Notes from the Front: AGO, upArt at the Gladstone

On account of all the bluster happening between the Toronto International Art Fair, Nuit Blanche, and who knows what else, this particular steeltown girl (and her little blog too) is reporting live from a Toronto hotel room, where the internet is dubiously sourced and the decor is non-offensively bland. Hurrah for art!

My primary purpose in spending the weekend in Toronto is to pitch in at the art fair as a representative of Map Magazine, but I’ve thus far only had a cursory browse of the fair - it’s really a great deal like last year’s affair - before being whisked off for a dealer’s to-do at the AGO. Frankly, I had no idea said event was taking place until about twenty minutes before Alice and I hightailed it for the AGO and were promptly whisked through coat check, elevator, wine trays and canapes to await a tour of the vaults. This highly choreographed ritual was staged in the old Henry Moore gallery (seemingly untouched by Frank Gehry’s renovation), surrounded by plastic-wrapped Moores and non-descript crates. As was later revealed, it turns out those crates contained the components of David Altmejd’s The Index, and as much as I’m a total Altmejd fangirl, I couldn’t avoid rolling my eyes at the ripple of awestruck ‘ooooohs’ that sounded through the room at that announcement. Sorry, folks, but crates are crates - give me a crowbar, and I’ll show you something to get excited about.

Failing that, however, there was plenty of exciting installation art not being shown in crates over at the Gladstone Hotel’s upArt Contemporary Art Fair. Mind you, there were also rooms where the work had nary a whiff of the site-specific about it, but those disappointments were rapidly overshadowed by some of the utterly fantastic things happening elsewhere on the second floor. The above work by Francois Morelli (represented by Montreal’s Galerie Joyce Yahouda) was an early favourite of mine for the evening, its domestic clutter undercut by something of the home-away-from-home in keeping with the spirit of the hotel room setting.

I have wildly fond memories of idling away much of last year’s TIAF in the company of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s The Kingdom of the Emaciated Albino Companion Animals, humming along to their oft-cited Songs of Praise, and their installation at the Gladstone is entirely consistent with their previous work, and perhaps is rather improved by the benefit of a smaller space, the close walls and cluster of video projections creating the sort of intimacy reminiscent of a woodland clearing, open but with the woods looming at one’s back. I’m not sure I fully grasp why this effort required the intercession of three curators to the two artists involved, but there’s no denying that it’s a good installation all the same.

My innate Hamiltonian was pleased to see that TH&B Collective boasted one of the more transformative installations of the evening, based around a relatively simple utility pole. The pervasive element of white noise in the work in combination with the swarm-like profusion of burrs covering the central totem of the installation evokes a sense of prickling paranoia with remarkable deftness. There’s something earthy in the marriage of raw wood and burrs, but the electronic buzz and threat of heavy steel cables complicate the work and charges the room with an indefinable sense of danger.

It was TH&B artist Ivan Jurakic’s glowing recommendation that sent me immediately from that room to Catherine Lane’s drawing-based installation, which definitely proved a significant highlight of upArt through her manipulations of both two and three-dimensional drawing surfaces, creating relationships between her cut-out drawn objects that tease between varying levels of realism and play. Lane is also remarkably adept at scaling these visions from something large enough to physically engage the viewer to representations closer to our traditional experience of drawing, right down to the truly minute and fantastic, like this wonderful vignette of a wolf jumping over a drop of blood.

UpLane(drop).jpg

Coming up next: Nuit Blanche, and black coffee by the gallon.

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