Bah Humbug, dear bloglings! This is the last issue until the new year, so here’s lots of events to keep you occupied. You absolutely must check out ToD friend, writer and early supporter Stacy Ho in Misinformed Informants in Toronto.Rob Kovitz brings his epic Ice Fishing in Gimili (a novel) home to Winnipeg. Ed Pien continues to wow (and in watercolour!) in Fluid Boundries in Montreal. Jean-Pierre Gauthier heads to Halifax with Machines at Play. Vancouver weathermen be on alert for Reece Terris‘ Another False Front. It’s the season of Heaven and Hell in London, Ont curtesy of Aidan Urquhart. And Valerie Blass and Tricia Middleton each have Nothing to Declare in Toronto. Enjoy!
By Mike Landry
Catherine Bolduc's "Paysage de perles."
I’m on the phone with Catherine Bolduc discussing “The Real” when the renowned installation artist gets a beep.
“Oh, just a second, I have someone on the other line,” she says, disappearing for 15 seconds. “It was my mom. What were we talking about? Reality? Yeah, my mom—that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
For years the Montreal based artist has created installations that explore “the real” through the discrepancies between our desires and reality. But Bolduc’s latest exhibition, Le voyage d’une fabulatrice, turns to drawing to invent all new, fantastic realities. Read the rest of this entry »
By Ola Wlusek
A detail from Never Lopez' photograph "15 octobre 1812, London, Ontario."
The tragic fact is Never Lopez and I didn’t successfully communicate regarding his latest body of work. We played the classic game of phone tag. Yet, I couldn’t resist considering his upcoming project regardless of the lack of the artist’s own input.
In a brief paragraph emailed to me in an obvious haste, induced by his preoccupation with installing his photographs, Never reveals his attraction to political fiction—an integral part to the aftermath of any historical event. How else would Never approach the subject of the war of 1812 aesthetically, if not through play and make-belief?
“This ‘reenactors’ project is part of a broader research about simulation, aggressiveness, conflict zones, anachronism, fiction, etc. I’m not particularly interested by the war of 1812. I didn’t research a lot about the possible links between contemporary art and the hobby of reenactment, etc. As I said, for the moment I’m not in a speculative mood, I’m just showing things, simple as that.” Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
Melanie MacDonald's painting, "Do Not Pass Go."
Everyone seems to have a Monopoly story. More often than not it has to do with the game board ending a mess, and without a clear winner. There’s a certain torture with every game. And after painting clean and organized images of Monopoly, St. Catherine’s painter Melanie MacDonald is focusing on this more sinister aspect of the classic game. I caught up with the artist via email. Enjoy!
ToD: From the exhibition’s title Do Not Pass Go, I guess we can expect to see more of your board game paintings, what else will make up the show?
MM: The show is a dozen paintings of Monopoly boards. They’re partly inspired by an episode in the final season of The Sopranos where a fight breaks out between Bobby and Tony during a Monopoly game. Tony ends up with Monopoly houses and hotels stuck to his face. I didn’t see this episode until after I’d started the Monopoly paintings over a year ago, but in this latest series the board’s all messed up. They’re chaotic scenes of the board in disarray, when the rules no longer apply.
By Mike Landry
One of Anne-Marie Sirois' iron sculptures, "fer drainé."
A bird’s nest, doll house, bureau and jack-o’-lantern—sounds like the beginning of a Carnac routine. The punch line? These are all things Anne-Marie Sirois has made from household irons.
The Moncton-based artist has been working with irons since 1995. Her exhibition Sculpture de fer collects more than 30 of her creations along with about a dozen other “new, amazing, surprising stuff.”
“I always liked the form of the iron—the shape. When I was young, I think I was around four years old, I drew one of my hands skating and on its feet were irons with a skate blade. I don’t know where I got the idea. After that I would draw a lot of cowboys with irons for cowboy boots,” says Sirois. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
Dagmara Genda's drawing, "After Walton Ford (loosely)".
Dagmara Genda was living out of her studio. It was one summer during her MFA, and she was in between places for a month. Her studio was packed with all her possessions. She was depressed.
Sitting with her head against a paint-splattered studio wall, she started tracing the splotches of paint. It became a consuming project. At the end of the month, half the wall had been traced. Enthralled with this process that allowed her to break the habits of drawing, paint-splotch tracing became a part of her practice.
“A blank piece of paper is never a tabula rasa, so to speak. It’s never a blank slate. You’re always faced with your own muscle memory, habits of drawing and seeing,” says Genda. “Using the paint as a material to react to, I force myself to draw common things in new ways.” Read the rest of this entry »
Get to the chopper, dear bloglings! Our media kit is now available for download in the Support Us! page. Take a look and then check out these shows: Karilee Fuglem spins a web in Barrie with Wild History; two ToD faves, Darlene Cole and Jude Griebel, share the stage at Bau-Xi in Toronto; and map your way to Sarah Kernohan’s In_scape in Kitchener. Enjoy!
—Mike Landry
By Mike Landry
Helen Gregory's acrylic painting, "Blue Tanagers".
Housed in the gigantic, double-walled Canadian Museum of Nature storage space in Gatineau are things you can’t imagine. Neither could Newfoundland-based painter Helen Gregory.
“It’s a massive collection. It’s insane. It’s so huge there’s just so many millions of specimens it’s overwhelming,” says Gregory. “Then I went to the actual museum where everything is displayed and I found the whole thing completely uninteresting. The casts of the dinosaurs were totally boring after I saw the actual bones in the storage space just sitting on shelves.”
These natural history specimens are the inspiration behind Gregory’s Unrequited Death. Working form museum collections and her own found treasures, the series consists of colourful, gilded-scrolled, window-sized paintings of dead creatures. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
A video still from Dominic Gagnon's "RIP IN PIECES AMERICA".
This following interview is one of the most interesting I’ve had the pleasure of doing for ToD. After premiering at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Dominic Gagnon’s new video RIP IN PIECES AMERICA is coming to Winnipeg for its North American premier. A feature-length single-channel projection, RIP… is comprised of banned homemade short videos found on Youtube. I sent a few questions about the project via email to the inventor, director, installer and active performer in Switzerland. Enjoy!
ToD: For those out there that are unfamiliar with your practice, how does this project tie to your previous work?
DG: I have made about a dozen films and videos that are all very different but there is one common denominator to all: obsession. It always starts and ends with obsessions. I like to go to the end, over the end and even further than the end of my original fascination or worries. I like to document situations, save materials, archive things to a point of process collapse in extremely subjective ways. I engage really strongly with subjects almost to a point of alienation. I do not consider truth to be relevant; I like to think of my project as Science-fiction/documentary. I make fictions that become documentaries over time by being proven true. That was the case with Du moteur à Explosion (2000) when I spent a year tracking down terrorists in international airports. The film became a documentary after 9/11. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
Gail Scheuring’s “feminized” wall piece.
A fluorescent pink chair covered in fun fur and crinoline standing on a small stage of Christmas lights. It sounds like an awful line from beatnik poetry, but it’s also part of Calgary-based artist Gail Scheuring’s new installation piece, Peepshow.
Peepshow is delightfully nonsensical. It’s like walking into a Dr. Seuss illustration. But the real absurdity isn’t Scheuring’s creation; it’s the part of the brain that connects things with personalities—like whether something is feminine or masculine.
“Things like the crinoline, the fun fur and lots of the fabric are seen as very feminine things, but the idea of that is basically within our culture,” says Scheuring. “There are these ice cube trays that are fluorescent colours that people would say are feminine-looking. Why would you relate those objects to the feminine? But in our culture it’s automatic.” Read the rest of this entry »
An embarrassing, and slightly offensive, slurred best man toast to you, dear bloglings. Calling all canines (and all you lap dog lovers), ToD’s favourite art pooch Garry-Lewis James Osterberg opens his first solo show of his sculptures this week at Paul Petro in Toronto. Vitaly Medvedovsky presents new gnomes with Lock Stock and Two Smoking Trolls in Montreal. Start lining up to see Ed Pien in the group show Fibred Optics in Ottawa. Bring your Buddha to Lee Henderson’s when you have not been there, your heart is full of longing (redux) in Edmonton. Lethbridge will be home to two ToD favourites until the new year, with Tricia Middleton’s Midnight Gallery Rambles; and Mary-Anne McTrowe’s Decorate and Protect. And check out Gareth Bate’s installation/set design for Corps Intérieur in Montreal. Enjoy!
By Mike Landry
Murray Toews' "I WANT IT".
Not many artists are comfortable “wearing their underwear over their pants,” as Murray Toews puts it. Fewer still are willing to project such images on a massive IMAX screen.
As part of his 2009 artist-in-residency at Winnipeg’s Video Pool, the Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist has been presenting a series called Manufacturing Malfunction. Toews calls them “output events.” Giving himself a set number of days, Toews collides together a collection of drawings, sketches and doodles made over the period to “represent a continued, fast-paced evolution using time constraints, vague notions, and even procrastination as process methodology to generate visual ideas and narratives.” (Click here for pics from the last event).
“There are some stereotypes about art that actually sort of gnaw at me a little bit,” says Toews. “Everyone’s got their own process, but most people don’t like to show the yucky parts of it—the neurotic parts—too much. They don’t want show the failings or the fact that they use an eraser to correct a mistake.” Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
Steven White's "Grain Bin".
Steven White just finished his lunch, and is shooing students out of his classroom. He’s the art teacher at a rural Ontario school. And for his latest exhibition, The Combine Project, he’s channeled that child-like playfulness and wonderment that surrounds him.
Working with an abandoned combine harvester, White created a series of kinetic, participatory, sound sculptures. For the past five years he’s been making music boxes from gears and chains, combining his love of drums and art. His favourite piece features a grain bin as a resonating chamber housing 40 feet of metal track that carries a metal ball so it hits 25 brass bells.(listen to some sounds here)
“It creates a pretty wild sound. It’s kind of music and a big cacophony at the same time. I love them. I put that ball in that slot hundreds and hundreds of times,” says White. Read the rest of this entry »
By Mike Landry
Kim Bruce's cast beeswax "Dress Maker 1" with pins and gauze, .
Kim Bruce spent 20 years as an interior designer making environments comfortable. In a way, it’s a business of shaping identity through functionality, quality of life and aesthetics. With a designer’s touch, spaces suddenly gain personality.
Although no longer working with spaces, the Calgary-based artist is still exploring notions of identity with her encaustic and beeswax sculptures. Face the Figure combines two series, one of tiny torso figures and another of tiny heads, and delves into her concerns about body image.
“We all put on a face, so to speak, and we all have a style,” says Bruce. “From that, I’m able to look at what we personify ourselves as—who we are, what we do and how that comes out in what we wear.” Read the rest of this entry »
An over-vigorous hand wave hello, dear bloglings. Another busy week coming for our ToD darlings. Maude Léonard-Contant blooms again in Rouyn-Noranda with Nature morte: prise deux (réanimation). Patrick Lundeen spins a web with Sin Will Find You Out in Calgary. Samuel Roy-Bois presents Polarizer in Oshawa. Terrance Houle gets gritty with GIVN’R in Thunder Bay. Steve Hudak is one of the artists to be found at Toronto’s Median Contemporary Gallery group show. David Gillanders presents his work at Montreal’s Galerie Trois Points. Scott Pattinson continues his busy month with Vanished in Edmonton. And diorama darling Diana Thorneycroft is one of four artists a part of Hinterlands in Toronto. Enjoy!
—Mike Landry
