seem out of place within a minimalist tableau; however, in Altmejd’s work, the dissonant elements magically come together.

He began experimenting with this combination while studying for an MFA at Columbia University in New York. At one point, he built a table that completely overwhelmed his small studio. With barely two feet to spare on either side of the structure in an already claustrophobic space, his purpose- built display case became the foundation for his work throughout the semester. By itself, the table seemed somehow unfinished, so Altmejd began fabricating a range of objects that could activate the structure. As he recalls, “When I integrated organic grotesque elements, it was as if the whole thing became alive.” One of these handcrafted objects happened to be a werewolf head.

Werewolf 2 (2000) was one of the earliest sculptural works by Altmejd to fully embrace the potential of the werewolf figure. He started off by designing a complete monster, but soon fragmented the body into pieces and scattered them—like church relics—onto an intricate display structure that resembled a new-age sarcophagus. The werewolf ’s head was partially concealed in an L-shaped box that was covered by fractured mirrors. Altmejd describes the effects of the mirrors and how “I did not expect that it would act as a kaleidoscope. When you looked inside there were bits of fragmented werewolf head reflected infinitely within the space that gave it a weird disco, labyrinth, werewolf feel. That was the first time I found this combination really satisfying and beautiful.”

Altmejd’s practice is charged by an interest in energy-generating processes that reflect the cyclical transitions between life and death. For the artist, the werewolf represents a powerful state of becoming—the body caught in metamorphosis. He imagines that his sculptures immortalize this hybrid creature after it has undergone an intense transformation. The mutilated and decomposing remains are often displayed with crystals growing from their inner and outer surfaces—for Altmejd, this is something that suggests the possibility of regeneration.

Birds are also a recurring ingredient within Altmejd’s repertoire. Until recently, they played only a peripheral role. The Old Sculptor (2003) consisted of delicate architectural structures fabricated from mirrors and Plexiglas that were arranged on a platform alongside the dispersed remains of a body and a scattering of artificial flowers. This tableau was surrounded by a thin gold chain that appeared to be carried by a cluster of handmade painted birds. Altmejd introduced the birds as a convenient creation myth, a means of explaining away his formalist decisions and alleging that responsibility for the direction of the work resided within the piece itself.

Altmejd makes it clear that, previously, “the birds were in the works as a way of injecting life and energy but they were empty, mere decorations. In the Venice work they become complex entities.” In recent months, he has constructed a remarkable array of birds to fill the aviary—some specimens are made of bronze, others will be taxidermied and there will even be a flock constituted from slivers of mirror. Also included will be a darker breed of “birdman”—a figure plucked from ancient Egyptian mythology—dressed in suits. Altmejd’s fantastical ecosystem promises to overflow with anthropomorphic birds who will feed, breed and nest within an extraordinary sanctuary.

The title of the work, The Index, might refer to the aviary as a system for classifying bird species, but it also explicitly references Borges. Moreover, the index alludes to the stripped-down language of minimalism and reinforces the idea of the aviary as a structure for creating order as well as an untamed natural environment. Order and chaos, finite and infinite spaces and the blurred boundary between nature and what is kept contained—all are tensions that pervade this new work, situated itself within the great outdoors.

The architecture of The Index is fashioned from a maze of bridges, birdcages, concealed backrooms, jutting steel poles, endlessly reflecting shards of mirror and island-like platforms. In the past, Altmejd theatrically framed his works within display structures in order to keep each sculpture self-contained. For Venice, everything has changed because, as Altmejd explains, “I wanted to push limits and this is the first time in my work that you are going to be able to travel into the space. In my mind it’s still a sculpture because all of the elements are connected.” He has created an immersive environment in which visitors can walk through hidden recesses and trompe l’oeil structures; however, all of the sprawling architecture will overlap to form a single body.

In this new work there is a convergence of the key elements within Altmejd’s material lexicon. Even the severed werewolf head makes an appearance, this time in a supporting role as a birdfeeder. The one typically monstrous component to feature in Venice will be The Giant 2, an 18-foot colossus built from bone, resin, hair and mirrors. This second work, located in the back of the pavilion, is a habitat within a habitat; its inner recesses are designed to serve as an elaborate nesting ground for the birds. The giant’s insides are an organic architectural network made up of staircases, holes and corridors, all overflowing with wildlife. Here, in a clever inversion of Altmejd’s typical approach, a fantastical body houses a display of architectural elements. This seems to complement his belief that “Energy is what makes things alive, and I like to feel as if my sculptures become living organisms…to make huge intense living organisms is a way of making me feel like I really exist intensely through the work.”

Those who make the trip to Venice can revel in the visual extravagance of Altmejd’s imagination, which has come to life at this year’s biennale on an unprecedented scale.

This is a feature article from the Summer 2007 issue of Canadian Art. To read more instalments from our Venice archives series, please visit the following pages:
From The Archives: Rebecca Belmore at the 2005 Venice Biennale
From The Archives: Rodney Graham Prepares for the 1997 Venice Biennale
From The Archives: Tom Dean Prepares for Venice in 1999
From The Archives: Ian Carr-Harris on Cardiff and Miller in Venice, 2001

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Margaret Dragu is cleaning. She often cleans and does laundry—for herself and others, taking these common domestic tasks and framing them in an art context. The winner of a 2012 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Dragu works in video, installation, web/book publication and performance art modes.

Reaching the heavy doors of the legislature, she rises to her feet: her face shows pain and perhaps bewilderment; her deep-set eyes seem old; she can’t go on. Perhaps it is not possible to scrub the body politic clean. Her merry band is silenced. Novelist/participant Sarah Sheard recalls: “It was like Mardi Gras meets small-town parade. Margaret gives us freedom, but also lots of guidance—freedom to have maximum fun.”

A veteran of international performance art festivals and the alternative gallery scene in Canada and abroad, Dragu often organizes events outside galleries, enlisting the help of non-artists. These pieces might involve parades, baking bread, flag dancing, or sharing stories. “If the participants are merely obedient, it is not collaboration,” she claims. “I’m mindful of how bossy I am. Working with people changes what you think you’re doing; it changes you forever.”

Born in Regina in 1953 to a farm-girl mother and a father who worked in construction, Dragu began artistic life as a dancer, then branched out to include the body in every aspect of her practice. “Whether her subject is sex, art, power, politics, money or motherhood, Dragu addresses the body as living and vulnerable. Her work treats the human body, every human body, as a sacrament,” Debbie O’Rourke writes in an essay on the artist.

Dragu claims to have “multi-personae” disorder and operates at various times as Lady Justice, Verb Woman, Art Cinderella and Nuestra Señora del Pan. As Lady Justice, she bears witness at roadside shrines to hit-and-run accidents, employing salt-and-wine rituals at mourning sites across the country. A sip of wine rolls down her bare arm, like a red tear.

She explains how her art enacts transformation: “Something that you thought you knew about justice and injustice, loss and revenge changes.” She may seek to “make the ugly beautiful, or to take something that is frightening and create something tender.” At Edmonton’s Vision of Hope monument, using her sword, salt and wine, and the scales of Lady Justice, she paid tribute to the women killed at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

Performance art is not theatre, though it employs some common elements. “Theatre,” says Dragu, “wants everyone to share the same experience.” Whereas, in her work, “I want everyone to bring their own lives and feelings to the piece.”

Working in a whatchamacallit genre, performance artists are always being asked to explain themselves. Dragu creates her own definition: “Performance is live. Alive. Embodied. It requires the artist to be present in all senses of the word ‘present.’ To forge a sacred trust with the audience (the community/the gathered). The performance artist is the vessel—the witch, the shaman—creating solo or group actions that lean towards transformation for themselves and others.” She calls these events “controlled improvisations,” though she is pleased when something unexpected occurs.

Dragu’s family moved to Calgary in 1963, and in 1969 she began taking classes with émigré dancer Yone Kvietys Young, who taught advanced movement, incorporating elements of Dada. Kvietys Young’s students danced to the words of Gertrude Stein and the music of Erik Satie—heady stuff in the late ’60s. In 1971, Dragu spent a year in New York City, where she studied with dancers/choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, danced with Laura Foreman’s company, and became involved in Happenings. She recalls how “there were so few barriers in what was still a small scene. You absorbed their teachings in your body.” “They” being Yvonne Rainer, Twyla Tharp, Steve Paxton and Merce Cunningham.

She soon figured out that she was never going to be a conventional modern dancer. She has the wrong body type, for starters, and, I suspect, was not good at taking direction. Weaving techniques from many fields of bodywork into performance, she’ll use burlesque, tap dancing, flamenco and theatre. Even as she seeks to crumple boundaries between audience and performer, there is always the element of artifice. “I appear to be very democratic with people, but I have a lot of technique acquired over 45 years. Some of this is publicly acknowledged as technique and some is technique that I have invented.” Group animation and storytelling may appear effortless—but they’re not.

Who else can dependably fill the Richmond Art Gallery with fervent fans—many of whom would otherwise never set foot in a gallery or theatrical venue? “These are my people,” Dragu says, meaning the mix of fellow artists, gallery-goers and clients from her day job as a personal trainer and fitness instructor who works with the disabled, seniors and teens. “At first they looked like they wanted to run for the hills, but they stayed. They were very open and non-judgmental.”

Lynn Beavis, former director of the gallery, agrees: “Everybody finds something in the work that resonates. Margaret has a great following here.”

The front room of the Richmond Cultural Centre displays props and traces from past performances: home-made playing cards, her mother’s recipe box, rolling pins, aprons, flags—“M. Dragu’s Museum.” Videos show the artist in various alter egos in performances going back to 1975. Violin music begins and Dragu dances down a huge staircase wearing gloves painted with letters of the alphabet. Facing the crowd, she asks them health questions plucked from the PAR-Q form (a physical-activity-readiness questionnaire, used in pre-exercise screening): Do you have diabetes? Heart condition? She and her collaborators, women from the Cinevolution media-arts society, garble warnings in various languages, mixed with “fasten your seatbelt” alerts, creating a slightly dangerous, slightly comic cacophony. Dragu takes a long black scarf and dances through the audience. “I call it ‘working the cloth,’” she says. The gestures allude to her time as a stripper, and to women’s work—ironing and laundry.

There is risk in working with the general public. What if they don’t agree to enter the spirit of the event? After 42 years of art practice, Dragu knows the tricks of the trade and how to corral unruly troops. The performance can still go haywire—usually when she feels unable to connect with the audience. “No one’s fault, but it’s not happening. Sometimes I just hate everyone there. It’s smoky and noisy and no one understands what I’m doing and I don’t want to do anything for them. Over the years, you learn not to put yourself in that situation.”

Feminist performance artist and University of Toronto Scarborough lecturer Tanya Mars acknowledges the gift of accessibility in Dragu’s work, and how “even when it’s dealing with serious subject matter, she exudes a kind of joy, so rare in contemporary art.” Mars adds, wryly, “it is typically thought about performance artists that they aren’t successful at theatre or dance or film, so they do performance art as a default option.”

The form is perilous, with no object to sell, and its ephemeral nature means that “the works survive as rumour, nostalgia and myth,” as Andy Fabo writes in his essay “Margaret Dragu: The Mother of All Movement.” Dragu has taken to video and social media with a vengeance, not only documenting performances but also creating videos that are complete events unto themselves.

Image: a hand lays cards on a table. The cards are stenciled with gerunds: MENDing, WRAPping and YOGAing. Verb Woman is at work. Flute music plays and a bucolic view of a rustic walkway appears on the video. More words flash—hanging, mending, wrapping—and Dragu, perched on a ledge wearing a fringed skirt, begins to wrap one foot in surgical tape. A sense of tenderness is evoked; the words become attached to the body, to gesture, to caring for an injury.

Interdisciplinary artist and long-time friend Elizabeth Chitty recalls how moving it was to see these Facebook videos displayed at the National Gallery of Canada: “context is all.” She shares a working-class background with Dragu, and offers this insight: “the dirty little secret in the art world is the degree to which social and economic class influences who gets a career and who doesn’t.” She admires Dragu’s dedication and commitment, despite a lifetime of economic struggle. “She’s always given at least one day a week to art, using low-tech tools and putting her work in front of an audience. She’s indefatigable and never imagines that being an artist isn’t a worthy calling.”

Dragu got into trouble with feminists back in the 1970s. Most of these women were anti-pornography, well educated, and born into middle-class backgrounds. Dragu never finished high school and spent many years cleaning houses and working as a stripper, turning burlesque into art performance. For this audacity, she was considered a traitor to the feminist cause—although, she says, some of these women “were willing to hire me as their cleaning lady so I wouldn’t have to work as a stripper anymore.”

A fixture on the Queen Street West scene in Toronto during the 1970s and early ’80s, Dragu moved to British Columbia in 1986, after an unpleasant incident during a performance at the Spadina Hotel where a viewer sexually assaulted her in the name of artistic intervention. It would be many years before she returned to Toronto to perform.

Dragu lived and worked for 25 years in Finn Slough, an old fishing village in Richmond, British Columbia, where she and her partner raised their daughter in a one-room cabin with iffy electricity and an outdoor privy down the boardwalk.

The Slough days are now over for Dragu, as is her marriage, and these days she is living in a small apartment in East Vancouver. No more long bus journeys home followed by a 45-minute bicycle ride. In this new phase, she luxuriates, with a flush toilet, hot-water baths and easy access to performance locales.

Dragu is finalizing a slate of performances and installations to take place in Krakow, Berlin and Richmond this year, all new pieces that involve concepts of political and personal conflict—“including my divorce.”

It is slightly surprising to see Dragu on the auditorium stage at the National Gallery of Canada, speaking to about 200 well-heeled lecture-goers. To begin, she has the audience stretch; we’ve been seated too long. A sturdily built woman with a charismatic presence, Dragu has no difficulty engaging our participation. She then poses the question “what is performance art?” and offers definitions from colleagues. Movement teacher Jane Ellison claims it is simply “Life, framed.” The screen shows snippets from videos: Dragu kneading bread as Nuestra Señora del Pan, weeping as Lady Justice, dancing with a dollhouse resting on her shoulders.

At the conclusion of the illustrated lecture, Dragu passes out cards hand-painted with alphabet letters. We are bidden to rise to our feet, arms outstretched, letters in hand, while Dragu snaps our photo with her phone. Suddenly we are no longer a passive audience; we become part of the action.

Margaret Dragu cheerfully admits that her art and life spill into each other, and that she draws heavily on her experiences as a working-class feminist, woman and mother. “My life is my palette. If I had goats outside my window, I’d make a video of goats—but I have laundry.”

This is an article from the Spring 2013 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, visit its table of contents. To find out more about Margaret Dragu, visit canadianart.ca/dragu to view stills and videos of some of her works.

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The award was announced this evening at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre.

As winner, Douglas receives $50,000 in cash, a primary Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival exhibition in 2014 and book to be published by Steidl.

Montreal-based artists Angela Grauerholz and Robert Walker are runners-up. Each will receive $5,000.

“We are so pleased to be offering Stan Douglas this opportunity to take his art to new heights,” said Scotiabank art collection director and award co-founder Jane Nokes. “His talent is undeniable and his impressive work underlines why we established the award in the first place.”

Stan Douglas has exhibited multiple times at the Venice Biennale and Documenta, and last year he won the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award. He is recognized as part of the Vancouver school of photoconceptualists that also includes Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham.

Re-enactments of films and political incidents are common in Douglas’s work—one of his large public works in downtown Vancouver, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, restages a scene from the 1971 Gastown riot. Douglas—who will soon be working with mobile apps—was nominated by Halifax artist and NSCAD professor Robert Bean.

The SPA jury members this year consisted of William Ewing, director of curatorial projects, Thames & Hudson; Karen Love, director of foundation and government grants, Vancouver Art Gallery; and 
Ann Thomas, curator, photographs, National Gallery of Canada. The jury was chaired by the SPA’s other co-founder, artist Edward Burtynsky.

The SPA bills itself as the nation’s largest peer-reviewed photography award. Past winners include Lynne Cohen and Arnaud Maggs.

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And Heffel’s spring auction in Vancouver—which also took place last night, and included the first work of video art ever sold at auction in Canada—brought in $11.5 million, surpassing pre-sale expectations.

Now, Ritchies is gearing up to return to the contemporary art auction scene in Canada—and it has made a splash by announcing it will be Canada’s first major auction house in to pay a resale commission to artists.

“Overall, I’m quite delighted,” says Grant McConnell, national president of CARFAC, the artists’ organization that has campaigned for a mandatory Artist’s Resale Right in Canada since 2010.

The mandatory Artist’s Resale Right CARFAC is proposing would ensure that visual artists in Canada to receive 5 per cent of the sale price when their work is resold. Similar measures have been adopted in some 70 other countries, including Germany, France, the UK, and Australia, though percentages and guidelines vary from place to place.

Details of Resale Commission Still in Development

Ritchies didn’t work with CARFAC on its decision, or share the information with them in advance of its royalty announcement.

Ritchies director of operations Gordon Gothreau says that when it comes to artist resale rights and royalties, “we are all familiar with the debate; there wasn’t really too much we could learn from CARFAC.”

He also said that Ritchies would rather manage the artist payments in-house than have CARFAC administrate them.

According to Gothreau, the exact percentage of the royalty payment is still being worked out and will be in place in time for Ritchies first auction of contemporary Canadian art on May 29 in Toronto.

What is confirmed is that Ritchies will make payments to both international and Canadian artists in its contemporary auction, as well as to the estates of Canadian artists.

Auction House Working to Overcome Past Problems

The artist resale commission shines a bright light on Ritchies, which was under a cloud of controversy just a few years ago.

As the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s have reported, in October 2009, Ritchies was forced into bankruptcy; later research showed that they bore an $8.5-million debt. Some 100 creditors, including consignors and landlords, were filing claims against them.

“That [2009 company] was actually a different company, technically speaking,” Gothreau says, though he admits that he was involved with both companies and that the scandal is “something we discuss with every congisnor.”

The Ritchies ownership, as Gothreau indicates, has changed completely. In 2011, the Globe reported that two investors, Kashif Khan and his partner Ravi Poddar, bought the Ritchies name from a bankruptcy trustee. In 2012, it reported that Dirk Heinze, owner of his own specialty auction house Heinze & Co., came on as president, though he left in late 2012. Since last year, the auction house has been running auctions of watches, decorative arts, and fine Canadian art, among other items.

Some in the art community might read Ritchies’ decision to pay artist royalties at its new contemporary auction as a publicity stunt—something to get them back in the news and distinguish them from more established national art-auction competitors like Heffel and Joyner Waddington’s.

“They’re welcome to read it that way,” Gothreau responds. “It’s inevitable that people are going to see it that way. And we just have to go through it, put our money where our mouth is and actually pay out the artists at the end the sale and they will see that it is something we are serious about.”

Artist Says Royalty Has Pros and Cons

Another factor Ritchies’ announcement brings to the fore is whether the contemporary Canadian art market is strong enough to sustain the addition of resale royalties.

Even an artist destined to benefit from the royalty expresses uncertainty about the issue.

One of Edward Burtynsky’s works, for instance, has been consigned to the Ritchies auction by an owner.

Burtynsky says he can see how a secondary resale royalty would benefit artists who make a very popular body of work and then change course, making work that the market doesn’t appreciate as much—so that as their auction prices for certain periods rise, they struggle to make ends meet.

“I’m thinking about Riopelle, for instance,” Burtynsky says. “Riopelle’s 1950s period was incredible and prolific and everyone wants his 1950s works. Later he went into painting on glass, and people didn’t follow as much… he wasn’t able to benefit from the escalation of his work and the secondary market of his work and I think it would have been a great thing for [a resale right] to happen for him.”

At the same time, Burtynsky calls the Canadian art market a “pretty nascent” one and says “there’s going to be resistance in the marketplace” to an Artist Resale Right.

Burtynsky’s works have sold at auction before at Christie’s and Phillips de Pury in New York and London, as well as at auctions in Canada. If his work sells at Ritchies at the end of this month, it would be the first time he would receive a royalty on an auction sale—though he’s unsure how large it would be given the market nationally.

“My work often doesn’t even get to gallery price [at Canadian auctions], where it always gets to retail or above in London and New York,” he says. “In the Canadian market, so far, there isn’t as robust of an audience.”

Weak Spots Persist in Contemporary Canadian Art Auction Market

Burtynsky’s wonderings are in part borne out by the results of Heffel’s auction last night.

The Heffel auction achieved better than expected earnings overall, and several paintings by contemporary Canadian artists did well—including Gordon Applebe Smith’s Trees in Winter selling nearly twice as much as was estimated at $55,575, including buyers’ premium.

But the auction’s video by Judy Radul—much touted in advance as the first piece of video art to be sold at auction in Canada—sold for about half of its $5,000 to $7,000 estimate, being hammered down at $2,925 including buyers’ premium.

Similarly, Roy Arden’s Basement—the only photo work Heffel’s contemporary auction—sold for half of its low estimate. Estimated at $10,000 to $15,000, it went for $5,265 including buyers’ premium.

Nonetheless—with the Ritchies contemporary auction less than two weeks away and the house still bringing on consignors, artists included—Gothreau remains undaunted about the prospect of making it work.

“We bought the [Ritchies] name with the intention of trying to do things right—of getting the company back to where it was and then surpassing it,” Gothreau says. “Which we have been doing really, I think.”

CARFAC representatives also remain positive about the Ritchies decision.

“If there is any prosperity in the art community in Canada, some of that should reach the makers,” CARFAC’s McConnell says. “Let’s hope other auction houses follow suit.”

This article was corrected and clarified on May 16, 2013. The original copy failed to state that Dirk Heinze is no longer involved with Ritchies. 

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OTTAWA
“Sakahàn”—touted by the National Gallery as “the largest survey of contemporary Indigenous art ever organized by a national institution”—opens tonight at 6 p.m., with a related symposium taking place tomorrow afternoon from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Featuring more than 150 artworks by more than 80 artists from 16 countries on 6 continents—artists ranging from Wangechi Mutu to Sonny Assu, and from Jimmie Durham to Annie Pootoogook—the exhibition promises (as the translation of its Algonquin title suggests) “to light a fire.”

VANCOUVER
Rising Vancouver-based artist Erdem Tasdelen isn’t afraid to ask questions about the purpose of being an artist—or poke fun at the idea, either. Recent works include films of his sessions with a therapist in which he discusses his creative anxieties, as well as a series of floor mats that riff on the connection between self-help and artmaking. Other works have been more installation based, like the placement of a multicoloured parrot in a multicoloured room and an offering of porcelain versions of Proust’s famed madeleines. This variety adds intrigue to the opening of his first solo show at Republic Gallery, which happens tonight from 6 to 9 p.m. Due to be included in a group show this fall at Kunstverein Hannover, Tasdelen—who grew up in Switzerland, Germany and Turkey, and completed an MAA at Emily Carr in 2010—seems destined to surprise.

CALGARY
The recent Wreck City project, in which a hundred Calgary artists took over nine buildings slated for demolition, is just one of the initiatives to be featured in “Garage Montage,” an Art Gallery of Calgary exhibition showcasing emerging and mid-career Calgary artists and their dynamic independent gallery spaces, studio collectives, and public art projects. Other participants include Arbour Lake Sghool, Bee Kingdom and the Contemporary Art Museum. Opening runs tonight from 7 to 10 p.m.

WINDSOR
The art-music supergroup CCMC, comprised of Michael Snow, John Oswald and Al Mattes, reunites for a rare performance on May 21 for the launch of Windsor’s Media City Film Festival. CCMC formed in 1974 as “a composing ensemble united by a desire to play music that is fluid, spontaneous, and self-regulating.” From 1976 to 1980, the band released six vinyl LPs through Toronto’s Music Gallery, and the May 21 performance at MOCAD in Detroit will also feature a launch for CCMC Volume Three, a lost recording now available after 35 years. Also featured at the festival on May 22 is a focus screening on Saul Levine and programs of international and Canadian shorts through the 25th.

TORONTO
France’s Pierre Huyghe remains one of the most unconventional artists of our time, and his project The Host and the Cloud—screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 20 at 7 p.m.—is no exception. In it, a group of actors, acting under a set of fictive conditions or parameters, interact in a setting over a long period of time. Also opening in the city this week are Val Nelson’s paintings of various subjects at Bau-Xi Gallery on May 18 from 2 to 4 p.m. and Janieta Eyre’s photo series The Mute Book at Katharine Mulherin on May 16 from 6 to 9 p.m.

WINNIPEG
Kettling—the police crowd-control tactic made infamous in Canada during the G20 summit—gets an aesthetic investigation by Scott Sorli as part of “A Total Spectacle,” a group show opening May 17 at 7 p.m. at the Atomic Centre. Curated by Milena Placentile, the show takes a look at the many forms of spectacle today through works by Dayna Danger, Glen Johnson, Joe Johnson, Istvan Kantor, Praba Pilar and Paul Wiersbinski.

MONTREAL
Collisions between music and art take centre stage starting May 18 at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. One body of work is by Testklang, a young music label from Berlin which bridges the gap between music, fine arts, poetry and film. Montreal’s Jérome Fortin accompanies with paper-based works based on blank musical staves. Also worth a look at PFOAC’s nearby experimental space is “No Homo,” a show Kent Monkman has curated of work by his studio assistants Don Monkman, Brad Tinmouth, Brian Rideout and Rory Dean—it runs until June 8.

For listings of art events across the country, visit canadianart.ca/listings.

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While the temporal before-and-after quality of these periods—before 2006 and after—has the critical eye on contrasts between the two exhibitions, continuities pervade. Indeed, it is situations like these that remind us why an artist’s work should be assessed with respect to the larger practice, particularly an artist for whom time and space are less a linear—or divisible—construct than a dialectical one.

The Kunstverein Hannover is a space divided into seven rooms connected in a fairly linear fashion.

The first room is sparsely arranged and features three works: The Prince (2006), Skull (2006–2009) and Blanket No. 2 (2008). While these works are unmistakably Jungen (a cigar-store Indian “greeter” made of baseball gloves, a skull made of softballs and baseballs, and a warp-and-weft blanket made from football jerseys), it is their supports as much as their narrative source material that preface what follows: free-standing works, works atop plinths, and wall works. In other words, no masks on armatures and nothing hanging from the ceiling—modes of display with which Jungen initially became associated.

In the next room, a larger display consists of plastic gasoline and water canisters into which designs have been drilled; an arrangement of women’s gloves; and a deer hide stretched over a jumble of drum frames. Just as the minutely drilled designs deny each canister its utility, the same could be said of the muted (perhaps interior) relationship between the hide and the drum frames.

If a prompt is required to signal these inversions, it can be found in Wieland (2006), where a handful of red leather gloves have been modelled to approximate a bird, or an angel, or an inverted maple leaf, like the one at the centre of an upside-down Canadian flag. Either way, Wieland can be read as both an homage to influential Canadian artist (i.e. Joyce) and a critique of the Trudeau-era nation-building project that Wieland was considered to be included in (a project that did not, for the most part, include the work of First Nations artists).

With material and political-economic inversions in place, the room that follows is the most ambitious one in the show.

For Five Year Universe (2011), Jungen used five stretched elk hides to create 20 silver-ink relief mono prints on large rectangles of thin black foam. These prints are arranged vertically, aligned side-by-side and top-to-bottom to form two horizontal rows of 10, making it the largest work in the exhibition. Past configurations of this work have left the images of the hides relatively intact; in this new configuration of the work at the Kunstverein, the prints suggest antlers more so than hides, and they occasionally meet to suggest new forms (like birds’ wings, say), though mostly they do not. Instead, this is an abstract composition, concerned not with the noun form of process, but its verb.

At the groundbreaking 1999 show of Jungen’s Prototype for New Understanding series at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver, it was not just the Nike-trainer masks that drew attention, but also the wall murals which were sometimes reflected in the masks’ museum-style vitrines. These murals were based on drawings solicited by volunteers on the city’s Granville Island, who stopped passers-by to ask what they think of when they think of “Indianness.”

With Five Year Universe, however, the primacy of the wall is undeniable. On the floor before it, atop plinths made not of wood but of metal (think autopsy lab), elk hides have “body-snatched” that which Jungen once reconfigured to make his whales. Not blow-moulded plastic chairs, in this instance, but something less disposable, more “refined”—expensive chairs made not by Wal-Mart but by modern designers in service of a discriminating clientele, items such as cone chairs and womb chairs sold (at the lower end) by outlets like Design Within Reach.

For those seeking a more spectacular, less abstracted reconfiguration, the room’s final element, Blanket No. 7 (2008), provides both a road in and a road out. This symmetrical (and equally stretched) work is comprised of LA Lakers and Denver Nuggets basketball jerseys.

Continuing on this road is a grove of five free-standing totem poles made of golf bags. Each one is named for the decades since First Nations people earned the right to vote federally in Canada, and each one is a monument as much to time as to space.

For fans of Jungen’s masks and whales, and admirers of the artist’s uncanny ability to find in tailored materials the northwest-coast ovoid motif, this totem-pole room (the largest and longest of the gallery spaces) will come as a respite from the mesomorphic abstract sculptures that preceded it.

But for those wanting more of Jungen’s elk hides, the room that follows marks a return to form, with hides stretched over car parts set atop unplugged freezers, the same freezers used by consumers who purchase their meat in bulk (or those who bag, skin and apportion it themselves). On the wall at the end, visible through the totems, is the exhibition’s first instance of electricity: a blue LED tube light arranged in loops around a stretched deer hide.

While the penultimate room is the smallest in the gallery and functions as something of an intermezzo, it is in Thunderbirds (2006), a wall-mounted array of five rear-view mirrors, that the last trace of the ovoid appears—and in found form, no less. (Could this be the artist’s last “look back” at his use of a motif associated not with his native Dane-Zaa, but with the Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, Salish and Tsimshian?)

As for the final room, the inversion that has run through much of Jungen’s work since the late 1990s (and certainly through this exhibition) completes itself in a series of commercially produced multi-coloured feedbags bound with belts and placed upon on the floor—the same type of bags, I understand, that are thrown from pick-up trucks to nourish the farmed elk and deer that have supplied Jungen with his hides.

Also included in this final room, as in most of the rooms in the exhibition, are blankets, as well as the exhibition’s oldest piece: the oxymoronic Portable Still (2003–2005), a poignant work that is improvised (as only a still can be) from materials that include a baby carriage.

When it was announced in 2003 that Jungen would be the subject of a touring survey organized by the VAG, some of his sharpest supporters wondered if such an exhibition was premature—that despite the artist’s astounding modulations from masks to whales to Minimal-esque palettes, additional movements, as opposed to additional works, were required.

Similar questions were raised over the Hannover exhibition given that much of the work debuted not at public institutions (be they artist-run centres or the National Gallery of Canada) but commercial spaces, where a perception continues to exist that work presented in these settings is geared more at ends than at means.

However, what is most apparent from this exhibition is an artist who, regardless of the setting, continues to make work using the same processes (both poetical and political) that informed his masks and whales. Only now, his source materials are increasingly less mediated, the forms closer to an earlier (Arpian) modernism, their presence gentler, quieter, more open to outcome.

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While Rayner was a towering figure in the Canadian art scene through the 1980s, best known for his muscular, sensuous and often unabashedly ravishing landscapes that channel both the Group of Seven and the abstractions of Jack Bush and the Painters Eleven, by the time of his death Rayner was a much less prominent figure: his primal, physically immediate approach to painting and his lavish use of colour had largely gone out of fashion, and he had increasingly withdrawn from Toronto, whether north to Magnetawan or south to Mexico.

Yet Rayner’s late work, flawless in its mastery and restlessly inventive in its technique, includes some of his finest.

Like Courbet’s great seascapes, Rayner’s landscapes are less about the picturesque—nature tamed to a human scale—than about natural forces.

In the stunning Big Blue Sky Falls (2008), which was part of his 2009 exhibition at Christopher Cutts, “Rapids, Falls and Dark Waters,” white-streaked blue water, interspersed with bands of black, roils down over boulders toward the picture’s lower edge, a twilit blue forest behind. Big Blue Sky Falls, despite its ecstatic title, has a dark, brooding tone, as though these falls were crashing through the unconscious.

Sweet Fall, Falls (2007), by contrast, is sumptuously autumnal, the boil of whitewater pouring down a steep cliff, conflagrations of red and yellow encroaching from one side, the water eventually swirling into a deep blue pool at the bottom of the painting: this is autumn not as melancholy decay, but as the final and definitive expression of summer.

And in Maple River, B.C. (2008), the swift water shifts between velvety purple, mineral green and drifting sheaths of foam white as it descends between two rock formations, one in deep shadow, the other in soft, warm evening sunlight. In these paintings, Rayner used a mix of oil, acrylic, and collage to great effect, the tensions between the materials mimicking the constant motion of the landscape itself.

The paintings in “The Oaxaca Suite,” recently closed at Christopher Cutts, were largely executed in a ramshackle colonial villa Rayner lived in in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, in a burst of creativity between October 1993 and June 1994. While works like those featured in “Rapids, Falls and Dark Waters” are very much part of a Canadian sublime in which the wild force of nature—all that churning, beautiful, indefinable water—dwarfs anything like human agency, the paintings Rayner did in Oaxaca, all in bright, high-keyed acrylic, are at the intersection of the dumpily human and the unsettling, and archaic, divine.

Warrior Dancer (1993), the first painting in the series, has a man wearing a deer head, holding a rifle and sitting on a giant green frog; behind him on the wall is a mirror (or perhaps a window) full of cloud-streaked blue sky. Whatever battle this warrior is about to embark on, it is surely one that involves the spirit world.

At the centre of The Dogs of Oaxaca (1993) is a dog wearing a menacing, pre-Columbian mask, his tongue lolling out, while around him other hounds doze and frolic and scrap, all of it set against a blue ground swarming with patterns of white dots, the green vapour trail of a comet streaking down toward the lower edge of the canvas: these are, apparently, celestial dogs.

Indeed, dogs, frogs, goats, and Rayner himself drifted through the paintings of “The Oaxaca Suite.”

In The Empty Church (1994), for instance, two dogs spar in front of a blood-spattered, flower-wreathed shrine with a doll-like baby Jesus making the traditional gesture of peace; behind is what might be read as a forest at sunset, subdued but smoldering orange hues shining through.

The wonderful A Quick Shine Before the Dance #1 (1994) has a man who looks like Rayner donning a ritual mask and a wild, feathered headdress reading the paper and getting his shoes shined, the blazing orange wall behind him scrawled with the words Viva Zapata. Leaning up against him is a kind of makeshift staff with a doll and a goofily creepy jack-o’-lantern face.

The Baby Sitters (1994) features a bemused goat standing in a baby carriage with a companion relaxing on the balcony beside, and an upended flaxen-haired doll in front; behind is a tropical green, rain-streaked street.

And in what is perhaps the most powerful and revealing painting in the series, Country Bath (Self-Portrait) (1994), Rayner stands naked in a water-filled metal bucket, arms tightly folded, face scowling, broad wings bursting from his shoulders. Green shutters open out from a balcony with wrought-iron railing onto a deep blue night sky. Country Bath (Self-Portrait) is a portrait of the defiant artist in middle age: his body lumpy and sagging, his faced creased, his bearing half angel, half demon, and ready for flight.

It would have been easy to dismiss the paintings in “The Oaxaca Suite” as those of a tired, aging artist seeking inspiration, and in interviews Rayner himself admitted that when he went to Oaxaca, he felt creatively dried up. He would hardly have been the first artist to travel to exotic locales in search of renewal: think of Delacroix in Algeria or Matisse in in Morocco.

But Rayner’s Oaxaca paintings are too direct, self-satirizing, and, for all their lushness of palette, gritty to be mere fantasizing. A Quick Shine Before the Dance #2 (1994), for instance, has another figure that looks like Rayner, in dark glasses and some kind of pagan headdress, getting his shoes shined, a dog sprawled out sleeping beside him.

And in front of the burning flames in Conflagration at the Altar (1994–95), where the torso of the crucified Christ is engulfed in smoke and flame, and the wall is streaming blood, is… a vacuum cleaner. These paintings never lose touch with the ordinary.

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