April 2011
4 posts
GORGEOUS weather outside! Commune with Toronto’s urban landscape via Jessica Thompson’s Swinging Suitcase. #swingingsuitcase
Hello Kelowna! William Griffiths is part of Sopa Fine Arts' U8, April 7-17, 2011
March 2011
5 posts
February 2011
3 posts
Art Dealers Association of Canada at The Armory Show
Information: Johanna Robinson at 416-934-1583 or johanna@ad-ac.ca.
Art Dealers Association of Canada (ADAC) is pleased to announce its official participation, as part of an exclusive not-for-profit contingent at The Armory Show taking place 2 to 6 March 2011. The ADAC pavilion is located in Pier 94 at Booth #1511. In partnership with Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Foundation and Art Toronto, ADAC will present a uniquely Canadian itinerary of exhibitions, public lectures and art tours. This dynamic program, entitled A Quiet Revolution: Canadian Art Now, is designed to build awareness around Canadian galleries, artists and the art market.
The exhibition and public programs are curated by Toronto Arts Foundation Associate Director William Huffman; work has been selected from the results of an open call to the ADAC membership. Working with The Armory continues the ADAC mandate of providing promotional and professional development opportunities for its member galleries across Canada.
Participating galleries are: Bau-Xi Photo; Diaz Contemporary; Doug Udell Gallery; Feheley Fine Arts; Galerie Simon Blais; Galerie Trois Points; Gallery 78; Gallery Gevik; Gallery Moos; Jessica Bradley Art + Projects; Kinsman Robinson Galleries; KWT Contemporary; Lonsdale Gallery; Mayberry Fine Art; Miriam Shiell Fine Art; Olga Korper Gallery; Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain; p|m gallery; Roberts Gallery and Sandra Ainsley Gallery.
Participating artists include: Keith W. Bentley; Michel Campeau; Dean Dreaver; Scott Everingham; Éliane Excoffier; Brendan Fernandes; Tom Forrestall; Irene Frolic; Osheen Harruthoonyan; Dil Hildebrand; Natalka Husar; William Lazos; John Lennard; Rita Letendre; Amanda MacCavour; Allyson Mitchell; Viktor Mitic; Lauren Nurse; Paul P.; Germaine Pataki-Thériault; Annie Pootoogook; Steven Scott; Chris Shepard; Bewabon Shilling; Max Streicher; Derek Sullivan; Denyse Thomasos; Jutai Toonoo and Andrew Valko.
The following program of public talks and walking tours will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition:
Canadian Art Now – This daily talk series features cultural professionals who really know the visual art landscape beyond the 49th parallel. After a lively discussion over a glass of wine, the participating speakers will conduct a walking tour of The Armory Show.
Thursday 3 March at 5pm
William Huffman (Toronto Arts Foundation) – Canadian Art on the World Stage
Friday 4 March at 5pm
Patricia Feheley (Feheley Fine Arts) – Canada’s Aboriginal Art Scene
Saturday 5 March at 5pm
Denise Markonish (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) – Canadian Art at MASS MoCA in 2012
Sunday 6 March at 12pm
François Babineau (Galerie Simon Blais) and Jean-François Belisle (Association des galeries d’art contemporain) – Contemporary Art in Québec
The Expat Effect – Meet a dozen Canuck artists who’ve taken a serious bite out of the Big Apple! Each day, three emerging talents will meet their public for an informal and interactive discussion – learn about their work, how they got here, the successes enjoyed and challenges overcome. After a lively discussion over a glass of wine, the participating artists will conduct a walking tour of The Armory Show. Please join us in celebrating 12 northern lights on the East River.
Thursday 3 March at 7pm
Shelly Bahl, John Monteith, Reena Katz
Friday 4 March at 7pm
Michael Caines, Mona Saeed Kamal, Inbred Hybrid Collective
Saturday 5 March at 7pm
Kristine Moran, Brendan Fernandes, Jason Gringler
Sunday 6 March at 2pm
Adrienne Reynolds, Emily Stoddart, Tobaron Waxman
Art Dealers Association of Canada is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1966 to provide a professional platform for the determination of ethical standards as they relate to commercial galleries. ADAC also actively lobbies government on issues affecting the visual arts. The association undertakes vital programming and professional development initiatives aimed at building national and international profile for Canadian commercial galleries specifically, and around the Canadian art market in general.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $17.1 million in visual arts throughout Canada.
Additional support is generously provided by Art Toronto, AXA Insurance, Consulate General of Canada in New York, Donoahue Design, Diane Dussault & Associates, Klaus by Nienkamper and PACART.
Get the Robert Waters catalogue by Praxis at Issuu.com →
issuu.com
THE ARTIST ROBERT WATERS USES EARTH FROM THE MASS GRAVES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR TO CULTIVATE MEDICINAL HERBS – INCLUDING SOME THAT HELP IMPROVE MEMORY – AND CREATE A HEALING ATMOSPHERE.
Gregory Burke to Leave The Power Plant in May →
artforum.com
02.08.11
02.08.11
Gregory Burke, director of Toronto’s The Power Plant, today announced that he will leave his position at the end of this May, after close to six years in the role. On joining The Power Plant in 2005, Burke immediately set in place the development of a five-year strategic plan, adopted in 2006. Under that plan, Burke led a range of initiatives to develop The Power Plant and increase awareness of its programs. In 2006, Burke launched All Summer, All Free, a program providing free admission to tens of thousands of visitors to The Power Plant. This program, combined with other new public programs, has led to The Power Plant increasing visitation by more than 250 percent during Burke’s tenure. The Power Plant annual commissioning program was also launched by Burke in 2006, with the aim of realizing major new projects. Since then projects have been commissioned from Simon Starling, Lawrence Weiner, Scott Lyall, Candice Breitz, Ian Wallace, and Pae White.
January 2011
3 posts
December 2010
2 posts
November 2010
2 posts
October 2010
4 posts
Check out NP's Leah Sandals' Dundas Street West promenade →
news.nationalpost.com
p|m Gallery is open tomorrow 12 - 5:30, so come and see Amanda Clyne’s beautifully painted exhibition. (sorry L, we disagree)
Get Thee Modified! NYC's Kurt Bigenho @ Drake Hotel
KURT BIGENHO
EXPERIENTIAL MODIFIERS
LOBBY
7pm-4am
Nuit Blanche is the perfect opportunity to try something a little different. NYC-based artist Kurt Bigenho is here to help with a lending library of usable art that allows participants to “modify” their experience of the night. Borrow something for a few hours and see where it takes you. We hear there is a special Canadian edition scarf!
http://www.thedrakehotel.ca/culture/art
Kurt Bigenho is a Californian artist currently living/working in Brooklyn, NYC. He has shown work in California, NYC, Tokyo. A recurring interest is with giving audiences a unique and customized experience. He works under a number of aliases, including The Dept. of Shape Research, Made By Kurt, K., The Generalist, and was a co-founder of VAINGLORIOUS, the SF-based uncertainty troupe, which was formally put to sleep in 2002. He is currently developing new interactive pieces and continuing to develop The Dept. of Shape Research. His design consultancy is known as Kurt for Hire. Other relevant biographical details: degree in architecture from UC Berkeley, studied yoga for a few years, likes to cook, and is a recovering pack rat. In 2004 he launched Multiverse, a monthly showcase promising ‘genre-bending at its best’. Also in 2004 he curated The Mobile Phone Photo Show, in which 250+ participants from 50+ countries sent in 2000+ images taken with mobile phones.
Corsano takes reins of Speed Art Criticism @ Nuit Blanche. →
scotiabanknuitblanche.ca
Grab your portfolio, Head to Zone C, and line up for 15 minutes of feedback from Toronto’s cream of the crop art critics.
September 2010
12 posts
It's Saturday! Are you ready for 3-sided Square @ Yonge-Dundas Square?
3-sided Square
Curated by Darren Copeland, New Adventures in Sound Art
Part of Toronto (new music) Marathon
Yonge-Dundas Square, Toronto
Performances Saturday, September 25, 2 - 7 pm
The name 3-sided Square derives from the fact that Yonge-Dundas Square (YDS) has a pie shape layout - a triangle shape rather than a square. These performances are a soundscape portrait of YDS (and its surrounding area) made from 3 perspectives at once - 2 performers and the audience. It is a performance that melds together the worlds of acoustic ecology and soundscape composition with laptop improvisation and electronica and that also incorporates audience participation. The performances function as short intermezzos in between the main stage performances of the Toronto New Music Marathon at Yonge-Dundas Square. The goal of 3-sided Square is to create spontaneous and personalized sound portraits of the Yonge-Dundas area that over the course of an 8 hour period will mirror the natural changes in the Yonge-Dundas soundscape. Performances by Richard Windeyer & Eric Powell (2 - 4 pm), Michelle Irving & Matt Miller (4 - 6 pm), Jessica Thompson & Hector Centeno (6 - 8 pm)
TO Art Agenda: Babble →
blogto.com
Posted by Matthew Purvis / September 9, 2010
St. Catherine’s based multimedia artist Duncan MacDonald provides an interrogation of the variance between sound and vision in his exhibit at the pm Gallery. The sculptural component of the show features three dimensional objects he’s cast based on the visual mapping of sound recordings of objects falling. It’s a fascinating game of ekphrasis, shifting from one medium to one another, from object to its translation to the translation of the translation back into an object. These objects pattern the wall as loops of sound fill up the gallery space.
At the far end of the room, there are three screens set up playing various video pieces by the artist. The slow and atmospheric videos question the nature of viewing and constantly displace the experience, forcing a kind of objectivity into viewing which provides an interesting contrast to the questioning of the object established in the sculptures. Some of the videos are created through the superimposition of the elliptical cross fades of films and their conflation with a soundtrack which does nothing to clarify them. More striking though, is the reddish pinhole style recording of a flock of starlings in the sky while its witnesses mutter banalities at a slowed down and distorted speed.
See you tonight! Duncan MacDonald: Babble, 6-9pm
August 2010
4 posts
July 2010
3 posts
Keith W. Bentley in Studio International →
studio-international.co.uk
Bentley’s ‘Cauda Equina’ continues to garner attention in Dead or Alive at MAD.
June 2010
6 posts
Umbrico is Deutsche Bank Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) for 2010. →
db-artmag.com
Archivist of Collective Pictorial Memory
Penelope Umbrico new Deutsche Bank Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts
Flickering lines and lattice-like patterns in black frames: What at first look like compositions by an abstract artist with a predilection for psychedelic effects turn out to be a series of photographs showing defective LCD televisions. Penelope Umbrico collected pictures of such devices from eBay and edited them so that only the screen can be seen. Her photo works from the series Broken Sets (eBay) combine modernist utopias encompassing abstraction and a belief in technological progress with reality - with unusable TV sets which until recently were the pride of their owners and now are offered on eBay as a cheap source of spare parts.
Whether she works with photos of sunsets from the website Flickr or motifs from home-improvement and décor websites and magazines which she combines into typologies, Umbrico is an archivist of 21st century collective pictorial memory. Now the artist has been selected as a Deutsche Bank Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) for 2010. Since 2000, an independent jury has chosen New York-based artists as Fellows. The artists who have been sponsored thus far include Michael Spano, Carl Fudge, Frank Magnotta and Fay Ku. The Deutsche Bank Fellows receive prize money and one of their works is purchased for the Deutsche Bank Collection. To promote artists who were not born in the U.S. but who have settled in New York, the Mentorship Program for Immigrant Artists was conceived and initiated by Deutsche Bank together with NYFA. With the program, NYFA Fellows help other artists get established in New York and make connections in the art scene there. The innovative project is also sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
May 2010
10 posts
Rhizome.org reviews Umbrico @ LMAK Projects →
rhizome.org
Aesthetics of Breakdown:
Penelope Umbrico at LMAKprojects
Penelope Umbrico at LMAKprojects
By Jacob Gaboury on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 10:00 am.
The normative logic of digital technologies and consumer electronics is that they “just work.” The fields of human computer interaction and usability studies are intended to make technology functional for even the most lay of users. This can be seen clearly in the way in which new technologies are advertised and in the shift away from machines intended to be “tinkered” with toward black box technologies that maximize interface. The most recent campaign for Apple’s new iPad states that “it’s magical,” and that “you already know how to use it,” and Microsoft goes so far as to imply that Windows 7 was designed by everyday users to be “easier.” Nonetheless, for most users dysfunction and breakdown are a large part of their everyday experience of technology.
In Broken Sets (eBay), Penelope Umbrico has collected a virtual archive of technological failure in images of broken LCD TV sets being sold on eBay for spare parts. Each image bears a unique pattern formed by cracks and other anomalies that fracture the images they display into a pixelization that resembles landscapes or test patterns. Many of the pieces, displayed as photo prints, vaguely resemble “digital interference” works by Sean Dack or Borna Sammak’s HD video collage, but taken as a whole they suggest a larger aesthetics of breakdown that is as much a critique of our idealized vision of these technologies as functionally useful objects as it is beautiful.
As Is, a collection of Penelope Umbrico’s work, is running at LMAKprojects until June 20th.
