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VoCA Recommends...A must see exhibition on Cuba at the MMFA, Montreal

¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

January 31 to June 8, 2008



¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, brings together 400 works of art in the first showcase the art of this Caribbean island, which Christopher Columbus described as “the most beautiful land eyes have ever seen.”

This massive multidisciplinary exhibition draws a broad panorama of Cuban art and history. You will find about one hundred paintings, including a huge collective mural produced in 1967 by many artists, two hundred photographs and documents, approximately one hundred works on paper (in particular two collections of pre- and post-1959-Revolution posters), installations and videos, in addition to music and film excerpts.


Portrait of Mary, from the exhibition. Image: mbam.qc.ca

Located at the crossroads of Old Europe and the New World, Cuba is a rich cultural terrain: its music and literature are well known outside of the country, but the same cannot be said of its visual arts

The exhibition is divided into five sections:
-Depicting Cuba: Finding Ways to Express a Nation (1868-1927)
-Arte Nuevo: The Avant-garde and the Re-creation of Identity (1927-1938)
-Cubanness: Affirming a Cuban Style (1938-1959)
-Within the Revolution, Everything, Against the Revolution, Nothing (1959-1979)
-The Revolution and Me: The Individual Within History (1980-2007).


The Intellectual or The Young Intellectual, from the exhibition. Image: mbam.qc.ca

The exhibition’s historical narrative is told through a selection of significant photographs: from those that have never been shown to the iconic, these pictures illustrate the chronology of events as recorded by remarkable photographers. Cuban artists created a profoundly original art of synthesis (Baroque and academic legacies, Spanish and African roots, Catholic and traditional spirituality). Central to the century and the exhibition, with the presentation of twenty paintings, the landmark work of Wifredo Lam embodies this synthesis.


Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943. Image: moma.ext.moma.org

For more information, please click HERE

VoCA Recommends...Jessica Thompson's collaborative performance at PM Gallery, Toronto

Freestyle SoundHack at PM Gallery, Toronto

Saturday, January 26, 2008, 1 – 5 pm


Jessica Thompson, Freestyle SoundKits. Image: pmgallery.com


Jessica Thompson, Freestyle SoundKits. Image: pmgallery.com

Freestyle SoundKits are the latest of artist Jessica Thompson's works. Thompson is a new media artist whose practice encompasses sound, performance and mobile technologies. Her projects enable audience members to create user-defined spaces and situations within urban environments. Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment.

Freestyle SoundHack is a collaborative performance. During the performance, the artist will teach participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, to distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose.
Material fee: $20 (full kit), $10 (kit-amp)

This project is presented as part of Give It Up: New Work by Jessica Thompson, a series of three performance-based projects at p|m Gallery in Toronto.


Jessica Thompson, Soundbike. Image: pmgallery.com

For more info or to RSVP, please email info@pmgallery.ca.

Gallery website is HERE.


Jessica Thompson, walking machine, 2003. Image: pmgallery.com

Kelly Wood and Monika Grzymala at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

Kelly Wood and Monika Grzymala, installation shot. Image: catrionajeffries.com

Kelly Wood and Monika Grzymala at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver

18 January – 16 February, 2008


This exhibition brings together works by gallery artist Kelly Wood and Hamburg-based artist Monika Grzymala.

Kelly Wood will show a new series of ten unique, large, near-monochromatic photographic images that depict the binary code formats of digital recordings of ten songs. Wood has selected recordings of innovative Canadian electronic or avant-garde music, ranging from Hugh Le Caine's "dripsody"—composed in 1955 from a sound sample of a drip of water falling in a pail—to recordings by Intersystems, the Nihilist Spasm Band, John Oswald and the UJ3RK5.


Kelly Wood, Garbage Bag (No. 5), 2001, C-print. Image: catrionajeffries.com

Based in Hamburg and Berlin, Monika Grzymala will produce an installation entitled Distortion, comprised of approximately seven kilometres of adhesive tape.


A work by Monika Grzymala. Image: catrionajeffries.com

Grzymala's installation is related to visual interference and pixellation—the random errors and digital distortions which appear accidentally in electronic imagery.

For more information, please visit the gallery's website HERE.

VoCA recommends...A film on Edward Said, Ottawa

Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said; A documentary by Japanese filmmaker Sato Makoto

Saturday 26 January at 7 pm

At the Library and Archives Canada Auditorium, Ottawa (395 Wellington Street)


Edward Said. Image: brown.edu

As a compliment to its exhibition Orientalism & Ephemera - 23 November 2007 to 3 February 2008 - the Ottawa Art Gallery and the Canadian Film Institute present this film, which borrows its title from Edward Said's 2000 memoir, Out of Place. The book traces the life and work of Edward Said (1935-2003), the Palestinian-born intellectual who wrote widely on history, literature, music, philosophy and politics.

Filmed in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and the U.S., this feature-length documentary traces Said's childhood influences and celebrates his intellectual legacy, especially the importance of his work in literary criticism and postcolonial studies, his love of music, his role on the Palestinian National Council, and his troubled relationship with Yasser Arafat.


Ernest Normand, Bondage, 1895. Image: rogallery.com

For more information on tickets etc, please click HERE.

VoCA recommends...Exhibitions in New York, Whitehorse, Vancouver

AA Bronson, excerpt from Mirror Sequences, 1969. Image: aabronson.com

1. AA Bronson's School For Young Shamans at John Connelly Presents, New York

January 10 - February 16, 2008

This performative exhibition features a collaboration with erstwhile Canadian artist Terence Koh and works by nine young shamans including Winnipeg artist Michael Dudeck and VoCA favorite, the Tokyo-based Item Idem:

With a portrait by Bruce LaBruce, original score by Andrew Zealley and AA Bronson’s self portraits from 1969.

Two collaborations with Terence Koh consist of a double toilet cubicle joined by a glory hole: one is a miniature, a three-dimensional model; the other is an architectural installation that invites the performative.

AA Bronson worked and lived as one of the three artists of General Idea from 1969 through 1994. Since then, he has worked under his own name, with multiple international exhibitions. He has been included in many biennales including Montreal, the Whitney, Venice, Sydney and Sao Paolo. He was appointed a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art in 2006, and has been the Director of Printed Matter, Inc. since 2004.

For more on the exhibition, please click HERE

For more on AA Bronson, please click HERE


Installation view from the exhibition. Image: johnconnellypresents.com


2. In the Shadow of the Midnight Sun and Drawn to Memory at the Yukon Art Centre, Whitehorse, Canada

January 10 – 9 March, 2008

Drawn to Memory is an exhibition of YT artist Catherine Deer's charcoal drawings that depict her memories of growing up in Baker Lake in the early 1960s, while In the Shadow brings together Canadian Inuit work with Sami pices from Norway, Sweden and Finland.


Sami (Lapps) outside their reindeer-skin tent in Finnish Lapland. Image: britannica.com

For more information, please visit the gallery website HERE


3. Exponential Future at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver

January 18—27 April, 2008


Tim Lee, Untitled (Light-Space Module, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1928-30), 2007.
Image: belkin.ubc.ca

This exhibition features the work of eight young Vancouver artists, including the super hot Tim Lee, with Alex Morrison, Isabelle Pauwels, Kevin Schmidt, Mark Soo, Corin Sworn, Althea Thauberger and Elizabeth Zvonar

In true Vancouver tradition, the exhibition celebrates the city’s local art scene. The curators have attempted to give an overview of the new artistic thinking through works that engage the complex reality of urban life in the early 21st century.


Elizabeth Zvonar, Pelly’s Mission 2982, 2006. Image: belkin.ubc.ca

For more information, please click HERE