Art Fair Guide

Skywalkers - Art Blimp Parade, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2006. Image: vinylpulse.com

As the international art fair season begins...courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Click HERE.

VoCA will preview the highlights of the Toronto International Art Fair (October 25 - 29) in mid-October.

VoCA recommends...Scratching the Surface, Winnipeg & Kelly Mark, Toronto

Tim Schouten, the treaty 3 suite (outside promises). Image: timschouten


Wanda Koop, Green Zone (infrared) , acrylic on canvas, 2005. Image: harbourfrontcentre.com

1. Scratching the Surface, Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg

September 14 – November 17, 2007

Public Opening: Friday, September 14 @ 8:00pm

This major exhibition explores the changing landscape of the Canadian Prairies, and in particular Winnipeg’s social, cultural, and physical character.


Sylviamatas, Warm Rain, 2004. Image: sylviamatas.com


Esther Warkov, Samples, In the House of Pear. Image: kensegalgallery.com

Many Canadian artists have and continue to be been inspired by their immediate landscape (Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Ron Kostyniuk, Gershon Iskowitz, Peter von Tiesenhausen…)

Scratching the Surface: The Post-Prairie Landscape provides a multi-generational look into this transition.

The exhibition will bring together emerging, mid-career, and established artists including Keith Berens, Sylvia Matas, Doug Smith, Melanie Bone, Kazuteru Miyauchi, Jennifer Stillwell, Paul Butler, Kim Ouellette, Ewa Tarsia, Daniel Dueck, Robert Pasternak, Esther Warkov, Simon Hughes, David Perrett, Calvin Yarush, Jean Klimack, Tim Schouten, Collin Zipp and Wanda Koop.


Kim Ouellette, Mountains with Black Clouds, 2004. Image: marciawoodgallery.com

Highlights include Paul Butler's public art project that transforms lampposts into an urban forest via applications of veneer tape, Jennifer Stillwell's sculptural work that engages the artificial production of geology and Esther Warkov's epic paper cityscape.


Collin Zipp, PIXEL 15. Image: collinzipp.info


2. Kelly Mark: Stupid Heaven, Hart House Gallery @ U of T, Toronto


Kelly Mark, 33 Minute Stare, 1996. Image: ireallyshould.com

Kelly Mark is one of those artists whose sophisticated, elegant, disarmingly simple and surprisingly effective work is also accessible - she makes lots of multiples and unlimited editions - and so should be coveted by young and beginning collectors.

In 2005, her Power Plant commission Glow House transformed a mansion on Palmerston Boulevard into an eerily haunted looking house every evening whose windows were lit up by the flickering blue glow of televisions.

Read what I wrote about it HERE.


Kelly Mark, Glow House #3, Installation: Apr 13, 2005. Image: mocoloco.com

This exhibition at U of T showcases Mark's sense of humour in a number of strong works. VoCA has often quoted Bruce Nauman: “Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.”


Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, c 1966. Image: artcomgroup.com

Nauman, like Kelly Mark, Maurizio Cattelan and others, uses humor to engage the viewer in deeply serious art.

Favorite pieces included the new film installation REM, the self-explanatory video 33 minute stare and the melancholy, amusing audio recording I Really Should…1000, wherein Mark repeats phrase after phrase beginning with the words “I really should…”

“…I really should…stop using the phrase Gaylord...I really should…read something utterly tragic…”


Kelly Mark, REM, 2007. Image: courtesy the artist

Check out the artist's website HERE.

UBC Masters Art Grad exhibition

Green

UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, Canada

More info HERE

September 14—October 7, 2007

Opening reception: Thursday September 13, 8—10pm

VoCA suggests you keep an eye out for these emerging artists:

KRISTINA LEE PODESVA, in an offshoot of her project, colourschool, has operated since November 2006 as a free school devoted to a speculative study of five colours and has attempted to develop a colour consciousness through presentations, screenings, reading groups, listening labs, and performances, among other activities.

Kristina Lee Podesva, Affection (image from Google Emotional Index)
Image: kristinapodesva.com

Check out her website HERE

SARAH TURNER unhinges meaning from a fixed origin—via sculptural processes, installation and intervention—she questions authority, authorship and artistic subjectivity

MARILOU LEMMENS and RICHARD IBGHY will present their work There was a bandstand, a two-channel video installation consisting of text, images, monochromes, and voice.

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens,Panic Attack, 2005. Image: 312.ca

NICOLE BRABANT’s video and photographic works employ golf as a vehicle to enter into a multi-axial critique of contemporary society. In her work Adaptation (Lesson), Brabant documents a staged golf lesson in an attempt to discuss broader issues of racism, classism, and neo-colonial aspects of globalization.

PAUL KAJANDER uses humour and provisional materials to critique contemporary experience.

Paul Kajander, Drawings for a University (study), 2007. Image: front.bc.ca

ELIZABETH MILTON explores how self-transformation can challenge and articulate the distorted sense of reality that consumes our culture of simulation.

COLIN MINER’s new sculpture and paint based works allude to themes of stillness and terror as connected to the vampire. The works build upon his interest in the gothic and the film noir genre, while playing with ideas of anxiety in a search for meaning and context in our present time.

Colin Miner, Banana Peel, (colour photograph), 2005. Image: ahva.ubc.ca

VoCA recommends...Phantom Shanghai by Greg Girard & Artcity Calgary 2007

1. Magenta, Canada’s art publishing house, will launch their newest book next week. The stunning book, Phantom Shanghai by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, documents China’s transition in otherworldly colours and with an elegant eye. Featuring a foreword by William Gibson and introduction by Leo Rubinfien.


Greg Girard, 600 Things, 2005. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

You can order it online HERE


Greg Girard, Fuzhou Lu Mailboxes, 2005. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

Greg Girard is represented by the Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto and Vancouver.


2. The Artcity 2007 Festival of Art, Design and Architecture takes place in the heart of Calgary from September 7-16. Artcity brings art and architecture into the spaces where the public lives and works. This year's theme is "Rupture".

The Festival aims to open possibilities in Calgary for conversations, debates and realizations about how and what artists, architects and designers do and how they see and shape the world around us.

“Not so much bent on audience development in the traditional sense, but rather concerned with the artistic zeitgeist, Artcity is indebted to contemporary artists who consistently provide citizens with new means of engagement," says programming director Wednesday Lupypciw.

VoCA recommends some must-see installations:


-BOOM



WHO: The Arbour Lake Sghool: Andrew Frosst, John Frosst, Justin Patterson, Scott Rogers, and Aaron Sereda

WHERE: Roaming distribution on the Stephen Avenue Pedestrian Mall. Also available at Truck Gallery, Stride Gallery, 809, McNally Robinson Booksellers, Skew Gallery, the Alberta College of Art & Design, Triangle Gallery, the University of Calgary, ArtCentral, and the Glenbow Museum Discovery Room.

WHEN: Duration of festival

The Arbour Lakers will bequeath the city with thousands of free artist multiples in the form of balloons emblazoned with a custom 'BOOM' logo.

Collect your very own variety of deflated and helium-filled 'BOOM's on the streets and in conjunction with other Artcity-affiliated events.

Read more on VoCA's favorite Calgary art collective right HERE


-FREE BOWL CALGARY INVITATIONAL



WHO: Michael Coolidge

WHERE: City Hall Lobby, 800 MacLeod Trail SE

WHEN: 9am-9pm daily

Michael Coolidge (Free Bowl Founder and conceptual artist) has organized a week-long prize tournament that will span the downtown core of Calgary.

Similar to Bocce and Lawn Bowling, the objective of Free Bowl is to bowl closest to a marker ball. Free Bowl players, however, must negotiate and determine their own courts, selecting from a vast array of existing urban spaces. One match leads to another, as the game and its players traverse the various landscapes of the built environment.


-SWINTAK



WHO: The Urban Quicksand Association

WHERE: Stephen Avenue Pedestrian Mall, the Alberta College of Art & Design, and Eau Claire Shopping Centre

WHEN: Throughout the festival

Making appearances at trade shows, festivals, colleges, and shopping malls, the UQA will distribute goodies such as the "Do-It-Yourself Quicksand Kits for Condo Dwellers", clear up the popular confusion between actual quicksand and so-called 'slow dirt', and argue on interesting topics like "Why Solids and Liquids are Over-Rated: The Curse of Binary Thinking in Urban Planning".


-THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A THINK IS MAINTAINED (?): PART II



WHO: Doug Scholes

WHERE: Olympic Plaza, 228 8th Avenue SE

WHEN: 24/7

Scholes will build towers that, by their very nature, will self-destruct. Onsite each day throughout the festival, the artist will manipulate thousands of hollow beeswax bricks in a futile attempt to maintain the towers as seemingly stable structures. Highly susceptible to sun, rain, wind, and outright vandalism, the constructions put into relief the 'everything-proof' standard that Calgarians have come to expect from concurrent architectural projects.

-YARNOVER CALGARY (YO CALGARY!)



WHO: Suzen Green

WHERE: Family of Man and Family of Horses

WHEN: Sep 7-16, 24 hours

During Artcity, a series of public monuments in the downtown core will be clad in custom designed scarves, socks, hats, and mittens. The temporary interventions are designed to encourage Calgarians to reconsider the innocuousness of the sculptures and what they stand for.

Suzen Green's pieces will be located at the Family of Horses sculpture (City Hall, 800 MacLeod Trail SE), the Family of Man sculpture (West of the Calgary Board of Education building, 515 MacLeod Trail SE).


-KIND OF SORT OF YOURS BUT ACTUALLY MOSTLY MINE

WHO: Paul Atkins (Out Of My System), Noel Bégin (Cinemaphidic Obliviolution - beta 0.3, 2007), Aleesa Cohene (Why me? #1, 2007), Lee Henderson (Revelations, 2005), Deirdre Logue (excerpts from Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes, 2003-2005), Stacey Watson (The Icecave, 2007)

WHERE: Glenbow Museum

WHEN: Sep 14, 6:30pm (directly before the ArtTalk panel discussion)

Combining appropriated and original footage, silence and booming soundtracks, the works on view include everything from messy relationship endings to the goings-on in a backyard aphid invasion.


-GUIDED TOURS

WHERE: Art Gallery of Calgary (117 8th Avenue SW, Calgary

WHEN: Sep 8 & 15, 1pm

FREE guided tours of the 2007 Artcity festival. Please meet the tour guide outisde the main entrance of the Art Gallery of Calgary.

Find more info on Artcity Calgary 2007 right HERE.

Toronto International Film Festival: The best of Future Projections

Future Projections is TIFF's new programme of film-related art installations throughout Toronto for the duration of the Film Festival...and sometimes beyond.

It's all free all the time! Find more info right HERE


They're all good, but VoCA particularly recommends checking out the following ones:

1. Tyranny, Ryan Sluggett, Canada, 2007


Ryan Sluggett, Judges and their Pedestals, 2006. Image: trepanierbaer.com

Vancouver-based artist Ryan Sluggett appropriates the wide-screen look of advertising and a range of painting styles in his latest short animation, which radically extends his painting and collage process. The hypnotic video installation presents a new, experiential form of moving images and minimalist sound of unparalleled intensity.

Sluggett writes: “Tyranny…is composed of about five thousand digital stills that run at six frames per second while a swinging pendulum/speaker plays a soundtrack. One must unfocus (one’s) vision, lose the specifics of the physical in order to find the image, and ‘read’ the montage.”

Ryan Sluggett shows with Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary.

Presented in partnership with and exhibited at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 140. During the Festival, the exhibit will be open from 11am to 6pm (including Sunday and Monday), and after September 15 from 11am to 5pm, closed Sundays and Mondays. Admission is free.

Click HEREfor more info.


2. Best Minds Part One, Jeremy Shaw, Canada, 2007


Jeremy Shaw, detail from DMT (Video still), 2004. Image: presentationhousegall.com

Calgary-based curator Wayne Baerwaldt (and one of VoCA’s most influential Canadians this year – click HERE)

Jeremy Shaw’s artistic practice engages with youth subcultures and cultural deviance. This piece juxtaposes the violent dancing of straight-edge youth with Shaw’s melancholic, time-warping score inspired by William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops.

Clint Burnham writes, “The video shows us kids slowed down – the dancers are simultaneously ballet-like and frenetic – but we are also witnessing a dirge, a funeral, twinned with Shaw’s music like a lament for a scene that is now so over (or maybe just a parody of itself). And in this last moment of historicity, we also see a strong connection to the literary heritage – the Beats – established by Shaw’s title, which refers to the first lines of Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl,’ itself a lament or dirge for the institutionalization of both his friend Carl Solomon and his mother Naomi.”

Presented at Thrush Holmes Empire, 1093 Queen Street West.

Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Shaw is represented by Tracey Lawrence Gallery


3. Darfur/Darfur, various artists, USA, 2006


Dies Irae in Sudan, Ron Haviv/VII, Image courtesy darfurdarfur.org/brown.edu

Curator Leslie Thomas has gathered over 150 colour and black-and-white images captured by seven renowned photojournalists – Lynsey Addario, Mark Brecke, Helene Caux, Ron Haviv, Paolo Pellegrin, Michal Ronnen Safdie and Ryan Spencer Reed – plus former United States Marine Brian Steidle. Accompanied by music, the images are organized into three video loops of about six minutes each. The first two loops introduce the narrative of the Darfur conflict, while the third uses portraiture to bring viewers closer to the people living through it right now. The idea is to bring the images up close and personal – so that we can no longer put them out of our mind.

Screening at the Royal Ontario Museum. Viewings will be held from dusk to 11pm every evening with a special Opening night event on September 7 at 8pm. Admission is free.

More info on the film HERE


4. Death in the Land of Encantos, Lav Diaz, The Phillipines, 2007


Lav Diaz (left) and Paul Tanedo. Image: sensesofcinema.com

Super Typhoon Durian devastated the the Bicol region of the Philippines late last year, burying entire villages. Death in the Land of Encantos is a mournful work of landscape art. Shooting in rich black and white, Diaz composes his film using barren trees, rocks and even the wind to build an image of loss. The traces of narrative concern a fictional exiled poet returning to wander through his ravaged former world, meeting old friends and lovers.

A nine-hour work running in a continuous loop, Death in the Land of Encantos offers an immersion into a region that has literally been erased and rewritten.

Screening at Spin Gallery, 1100 Queen Street West, 2nd Floor.
An Artist Reception will be held on September 12 (8pm to 1am).


5. Wildflowers of Manitoba, Noam Gonick, Luis Jacob, Canada, 2007


Luis Jacob, A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice...(Video still), 2007. Image: birchlibralato.com

Wildflowers of Manitoba is a performative installation of four short films and sound presented in a furnished geodesic dome. The films feature four young men living off the grid in an idealistic survivalist camp on the shores of Lake Winnipeg during the summer of 2006. The music by visionary seventies Québécois rock band Harmonium suggests the potential for sexual and political freedom.

Presented in partnership with and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West.

Luis Jacob is represented by Birch Libralato Gallery, Toronto.

Wildflowers of Manitoba will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), 952 Queen Street West, from September 8 to 16, between 11am and 6pm. Admission is free.

Canadian artists abroad: London, Glasgow

1. Mark Lewis

BFI Southbank Gallery, London

September 13 - 11 November, 2007


Mark Lewis, Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside, 2005. Film still. Image: fillip.ca

This past May, Mark Lewis was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for his contribution to visual arts in Canada. The prize was created in 1985 by abstract artist Gershon Iskowitz and is now jointly administered by Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario and the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.


2. Rodney Graham: Wet on Wet: My Late Early Styles

Lisson Gallery, London

October 10 - 17 November, 2007


Rodney Graham, “Gifted Amateur”, 2007, Production still. Photo: Scott Livingstone. © Rodney Graham, 2007. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery

This new body of works reflects on the practice of painting. Graham will adopt the eccentric persona of the ‘gifted amateur’, to encompass a variety of styles.

More info HERE


3. David Rokeby: Silicon Remembers Carbon

CCA Glasgow

August 4 - 15 September, 2007


David Rokeby, Taken, 2002. Surveillance Installation. Image: telegraph.co.uk

"I am fascinated by the way we transform the raw impressions streaming in through our senses into a coherent mental picture of reality. So I create artworks that look and listen, and try to make sense of what they see and hear. I am caught in the daily clash between the logical world of the computer and the embodied experience of living. So I bring these two worlds into closer dialogue to see what fails and what resolves."

Read a review of the show HERE