A mermaid’s gurgling underwater hello, dear bloglings! As promised here are the ToD listings highlights so you can check out a previously covered artist hopefully in your city. Brendan Fernandes has stopped by Montreal with Haraka Haraka to prove he still rocks like a cradle. Be sure to catch Jude Griebel’s Away Like Smoke in Calgary before it disappears. Go for Milutin Gubash, but stay for Annie Gauthier in You, Me and You in Montreal. James Lahey and his rhombuses go for gold in Vancouver. And Catherine Bolduc gets into all sorts of amazing in Laval with Mes châteaux d’air. Enjoy!
-Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
Marcel Dzama's 2009, "We Shall Be Given Back to the Old Disharmony."
Big news everyone! This week I’m pleased to have the one and only Marcel Dzama in conversation with ToD. The former Royal Art Lodge member, winning Winnipegger and all-around awesome artist was in Montreal helping set up the largest solo exhibition of his works ever organized by a museum, Of Many Turns, at the Musée d’art contemporain.
ToD: When did you arrive in Montreal?
MD: Five days ago.
ToD: How has the installation been going?
MD: It’s actually very good, everyone’s been very professional, and Mark [Lanctôt] set up the show very well. I didn’t really move anything. It was quite easy actually. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
"White Out" from Sarah Anne Johnson's previous series, "House on Fire."
Sarah Anne Johnson isn’t quite sure what she’s created. After working 15-hour days since the beginning of January, who could blame her. But Winnipeggers are lining up to find out their local Grange Prize-winning art darling has been up to this past month at aceartinc.
Johnson’s installation/dance performance, Dancing with the Doctor, is the cities hottest ticket. New performances were even added to accommodate the flood of prospective attendees, but those have since filled up. Even in the middle of Winnipeg winter, aceartinc’s website proudly proclaims in red, bold and all-caps “Filled no more seats.”
“The original plan [was an installation proper]. It’s really turned more into a theatrical piece. Now I want the audience members to treat the set like a stage,” says Johnson. “We have it cordoned off, so you can only view it from where you would sit down to watch the show. It’s turned into a real theatre production. Which I wasn’t anticipating, but it was a natural progression.” Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
A still from Julie Lequin's new video, "True Stories (almost)."
It’s an experience everyone can relate to. That obligatory question in conversation, especially with a parent or a former peer/coworker—so, what have you been up to?
“I hate to hear that!” says Montreal-based artist Julie Lequin. Her most recent four-channel video is a humorous take on conversations she’s had with her mom, collector and publisher. “These three people always tell me things I should do. It’s a little bit annoying.”
The ten-minute video, “True Stories (almost)” is the centre piece of Lequin’s exhibition, What Have You Been Up To, Julie? In it she fields questions like: what are you doing anyways? why would you do that? do you mean you wanted to cover your white hair? Accompanying the video are Lequin’s initial drawings of her characters along with their costumes Lequin made herself. Read the rest of this entry »
A Mack truck double arm-honk-motion hello bloglings. I’ve been a bit lax with keeping tabs on previous ToD peeps, but I’m back on the ball for next week. Until then check out my feature on Marc Bell. This week we’re running a huuuuge feature on Mario Doucette, so I’d check that out too. Enjoy!
-Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
David Burdeny's "Macon, Loire Valley, France, 2009."
Recent winner of the coveted Nature Photographer of the Year Award at the Pilsner Urquell International Photography Awards, David Burdeny, has turned his lens on urban edge conditions and built environments throughout the world. In his ongoing series, Sacred and Secular, the Vancouver photographer explores architecture in equally explosive expanse and quiet grace.
ToD: You write that you’ve been “working intensely” this past year on Sacred and Secular. How do you mean? Like how is this series different from the work you put into previous series.
DB: In the past I had always worked on image making in short blocks of time. Up until a year ago I was still practicing architecture full-time, so out of necessity I was forced to make the photographs during off hours or when I was able to step away from my projects. The intensity would come and go as I switched hats between architect and photographer.
However, a year ago I made the difficult decision to leave the architectural profession to concentrate solely on making photographs. So for the past year I lived, ate and breathed photography. I poured myself both physically and emotionally into the work for long stretches at a time—researching ideas, locations, equipment and ultimately exposing film. At times it was exhausting and lonely work trying to take photographs in an unfamiliar city where you don’t speak the language and know very little about its urban dynamics. To make matters worse I established a fairly compressed schedule which left
little room for error in finding a location or managing poor weather. Case in point: I traveled to Shanghai to photograph the Pudong skyline from the Bund side of the Huangpu River only to find it totally inaccessible due to the 2010 world’s fair construction. To get the image I needed, I had to make my way up to a roof of a building that was still under construction. Read the rest of this entry »
A booming operatic, glass-shattering, hello, dear bloglings! We here at ToD finally have the internet at our fingertips every second of the day again. Yes! Now we can get back to the business of really knocking your socks off. Or you can just check out Mitchell F Chan’s latest piece of genius, Visions of the Amen: Kinetic Sculpture Installation, at Toronto’s Spoke Club. Rather than do it the injustice of trying to describe it, I’ll simply recommend you check out this video teaser for the project here. As a for a shameless plug for myself, make sure to check out the Telegraph-Journal this Saturday for a killer feature I wrote on the heart-palpitatingly spectacular work of Marc Bell.
Enjoy!
-Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
Yann Pocreau's 2008 photograph, "Attendre-3, Ancien Collège des Jésuites - réfectoire (réfectoire)."
Yann Pocreau is being honest. He’s pretty stressed about his coming show.
“I’m not sure if it’s going to work, eh,” says the Montreal-based photographer, chuckling. “It’s all about me trying not to do just nice photos on the wall.”
Pocreau’s latest series, Définir la lumière locale is both a departure from and continuation of his practice. It’s the first time he’s created a body of work from a variety of locations from Morocco to Montreal, rather than just one or two. It’s also the first time he’s shown work with little to no figures or literal presence. At the same time it might just be his strongest examination of the relationship between space and body in his work. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
A video still from Evan Tapper's animation in "Swoon."
The day before Evan Tapper’s installation is set to open at Gallery 1C03 there’s a bit of a hiccup. Unknowing cleaners (at the University of Winnipeg) had swept up the giant mat of feathers on the gallery floor into a neat pile in the corner.
The Winnipeg-born artist easily redistributed the feathers, laughing off the mistake. “I guess installation exhibits are still a bit new,” he says.
Installations like this are new for Tapper, too. Primarily a video and animation artist, Swoon, with its use of actual use of art objects, is a first for Tapper—with a print from the gallery’s collection and the feathers from a sliced open duvet used as a video projection screen. Returning home from Toronto for his first solo show since he left in 1998, Swoon is fittingly specific to the gallery, institution and the ideas of sexual violence and power addressed it addresses. Read the rest of this entry »
A Beach Boys harmony-perfect hello, dear bloglings! Saint John is warming up to me (actually it’s been really cold this week, but you know what I mean). I went to Sackville earlier this week, and finally got to hang out with John Murchie at Struts. Awesome. Rogers dropped the ball on getting my internet hooked up this past weekend, but hopefully everything is being installed today. Luckily, you have three killer interviews to read this week while I get my act together. Enjoy!
-Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
An installation shot of Sasaki's obsolete mascot Nork.
Doris McCarthy Gallery is exhibiting recent work by Toronto multimedia artist Jon Sasaki. With the triple bill starting points of futility, failure and tragedy in his work, Sasaki is a must for ToD. Or maybe it was my undying allegiance to Youppi that drew me to Sasaki’s work. I talked to Sasaki about all his good intentions.
ToD: You’re a self-described “romantic-conceptualist.” Can you explain what this is, and why you identify with it?
JS: i first came across the term in an essay by Jörg Heiser, although i don’t know if he coined it or not. certainly, though, the aesthetic he describes predates him… as seen in work that makes use of conceptual art strategies deployed in ways that resonate emotionally. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
A video still from Pagurek's two-channel "Growing Pains".
Cheryl Pagurek has a pest in her garden. And it’s not any slug or mite—it’s war. At Patrick Mikhail Gallery, in the Ottawa artist’s latest, Growing Pains (see it here), video of her garden plays simultaneously next to military tracking footage. In the photographic companion piece, High Value Targets, Pagurek abuts grainy military video stills with high resolution garden shots titled with a short military statement or command. With her micro and macro pairings Pagurek has set her sights on a shared concern for control and surveillance.
ToD: This show features intimate recordings of a season of gardening. Have you always had a green thumb?
CP: I became interested in gardening when I lived in Victoria, growing flowers in pots on my doorstep. But really I only had the opportunity to garden more extensively when we moved back to Ottawa 12 years ago, to my current house which had many garden beds around it. I’ve been changing them and working on them ever since. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
A still from Pivato's thesis project, "I Want to be Alive With You".
I love repetition. I watch even bad movies dozens of times. I’ll listen to the same album over and over again for a week straight. My perfect job was at Winners mindlessly scanning hundreds of bar codes day after day. Like multimedia artist Juliana Pivato, repetition is a “stabilizing trope”. A new exhibition of Pivato’s work continues her exploration of repetition in drawing, small sculptures, sound and video as “little coping mechanisms”.
ToD: Your first degree was a BMus (voice) from McGill, and theatre and performance plays a huge part in your work. But how did that transition from music to fine art occur? Did something precipitate it?
JP: The performer audience relationship was always very problematic to me - the one sidedness of it - and also - I had developed for a time - an incredibly debilitating performance anxiety that made it impossible to really perform the way that I’d grown up performing. I wanted to have more control. I also wanted to work in a way that enabled editing, shaping and folding of concepts. I use performance in almost every aspect of my sculpture and drawing. It is always there. I will answer more on this later. It’s a very complicated issue. There is a lot we take for granted about performance that, when destabilized, becomes a really rich terrain for investigation. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy New Year bloglings! So the big news is ToD HQ has set sail once again, and is now stationed in Saint John, New Brunswick, where I’m the new Arts and Culture editor at the Telegraph-Journal. So the first two weeks of ToD will be slow as Rogers dilly-dallies about getting my internet set up. In the meantime check out these awesome shows! Scott Rogers is up to his old antics with Wireframe in Calgary; Nicolas Baier kicks some ass at Galerie Rene Blouin in Montreal; Shawn Shepherd presents RETINAL NEXUS in Toronto; and Bradley Harms shells out New Canadian Fiction in Toronto. Enjoy!
-Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
Kristiina Lahde's "Burning City," 2009.
Given my new post in the newspaper industry, it’s funny that Kristiina Lahde be my first interview of 2010. The Toronto-based artist’s latest series, Double Take is a series of collages made from newspapers. Using a range of effects, Lahde slices and dices newspapers like a disgruntled copy editor. The end result is kaleidoscopic magic.
ToD: Are you a media hound, or is this a project you approached from the outside?
KL: A few years ago I started to notice that headlines would catch my eye as I passed by the newsstand. I wasn’t actually looking out for headlines but I was compelled to look. I found the experience random and invasive. I wondered what kind of effect this was having on me.
