Thompson Ivories preview in London, UK

Ivory from the Thompson Collection. Image: ft.com

A collection of Ivories from the Thompson Collection to be previewed at London's Somerset House before coming to the Art Gallery of Ontario later this year.

"Ivories were the first works of art Thomson ever acquired back in the 1950s; he was attracted by their miniaturist craftsmanship and their intimate tactile quality. He bought Egyptian, Byzantine and Romanesque ivory carvings as well as Japanese Netsuke, Baroque ivories and ingenious machine-carved Cheverton portrait busts. Within this group, however, the holding of western medieval ivories ranks among the most important in the world – in or out of a museum..."


Ivory from the Thompson Collection. Image: ft.com

Read the full preview in the Financial Times right HERE

On Museums

Philippe de Montebello. Image: tfaoi.com

“it is the mystery, the wonder, the presence of the real that is our singular distinction and that we should proudly, joyfully proclaim.”
- Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Read the full article HERE


New York's Metropolitan. Image: Neil Setchfield, Lonley Planet Images


Ottawa's National Gallery. Image: travelandtransitions.com

“Today, as an ever increasing number of museums compete to lure visitors, their directors are counted upon to court donors and corporations, oversee budgets and capital plans, and negotiate with City Hall and with foreign governments…”

Read the full article HERE

View the ongoing construction of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario Frank Gehry addition HERE:

ARCHITECTURE IS A POLITICAL ACT.

VoCA saw Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity speak at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto last night.


Cameron Sinclair. Image: worldchanging.com

He was able to demonstrate, in just over an hour, what Bruce Mau was trying to tell Toronto with his exhibition Massive Change in 2005.


Massive Change, by Bruce Mau Design. Image: experientia.com

DESIGN HAS THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

Mr. Sinclair was raised in Peckham, South London. Growing up, he was uninspired by the surrounding architecture and later, with architecture as a practice.

He noticed that history was being eradicated in war torn areas like Kosovo by destroying all traces of a people, including their homes. So he rang the UN and made a presentation to them in 1990 with an idea for building affordable, innovative housing for displaced people.

Architecture for Humanity(AFH), a global non-profit, was born from a design competition of 300 entries from 30 countries. 5 prototypes were built, 100k was raised. It is funded mostly through online initiatives and is made up of young (19, 20-year- old) designers.

Examples: Hemp House made from locally grown hemp dried and cast like papier mache, a house made of wooden food palletts filled in with local materials and houses whose structure comes from infills of surrounding rubble..


The cover of AFH's book. Image: static.flickr.com

Cameron Sinclair’s idea of architecture is not your idea of architecture.

It’s not grand buildings in Western cities. Rather, it is about creating beauty where there is none, it’s about improving communities and the planet, it’s about the importance of thinking.

It’s about providing design opportunities for those interested in innovation, creativity, possibilities. It’s about arming communities with expertise and technology. It’s about knowing that sustainability is based on finance.

It’s about community-based development – it allows people to care for their buildings because they were part of the design process. It’s about design that answers questions.


The first prototype of the tsunami safe(r) house was completed in September 2005 in balapitiya in sri lanka.
TDI - tsunami design initiative is a student initiative at harvard design school that was set up in response to the rebuilding efforts in the south asian coast after the tsunami in december 2004. Image: designbboom.com

It’s about the proposal for temporary health clinics in Africa made from fast-growing reeds that provide nourishment for the villagers so that they are well enough to take the medication provided them.



It’s about the fact that AFH rebuilt 38% of East Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina with no government money. All homes were on an estimated $115,000 USD budget.



Click HERE for more info on the Katrina project.

Cameron Sinclair won the 2006 TED Prize – Please click HERE.

VoCA Recommends...Exhibitions in Kingston, Ottawa, Toronto

1. CONVERSATION PIECES

12 January to 10 February

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston Ontario


Deirdre Logue, Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes. Image: deirdrelogue.com

Conversation Pieces is an exhibition of new media work by Canadian artists Linda Duvall, Germaine Koh, Deirdre Logue, Matt Rogalsky and Laurel Woodcock. Audio, video and multimedia installations explore acts of communication through verbal exchanges.


Laurel Woodcock, conversation pieces, 2001. Image: laurelwoodcock.ca

Lecture: Sunday 13 January
Frances Dyson: Chat and chatter: searching for the true voice via tone, affect and algorithm.

Panel: 3:15 pm
Sarah E. K. Smith in conversation with the artists

For more information, please click HERE


2. PASCAL GRANDMAISON: LE GRAND JOUR
CONSTRUCTED VISIONS: DRAWINGS BY RONALD BLOORE
NOT A TRIVIAL PURSUIT: HUNTING IN INUIT ART

14 January — 13 April 2008

Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa

Le grand jour is a solo exhibition of new work by the young Montreal photographer and video artist, whose work is gaining national and international attention. The exhibition takes its title from the earliest work presented,


Dan Flavin, Monument, 1967. Image: mccullagh.org

Le grand jour (2004), a three-part video projection that brings to mind the work of the American minimalist Dan Flavin. Although apparently abstract, this black and white work in fact records the reversing movement of the gases present in an ordinary fluorescent light tube, shot in progressive close-up.

Bloore’s drawings are inspired by his travels and by his study of archaeology and architecture, and in them we see his idiosyncratic iconography – a visual language constructed of abstracted symbol-forms such as leaves, arches, crosses, and discs. Constructed Visions features a selection of the more than 100 Bloore drawings in CUAG’s collection. His early drawings are subtle and delicate graphite works made in the 1960s.


Ron Bloore, After Egypt (Number 18), 1965. Image: ronbloore.ca


Ron Bloore, a work from 1982. Image: ronbloore.ca

For many first-generation artists who lived in traditional camps before moving to settlements, hunting was a fact of life and a common subject of their art. Depictions of hunting by younger artists, in contrast, often portray stories they heard from their elders, or attest to the challenges of their forebears’ life on the land. Not a Trivial Pursuit explores how Inuit artists address the pervasive theme of hunting in drawings, prints, sculptures and video. Artists featured include Parr, Zacharias Kunuk, Pitaloosie Saila, and Andrew Karpik.


Andrew Karpik, Char Fishing, 1986. Image: carleton.ca

Artist's talk: Ronald Bloore

Tuesday, 15 January, 12:00 noon


Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, The Journals of Knud Rasmussin, 2006. Image: blogs.indiewire.com

For more information, please click HERE.


3. NEW WORLD: OLIA MISHCHENKO, MONA VATAMANU & FLORIN TUDOR

January 10 to February 24, 2008

The Koffler Gallery, Toronto


Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Vacaresti, 2003. Image: monavatamanuflorintudor.ro

New World brings together video work by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, presented for the first time in Canada, and a new body of work by Toronto-based Olia Mishchenko.

These artists address the elusive promise of progress through their shared experiences of growing up in Communist systems. Originating from distinct but sometimes overlapping viewpoints, the works presented at the Koffler Gallery address the turmoil and expectations intrinsic to rebuilding one’s life on unknown territory.

Please click HERE for more info.

Thoughts on Jeff Wall...from the FT

Exquisitely contrived disorder

By Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times

Published: December 14 2007


Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979. Image: courses.washington.edu

What happens if a politicised conceptual artist loves beauty? The Canadian artist Jeff Wall launched his career with “Picture for Women” – a clever photographic reprise of “A Bar at the Folies Bergère” – in the 1970s, a time when aesthetic seduction roughly approximated to the evils of capitalism. Wall was too intelligent, innovative and ethically committed to ignore the current sensibility, but too finely tuned as an artist, and too steeped in art history’s pleasures, to accept the taboo on beauty. So he came up with a method of image-making that referenced Manet as well as Donald Judd, Cézanne as well as Dan Flavin, and revolutionised late 20th-century art photography.

Manet’s “Folies Bergère” confronts us with a sullen barmaid before a dazzle of lights and optical illusions. Wall reiterated her pose and expression, and also followed Manet’s spatial depths, reflecting mirrors, multiple perspectives and proto-feminist dissection of the male gaze. But in the middle of his photograph, he also stuck a camera, urging the question that would preoccupy him, as it had Manet, throughout his career: how do you make modern art in a culture whose traditions are exhausted?


Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881 - 82. Image: artandarchitecture.org.uk

One answer was to display the colour transparency in a lightbox, at once infusing it with the luminosity of the cinema screen, mimicking advertisements, and turning the image into a minimalist object, like a Judd stack or Flavin fluorescent tube.

Ever since, Wall’s signature work, made very slowly, has been such large-scale colour transparencies in wall-mounted lightboxes, supplemented more recently by monumental monochrome gelatin-silver prints.

As superb, fresh shows running concurrently at London’s White Cube and Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim demonstrate, these remain the terrain for Wall’s battle between a tone as detached and neutral as Warhol’s and painstaking, deliberate compositions echoing the grandeur of his- tory painting.

Both shows feature a quartet of black-and-white works, each more than 3m wide, from 2006 and 2007, which Wall describes as “near-documentary” for their controlled re-stagings of decisive moments in stark, suburban life. “Tenants”, composed like a series of Cézanne cubes, depicts the struggling residents of a clapboard social housing project at the point when one of them returns from a day’s work. “War Game” is set on an anonymous stretch of wasteland where a gang of kids with toy guns ritually enact adult violence on a summer afternoon. Wall has situated them as isolated figures, panting across scrubland with menace and aggression. This is a heart-of-darkness picture: at its centre a boy on top of a pile of tyres, guards a makeshift cage of scrap fencing that encloses three human bodies – mock-corpses, yet carrying a charge of real-life horror.

Stillness, artifice, vivid detail, photo-realist immediacy: Wall disturbs by combining them all. “Men Waiting” brings a Waiting for Godot absurdity and austere Stieglitz elegance to a quotidian narrative of casual workers outside a plant, hoping to be selected for temporary jobs – a scene that Wall happened to see and then recreated nearby, placing his characters in the shadow of a looming evergreen.


Jeff Wall, Men Waiting 2006. Image: Idesign.com

The suggestion of nature’s and history’s indifference to individual fate is echoed in the quartet’s only unpeopled piece, “Cold Storage”: a close-up of three temple-like columns in a desolate industrial cold storage space lined with ice, which falls in small chunks to the ground. White Cube’s catalogue juxtaposes this with an upside-down reproduction of Poussin’s “The Triumph of David”, with its trio of resplendent columns, to emphasise Wall’s neo-classical structure. His columns are mere concrete slabs protecting foodstuff from decay; or are they also the foundations of western culture, bleak, deserted, but still standing?

“The Western Picture,” says Wall, “is of course a tableau, that independently beautiful depiction and composition that derives from the institutionalisation of perspective and dramatic figuration at the origins of modern western art, with Raphael, Dürer, Bellini and the other familiar maestri. It is known as a product of divine gift, high skill, deep emotion and crafty planning.”

He trained as a painter, and his own colour tableaux are attempts to bring to photography the vibrancy and compositional rigour of great pre-20th-century painting, as well as its serious purpose as a commentary on modern life.

Berlin has well-known examples from the early 2000s focusing, like the monochromes, on the idea of exposure – the urban drama of vertical lines, cubes and circles in “Concrete Ball”, the vista of travellers receding along a never-ending walkway beneath a stormy Constable sky in “Overpass”.


Jeff Wall, Overpass 2001. Image: tate.org.uk

At White Cube, however, two of the large colour transparencies from 2007, on show for the first time, seem to me a breakthrough: to a radiant, fluid, almost painterly late style – Wall is 61 – with a new lushness overflowing his chiselled perfections.

“Church, Carolina St, Vancouver” shows a Slavic Pentecostal church on a modest snow-covered street; in a cottage next door, a red glow from a window casts the only glimmer of warmth. This simple image is made transcendent by the flood of light that plays on Wall’s white-grey tonal gradations, as snow turns to slush and sharpens the grid of black horizontals and verticals – telegraph wires, lampposts. These form an abstract pattern, but also suggest the Christian cross, black against the white backcloth, evocative of Malevich.

“Dressing Poultry”, exhibited alongside, is an exuberant portrait of four workers in a rural building, slaughtering chickens. The focal point is the laughing face of an elderly woman as she tugs at a fowl’s entrails – an image straight out of Dutch 17th-century genre, as is the exquisitely contrived disorder of straw, bicycles, drills, piled up around the labourers. Pulsating with activity, “Dressing Poultry” is the secular pendant to the silent, pared down “Church”. They share sensuousness, graceful contrasts, the surprise of beauty in the mundane, and implications of sacrifice versus joy that root them in the Christian-Renaissance aesthetic. But they are also as accessible for newcomers as for aficionados of Wall’s cerebral, enriching oeuvre.

Jeff Wall’,
White Cube, London SW1, to January 19;
tel: +44 (0)20-7930-5373

‘Jeff Wall: Exposure’,
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin,
to January 20; tel: +49 (0)30-2020-930

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief art critic.

Michel de Broin speaks!

VoCA recently caught up with 2007 Sobey Art Prize winner Michel de Broin, by phone from Berlin, where he is now based.

The Montreal artist has a Toronto court case coming up this spring to contest charges brought against the driver of his increasingly notorious pedal powered Buick, the Shared Propulsion Car, which was recently on view at Mercer Union.

The public is invited to the hearing, which will take place in Toronto on April 3rd, in courtroom R at 60 Queen Street West
at 3 pm. Watch this space for more info.


Michel de Broin, Solitude. Colour Photograph, 2002. Image: micheldebroin.org.
The project consists of suspend a mobile home in isolation but in the centre of traffic for a retreat.

VoCA: There seems to be something of a contradiction between Western society's desires - for a healthy planet, for example - and our cultural behavior. Your work seems to harness this contradiction, to make objects that somehow embody that contradiction.

Michel de Broin: Do you know my work Keep on Smoking? On one hand, I try to produce power that’s totally alternative in the way it works, but the result is that it creates the smoke, the sign of pollution.


Michel de Broin, Keep on Smoking, 2006. Image: micheldeboin.org

It’s interesting the way ecology is use to decide good behaviour, like for instance the petrol industry will paint their signs in green to suggest environmentalism although what they do isn’t clean, but this piece (Keep on Smoking) is the opposite. The way it works is clean but it produces the sign of pollution. It’s the reverse of how ecology is used normally, the smoke produced is not polluting. It’s the sign without the effect.

It’s great to produce smoke without polluting, because it’s a symbol of power but today we are confronted with new resources, in some of my work as with the car, the poetry involved is the alternative to consumption.

With Shared Propulsion Car, tailoring a car is inefficient, but the idea itself and the poetry involved is my alternative. It was possible to imagine tailoring a car in a metaphorical world. That can be more interesting than the real world. I mean that what I’ve discovered with this project is that having less efficiency in terms of mechanics can work well because it’s big and goes slow. It makes sense because it’s very poetic to drive a big car.


Michel de Broin, Shared Propulsion Car, Car body, pedals and gears, 2005. Image: micheldebroin.org


Michel de Broin, Shared Propulsion Car (in action), 2005. Image: micheldebroin.org

The goal – there’s a risk for pretending to save the world with art. That’s dangerous because artists promote themselves…they show that they have good beliefs, but it comes back as self-promotion. It’s important that the object not be just about referring to a good cause. Works play on the idea and they are relevant today, but the main ideas for me regarding art is to try to open a small gap in the meaning/construction of reality, so that the viewer can construct a meaning for themselves. An artwork is something that creates a gap in the meaning, that is attractive for the viewer to fill themselves.

The subject succeeds when people are questioned by it, they have to construct the meaning, they have to participate in the creation of the sense of the work.

VoCA: You often use the 'real' world as a backdrop for your pieces. Why is this important to you?

Michel de Broin: What we see as the real world is also a construction, as much as my own constructions. The difference is that we all collectively agree to believe (these ‘real world’ constructions), but they can be very boring too, because the reality stops being poetic, because we frequent it too much, and not so exciting. I oppose my construction to the common construction, and it creates a tension that creates an aliveness.


Michel de Broin, Superficial, 2004. Installed in Vosges, Alsace, France. Image: micheldebroin.org.


Michel de Broin, Superficial, 2004. Installed in Vosges, Alsace, France. Image: micheldebroin.org.


Michel de Broin, Superficial, 2004. Installed in Vosges, Alsace, France. Image: micheldebroin.org.

Today artists work a lot with the real, I’m not the only one doing that. But there’s a reason, it’s very philosophical – seeing the reality as being a representation itself. To make a painting or draw in another context what we see in the real, to create a second layer of representation on top of another can be interesting, but I’m comparing and reorganizing representation so that it surprises and confronts because it’s made of the same matter, it comes to the people a bit as if it were part of (what they already know).

The reality is a construction from the imagination. I’m displacing objects from the real into a new configuration. The real is just a painting that we can rearrange. It creates possibilities; my goal is to open possibilities without necessarily giving a solution. Showing that there are different possibilities.

VoCA: Were you surprised that Dean was arrested while driving the Shared Propulsion car?

Michel de Broin: I was arrested in Montreal before, but I was testing the car, and I went on the street, and I was arrested and the police just told me to return with a tow truck. But in Toronto I was expecting to be arrested, I was thinking I was just transgressing expectation. But there is no law against pedal cars, I don’t think there was anything in the law, but we didn’t do anything wrong. It was not a transgression of the law, from my point of view. I wouldn’t do something that was against the law.

It was creating a situation that the police consider unlawful - that it’s forbidden to modify a car, but what if you go really far and modify it in extreme ways (like I did)? The law is made for car powered motors. Our lawyer is saying that since this is pedal powered, it’s another law that’s applied.

It’s irritating for the police. The car looks menacing and strong, that’s probably why we got arrested – we weren’t holding up traffic, really, people really liked it. They were supportive. This car looks like a statement against car culture, but it is more than this, it touches the imagination. It has a Mad Max aspect – it’s like the last car on earth. It looks like a ghost of a car. You think it’s impossible, that there’s no car like this.

It didn’t matter the speed, if the car can go half a k/hour, for me it would still be a success. Going slow is interesting, as a contradiction. I’d say the car can go up to 15 km an hour. Turning and going up hills, there are seven speeds, but we haven’t had a chance to use them all. It brakes very well, with one arm break on each side – the car’s brakes..

In the gallery, the front lights were lit by candles…there is something about the empty car that has a special presence.

The gallery put the video on youtube, and I wanted to remove it and make it better, but after a few hours, many people copied it and put it back on the internet, and I lost control. My video that I fixed got fewer hits, but you can find it here:



VoCA: What do you hope is the outcome of the court case on April 3rd?

Michel de Broin: It’s difficult to know, they always can say that this thing was disturbing or unsafe, if they say that our car is dangerous, how can they prove it? It’s a bit off point, other cars are more dangerous…it depends on the lawyer, I think we have a good lawyer – I hope that whatever happens will be interesting, any anyway it’s a good image to take a pedal car to court. If we win, we want to drive back to the gallery, to make a promenade in the city. If we lose, I will do the same in Montreal, go in the street and wait to be arrested.

It’s interesting the relationship to the law, it’s like when you bring an object that confronts the norm, in the context of traffic, the police are there to show that this car is really disturbing the norm. This is what we want to do with an artwork, to shock what was there before. This process of being, but not being illegal, just doing something without precedent is interesting. It’s good to have the Sobey prize, because now I can afford the consequences.

Disturbing the norms is not the primary goal, but I like the contrast – it’s easy to disturb, but here it’s poetic, and has a certain beauty. It’s the reaction of the people that I’m curious to see. People have projected themselves well, they have shown that the work makes people happy.