“Art After Photography” May 13th

Betty Ann Jordan is a Canadian art writer and consultant who currently leads tours for Queen Street West’s 1st Thursdays.  The Drake’s promotional blurb described Jordan’s dinner talk as a reflection on ”photography’s strengths and limitations exposed by artists working in other media.”  An intriguing and a daring choice of event in the midst of the city’s Contact Photography Festival.

The evening began with a warm greeting from the gracious and charismatic Jordan who was obviously much adored by those assembled, but we were surprised to learn that she wasn’t going to talk about photography at all.

Jordan derided photography, conceptual and performance art’s current domination of the contemporary art scene since she herself favoured work that was more intimate and made by hand.  She even pulled out powerhouse critic Roberta Smith’s recent New York Times article in her defense.  Fair enough, one is entitled to their own tastes, but isn’t this talk about how “Photography changed everything for artists”?  Guess not.

After adjusting our expectation that we were to hear a talk about the human link to animals and the prediction that we would all one day become sun worshippers, she informed us that this talk was going to be like “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould”, ie. disjointed and woefully unprepared.

The rest of her presentation consisted of superficial commentary about artists whose work she liked (most of whom are widely recognized) and information on where one could buy the work should they be interested.  The biggest revelation of the evening turned out to be that the Tecumseth Street galleries are currently offering a 20% off discount.

I might have been able to roll with the lack of delivery had the premise not been so bold and had we not paid dinner theatre prices for a community theatre calibre show.  And really, that’s being unfair to community theatre.  They would have been better prepared.

“Selective Affinities” til May 29

In Selective Affinities Susana Reisman gives everyday objects what I call “the museum treatment”.  That is, taking everyday objects and presenting them unencumbered by their history for contemplation as pure aesthetic object.  Isolated on a white backdrop and lit with all the care and attention afforded a supermodel, we are forced to recon with the beauty that we are confronted with everyday and so seldom see.  In a sense, she has “white cubed” these objects and in the process these utilitarian objects have transcended their common household status.

But Reisman’s exercise/project (by her own admission) led to a very interesting discovery about “the museum treatment” phenom.   While creating these pieces, she started to notice that the posing and staging of the objects and the resulting forms started to remind her of the work of other artists (Brancusi, Donald Judd and Duchamp to name a few).  She needed to ask herself, was she doing this because she could not help but imitate those who came before her (as they were part of her visual vocabulary) or rather was it even possible to avoid doing so in the confines of the white cube?

“Exposures” til May 29

Barbara Probst’s ongoing Exposure series takes multiple photographs using different cameras all synchronized to capture the same moment.  The results are fascinating, sometimes surprising and enlightening.   Cropping and framing, and the other myriad ways that photographers mold an image, always yield interesting results, but what a difference an angle makes!   It’s a bit of an instructional course on the tricks of photography.

The image shown above, Exposure #71a: N.Y.C., Crosby & Broome Streets, 06, at first puts us in the position of a voyeur watching a woman standing on the street below, but when we look at the other photograph, of the woman at street level who gazes at us, we are left to wonder who the voyeur is here.

Image contemplation abounds in this show and my enjoyment of it comes from its exposure of photography’s mechanics, but also because it unfolds like a bit of a mystery that we are invited to solve.  Inevitably, the different photographs of the moment inform one another and a whole new meaning or story emerges.

til May 22nd

Carlos and Jason Sanchez are Montreal based photographers who create emotionally and politically charged imagery using staged photography in the vein of Jeff Wall.

Their latest show at Nicholas Metivier shows work from the past few years that seems to be ripped from the headlines of the newspapers.  (Except if this was indeed photojournalism, the fortuitous access of the photographers would suggest a Forrest Gump like knack for being in the right place at the right time.)

Preoccupied with death and tragedy, the underbelly of the contemporary world that we inhabit, these photographs are the visual manifestation of our darkest fears and fascinations:  pedophilia, terrorism, war, and natural disasters are all portrayed here.  These works are nightmares at a glance. 

The influences of this work go back further than Jeff Wall and the photoconceptualists, to the French Romantics of the early 19th century, just before the birth of photography.  Like the Sanchez brothers, the Romantic painters brought the stories of the day to life with their brushes.   And like Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s methods of vigilant research and cleverly staged reality I’m reminded of  Théodore Géricault‘s work Raft of the Medusa, a painting dramatizing a famous shipwreck that portrayed a tortured handful of survivors on a disintegrating raft lost at sea.  People of the day were shocked and horrifed, but none could ignore the work’s impact.

“Seen & Unseen” til May 1

It is probably a bit unfair that I saw Eggleston’s show at the Art Institute Chicago a couple of days before seeing the work of Keith Carter for the first time.  I think I might have gone easier on Carter’s style had the unassuming power of Eggleston’s work not preceded it, but it was an interesting lesson for me in understanding my own tastes.

In his show “Seen and Unseen” Keith Carter reveals an engaging vision that has a great sense of atmospherics and a sensibility of magic and delight.  There’s also complexity to his vision in his attraction to oddity, innocence that is not quite really innocent.  I can understand why people would like his work.  It’s accessible with a mysterious and somewhat quirky edge that pushes it beyond the sentimental.

But in the wake of Eggleston’s show, Carter’s “search for truth and beauty” reads like sentimental pap and feels destined  for the cover of a more sophisticated greeting card — because they really are lovely.  Carter’s photographs are meant to pull on the heart-strings, but it is this intention that puts me off.  He seems to be trying too hard to convey magic and wonder and you can see it in the work, ie. it feels contrived.  In contrast Eggleston’s work  seems genuine and the moments he documents like fortunate accidents that only a uniquely talented eye would notice.

The photographs were taken in the recent past, but are made to feel as if they hail from another era altogether — the dust bowl  of the past century or Victorian, another century all together.  It’s as if he dreamt up his subjects and used the sensibility of these earlier eras to render them mysterious, somehow unknowable.  The style of blurring out the edges lends to this. Nothing wrong with appropriating sensibilities, acquiring the tropes of another era is a well honed tool to find new sensibilities, but I can’t help but think that Carter is more art director than original visionary.  Even those images that were not sentimental in subject matter — his attempts at the macabre — seem cutesy somehow.

That being said, I do remember enjoying this exhibition because there is lots of wonder to be found here and will be a delight to some.  But in the end, it’s simply not my cup of tea.

Note:  I would however recommend this gallery.  Their stable of photographers is intriguing.

2. Guido Van Der Werve @ Prefix

3. A Tiny View

4. Culture Sculpture

5. Poison Pen Perfected

“Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008″ til May 23

William Eggleston is widely credited with bringing colour photography into the realm of fine art.  It’s almost ironic that his reason for using colour was not exactly worthy of fine art high thinking.  By his own admission, Eggleston merely wanted to represent the world around him which happens to be in colour.  But even as what he did was to show us the obvious, what we already know, through his photographs we realize that we were don’t really ever look quite this way.

His work, seemingly quite simply, shows us the beauty, wonder and depth in the everyday and unassuming.  Most profoundly, he humanizes objects or we feel the presence of the people whom he depicts.  It’s no wonder that David Lynch and Sophia Coppola credit Eggleston as an influence — each photograph reads like the opening shot of a film.  There is so much real life in these still images.

Take for example, The Red Ceiling named for its screaming colour.  The red grabs you buy the throat and then slowly you notice what else is in the picture.  A bare lightbulb sits in a standard fixture extended by not one but two extensions which provides a receptacle for electrical cords of which two are engaged, stapled to the ceiling and out of frame to whatever they provide power to.  Whoever occupies this place is too cheap to pay for proper electrical solutions, or ceiling repair for that matter, the crown molding is missing in the corner.

Other objects in the photograph suggests some sort of public establishment: the heating element attached to the ceiling and the top corner of a colourful poster that shows monochrome outlines of people in various sexual positions, a standing sixty-nine jumps out at me.   My guess is that it’s a bar or place of ill repute.  It’s a dangerous and menacing photograph on many levels, and even sexy in a low rent kinda way.  It’s not surprising to learn that The Red Ceiling is also considered one of Eggleston’s best and most famous photographs.

Beyond the saturated colours and resolutions that we associate with another era (it’s hard to see what the eye saw forty years ago), Eggleston is a documentarian who knows how to tell people’s stories with an image.  There’s a sort of brilliance in the places that you least expect to find it.  His style is a rock ’n roll and it’s no surprise to me that his photographs have been used on album covers and that he was also commissioned to shoot Graceland, home of the King of rock ’n roll himself.

“Sweet Crude” til Apr 25

I became interested in Cal Lane’s work a few months ago after seeing an advertisement for her upcoming show, Sweet Crude, in Canadian Art.  In the ad,  the artist with long brown hair straddles a rusted household oil tank as she cuts a floral pattern into the metal using a blow torch. An attractive women using a blow torch to make art is novel and to some (like me) seductive.  And I don’t think I’m alone in reacting that way.  Clearly the intention of the advertisement is to generate interest in Lane’s work by highlighting the intriguing contrast between a feminine woman performing a masculine task.   Is there anything wrong with that?

Beyond being a woman using a traditionally masculine trade to make her work, the contrast between masculine and feminine elements is the most salient dynamic in the work.  She welds distinctly feminine patterns, reminiscent of doilies and lace,  into metal surfaces and the objects that she repurposed are industrial – oil drums, car parts and gardening tools — that are typically associated with the masculine.

I also like how she keeps the integrity of the original objects and doesn’t just use objects just for the metal or as material to be salvaged.  It’s a bit of an homage to the past in this way and an artful chronicle of our ever-changing world.   

Figuring prominently in Sweet Crude are antique world maps.  She carves out these maps into the eroding oil cans and barrels rendering a portrait of a world dependent on oil that is antiquated.  A bit of an overt statement, perhaps, but a natural evolution in her art practice.

Lane takes what is essentially garbage and remakes it into a coveted object.  She is an alchemist of sorts.

“Cut to the Chase” til May 2

I rarely get excited about collage.  I can appreciate a good tear up, which I recently experienced looking at Tony Ramano’s poster collages, but never have I been awed by the way a guy can cut and paste.

Greg Lamarche has turned my head by taking disparate imagery from multiple sources of found and forgotten paper forms and puts them together like a spatial word poet or a conductor of  letters and lines.  His arrangements are inventive, fun and often clever.   His “O” pieces, in particular, are retro and fresh at the same time.  It’s wonderful to witness the excitement that a letter without the aid of placement in a  word can generate in the right hands.

Admittedly, I also have a weakness for his Motown era sensibility.  The colours and the fonts remind me of this time and its funky vibe.  He’s nailed the carefree and cool essence of the era without being derivative. 

Lamarche’s  medium is collage and so are his influences.  There’s a touch of  graffiti’s style and a lot of graphic design.  In some ways, the greatest strengths of Lamarche’s work is also its weakness.  It’s hard to separate the results of these artful collages from solid graphic design work. 

It’s not that good graphic design is a lesser art.  Talent is talent.  I’m just always personally torn about whether or not its ”fine” art.  But really, after decades of conceptual art and it’s legacy of breaking down barriers, you’d think I’d be used to this by now and just admit that it’s really good collage and stop my quibbling, huh?

“Harmonizing Forces” til Apr 25

In a window of the gallery, a plank of wood balances on a triangular base like  a teeter totter.   On one side is a potted pine tree and on the other, a stack of newspapers about a foot high.  The paper pile and the tree were in perfect balance.  The removal of just one paper would throw the balance off.  It’s a straight forward, yet clever, metaphor for the fine balance required between nature and culture in an age of diminishing resources.

Further investigating the relationship between commodity and nature is Tree-ring Dating, a representation of the cross-section of the tree made from newspapers.   Lagos folded the stock pages and arranged them like a fan in a circle.  The stock data looks like the rings that one can count on a tree to know it’s age and the circumstances of its growth.  This piece works as an information archive on a few levels. 

Projected onto the rear wall of the gallery was a sped up video loop of cars and pedestrians navigating a busy road in a South American city.  Curiously, in the middle of the road an enormous tree is growing.  The cars have to all go around it and you wonder how they all manage to successfully navigate around the tree without having an accident.  The situation is both wonderful and crazy.  Without question, we’d have cut that tree down before we even build the road in this city.  We don’t tolerate potential hazards here well. 

There are other pieces, each of which I found equally charming.  I recommend you go and check it out.

The artist, Milar Lagos, is from Columbia.  The curator, Astrid Bastin of AB Projects brought Lagos from Columbia for a residency in Toronto.  She is also plans to bring a couple of Canadian artists back to Columbia.  A cultural exchange in good hands.

Part of “Perpetuities and Accumulations” til Apr 10

We all have them.  We can’t live without them, but they are basically ignored and forgotten until we have something that we just don’t have a place for and then the good old junk drawer gets a call to duty…  for the moment.

I understand that junk drawers don’t experience feelings of neglect, but what Lycan has pointed out here with this installation of photographed and mounted contents of a typical junk drawer:  rolls of various kinds of tape, batteries, a birth certificate, elastics, receipts, pens, expired checkbooks, a user manual, an address book, paper clips, and paint colour swatches… is our propensity to accumulate.

Interesting, but not at all surprising, is how similar the contents of Lycan’s drawer (or whomever’s stuff it is that she has represented here) and my own junk drawer and the one that I grew up with for that matter is.  I’m pretty sure that my household is not alone in this admission.  The junk drawer might well be universal.

In Lycan’s installation, we get to wander amongst the representations of this junk strewn around the gallery floor.  One gets the feeling we are just another item in the drawer.   Could Lycan be suggesting that we contemporary accumulators, whose reason for being is to consume, are just like the contents of one great big junk drawer?   I wouldn’t necessarily argue with her.

“Relics of the Future” til May 1

Toni Hafkenscheid uses a special camera and lens to achieve an effect that makes his photographs of real subjects seem like staged scenes of dioramas or small-scale models.  This lens blurs information around the edges and focuses the objects in the middle of the picture.

We recognize these photographs as pictures of models because this lens effect mimics what happens when one attempts to take a photograph of something small without using a macro camera lens.  The lens is only capable of focusing on the middle of frame, and because the subject is so close and the lens is limited in-depth of field, the elements at the edges of the photograph come out blurry.  (I say this with layman’s experience and my terminology is no doubt rudimentary.)

One could simply enjoy these pieces for the same reasons that most of like to look at models and dioramas — we like when things are small because it makes us feel big which makes us feel kind of safe.  Hafkenscheid also uses the comfort of nostalgia in his imagery tinting his photographs in colours once used in mid-century postcards.  The result is contemporary photographs appear to be from a bygone era.

But why make the big small and evoke nostalgia for the past?  What is this illusion about?  By Hafkenscheid’s own admission, the subject of these photographs is about the excitement generated amoungst the mid-century North American citizenry by the idea of  progress.   These photographs reflect the iconography of those aspirations:  highways, high-powered jets and towering buildings.

Think it apt that Hafkenscheid’s technique, that renders the monumental toy like and sentimental, speaks to the naivety of the people we once were.  Oh, how cynical we have become.  Or is it just me?

“ACCRUAL” ended Mar 27

It’s not like this sort of layering of photographic images hasn’t been done before.  But that they feel like mini films, a slew of experiences strung together like a Hudson’s Bay sweater struck a sentimental chord with me.I.M. Martinez has achieved a real sensibility here a nice slice and dice of urban life.  They portray movement and experience.  We get the feeling that we are participant in the journey because as viewers we get to search through the layers of  imagery for things that jump out at us.  Look again and something new comes to your attention. 

So they feel somewhat like a brochure for a furniture store that’s trying to sell you a lifestyle so that you’ll by their furniture.  I enjoy how Martinez is able to create an image that doesn’t feel forced or idealized nor does it feel gritty and real.  The sum of it’s parts leaves a sense of the urban sophisticate –  portraying the spaces where people who care about architecture and design spend their time.   Truth is these photo montages didn’t rock my world, but I like how they gave me that Sunday in the city kind of feeling.

2.  Xiao Gou Hui’s Twisted Pleasures

3.  The Independent 2010 — New York

4.  The Whitney Biennial 2010 — New York

5.  will-gorlitz-mocca-toronto/

“Shut Up” til Apr 24

What did the dummy say in the art gallery? Nothing.  He’s given up the comedy circuit for a quieter, more intellectual life in the fine arts.

Ever since seeing her 1998 piece Le Jardin du sommeil, I was seduced by her evocation of our dreams and nightmares by showing us a field of antique bed frames that obviously were once slept in by those who are no longer with us.  The effect is ghostly and haunting. 

In “Shut Up”, it seems that Hurlbut is treading over familiar ground collecting and displaying remnants from the not so distance past, this time in the form of the ventriloquists’ dummy. 

Hurlbut has used dolls in her work before.  In 2001, in collaboration with Mike Robison, she made a series of daguerreotypes that featured a child mannequin.  True to form, there was something haunting about the portraits of the doll child missing a nose.  There is also an antique doll bed frame used in Broken that serves as a very uncomfortable bed for a seemingly not too happy Howdy Doody marionette. 

In looking at these vintage 1960’s dummies that are hung up on the gallery walls (or in portrait form) one gets the feeling that there is something not quite right about them.  The tone is set by the first small dummy that you see. who has a ribbon hanging out of his mouth that reads “Don’t Put Words In My Mouth” (also the name of the piece) as if he is literally throwing up this sentiment. 

Otherwise, these dummies are inanimate, each displayed to show a version of the 360 degree head spin.   Their blank expressions, their similarity to one another and their reenactment of the Exorcist manoeuver feels a bit like a set up for a horror film, as if Revenge of the Dummy could break out at any moment.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but other than exploiting these objects’ inherent eerie aura this show seems to not have much else to say.