This isn’t to say I haven’t been reading at all - that’s a habit I couldn’t break if I tried - but there’s a world of difference between skimming articles on the fly and taking time to engage with words and their ideas to the extent that it leads to another string of words and ideas. This blog started from an impulse to look continuously outward and not remain confined to the limits of my own studio or headspace so it feels good to come back into this on the wave of another writer’s words rather than the necessity of promoting another of my exhibitions (of which there have been several of late). Especially when the topic at hand is tied so closely to how artists present themselves through language.

Textility at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, curated by Mary Birmingham and Joanne Mattera. In the words of the latter, ‘No “fiber art” here. The medium is fiber, the result is art.’ (Source: Joanna Mattera Art Blog)

While catching up on that lamentable backlog of RSS feeds over coffee one rare early morning, my casual enjoyment of Joanna Mattera’s wonderful Marketing Mondays (I’ve said it before but seriously, a great resource for the emerging artist) was snapped into a more introspective vein by a March post on how artists hinder themselves through acceptance of too-easy categories for their practices. She speaks more specifically from her personal experience as both an artist known best for encaustic painting and the curator of a recent exhibition of artists responding to textiles, but these labels extend to even wider and far more problematic places as gender and race:

“I’m not for a moment suggesting we deny our sex or race or the medium we work with. And I’m not suggesting we never participate in exhibitions or events in which a particular element of our identity is a unifying theme; indeed, the embrace of a community can be nurturing and safe. But a community can be as constrictive as it is supportive.”

The thing that struck the loudest note for me in that statement, strangely enough, was that use of “safe.” While perhaps meant here as a positive, “safe” can also be a death knell for the artist looking to create a distinctive voice for themselves; from art school crits to gallery conversation, “safe” is shorthand for roads untravelled, risk thrown aside for what is easy and trite.

Stephanie Vegh, A Child in Your Hands, 2008. Included in con.text at Cre8ery, Winnipeg.

I flinched against that word when it was flung at my work during my own crit days, but nor have I been steadfast in my resistance to the group exhibition that thrives on labels. As an emerging artist, such shows have been the foundation of my CV and it may have been easy to become known as a “text artist” when I participated in two separate shows about the use of text in art in the early days of my career. Those two shows could have been the first stitches in one hell of a straitjacket, if I hadn’t turned around and also taken up an open call for artists interested in animals at the same time.

Stephanie Vegh, The Plagues, 2009, installation view. Included in Mis[place]d: Animals Lost and Found at XPACE, Toronto.

The works I included in Mis[place]d: Animals Lost and Found could have easily been pulled into another “text artist” show, drawn as they are on found book pages. By taking on a different category entirely, one that isn’t necessarily consistent with my wider practice, I felt I had slipped away from that safe place and found another area to explore that has since fed a more satisfying direction in the studio.

Later in the comments to her post, Joanne Mattera adds, “We have to start somewhere. But how we self define can explicate our world or narrow it.” The labels applied to artists, their themes and their works can create limitations, but can also offer possibilities for exploration if harnessed as challenges. Far from being necessarily safe, they can represent new territories to explore. At present, my reputation as a “text artist” has been called out to contribute to a group exhibition with the Brontë sisters as its theme; it’s a natural transition in itself, but one that demands new research and most likely a new method of working to create an artistic response worthy of the topic. The sense of not-knowing at this stage is terrifying in its way, but it also feels good, productive.

I say this as a reminder to myself as much as to any reader - the best way to escape a ghetto of words (or worse, of a single word) is to claim language as a part of creativity, to speak in multiple tongues against a tide of simple definition and to play freely among categories.

All the more reason, then, to keep writing.

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Simon Frank, View (from the escarpment) (detail), 2012, log-marking hammer on drywall (photo: Mike Lalich)

A challenge of writing for Akimblog, one that I think has revealed its hand in this round of exhibitions, is that deadlines and gallery schedules do not always coincide in my favour. The pace of blogging demands the currency of shows that are still open to curious readers and there were many shows closing the same weekend as my deadline that would have left said readers disappointed. This creates a limited field of conversation points but also opens opportunities to discuss projects that would otherwise go unacknowledged in a broad sweep of the city. For example, you won’t see William Kurelek or Emily Carr in my look-in at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, but rather the unfolding of a single work in Simon Frank’s View (from the escarpment).

Installation view of 125 & 45: An Interrogative Spirit at the McMaster Museum of Art

Comparatively, the other two shows available for discussion demand a wider sweep of the eye across group exhibitions strung together by relatively loose histories. At the McMaster Museum of Art in particular, the two-gallery installation of 125 & 45: An Interrogative Spirit spans the count of years referenced in its title with no particular adherence to style or subject matter save that spun into selective being by a particular art critic’s studied whim. Some of the works from Mac’s permanent collection are almost too iconic to bear further discussion but the experience of that cumulative legacy enlivens the familiar images. I just wish some greater curatorial kindness had been paid to Elisabeth Frink’s Mirage Bird, the “enchantingly awkward ducking” I mention in the Akimblog review and just visible behind the freestanding wall in the above installation view.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Snjóflóð/Réttir (Avalanche/Corral), 2012, mixed plastic and polypropylene installation (photo: KJ Bedford)

There are a good many more threads to tie together at TH&B2, and a flicker of nostalgia knowing that the previous TH&B in 2008 was among the shows reviewed in my first outing with Akimblog (curiously, completely forgotten, that review also included a glance at Tony Scherman via an AGH group show, much as he is highlighted at Mac in this most recent review). Though there’s a strong core of recurring artists between these two exhibitions, there are plenty enough differences as well that I feel I am still processing their separate significances. Perhaps the closing party for TH&B2 on May 12 will help me scratch the surface those tantalizing inches deeper.

While less than two weeks remain of TH&B, 125 & 45: An Interrogative Spirit continues until May 12 (Levy Gallery) and August 4 (Tomlinson Gallery). Simon Frank’s View (from the escarpment) continues until September 3.

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Well, I say new but Revisions is more in the character of a retrospective of the years that have passed since I was assembling my degree show out at Glasgow’s Tramway. When the amazing Barbara Milne extended an invitation to install a show in her second-floor gallery at The Pearl Company, I was faced with limited notice and little time to produce new work (did I mention those moves?). This instead became an opportunity to reflect back on a sometimes haphazard creative practice that has solidified its own themes in the years I’ve spent making and thinking and working in Hamilton.

Given that they preoccupied two of those five years, Revisions includes a strong representation of bees - not only those initially produced for my 2010 exhibition at the Leeds College of Art and Design, but a selection of the hand-cut drawings that appeared in my installation at the Gladstone Hotel’s upArt Contemporary Art Fair last fall. My emphasis on these works allowed me to draw attention to the instinct towards swarming multiples that I brought back from Glasgow, as represented in the earliest works included in this show.

You Take My Breath Away (above) is a series developed from the aforementioned degree show when I was seeking a concise expression within a larger body of work depicting the love affair between a mermaid and a Russian cosmonaut. These birds, plucked out of upholstery fabric by a gesso editing job and aided in their breathing with worm-like oxygen tubes, were initially a simple analogue to my romantic cosmonaut; the further twenty-one versions I produced during my residency at Repton eventually shifted towards a more open meaning and took on the quality of a swarm.

By the time I was back in Canada and at work on The Plagues, I was better able to concentrate those repetitive energies into a sensibility that mimics the multiplicity of a book’s pages, the itching of a swarm of rats. It was a lesson that served me well when my attentions turned to Colony Collapse Disorder in the following year and I only wish they had been included in this show - unfortunately, they got missed in the move from one home and studio to the other.

The opening reception for Revisions is Thursday, April 12 starting at 7pm; the exhibition continues until May 28.

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Left: Anders Zorn, Omnibus, 1892.
Right: Patti Smith, Ghent Altarpiece (The Backside of the Mystical Lamb), Ghent, Belgium, 2005. © Patti Smith. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery

Secret sculpture in the public realm: The BBC reports on a series of ten meticulous book-based sculptures that have been left in various Edinburgh museums over recent months by an unknown artist. From a dragon hatching in a nest to a dark Jekyll and Hyde tableau, these are beautiful gestures mindful of their medium, striking even closer to their fairy tale origins through the generous anonymity of these works as gifts set loose in public space to be discovered by chance.

Patti Smith: Camera Solo: Patti Smith’s first U.S. solo exhibition has been ongoing at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut since October. For those of us unlikely to make it over there before the show wraps next month, however, the dedicated website complete with image gallery is a thoughtful alternative.

Anders Zorn: I love the moment when a not-terribly-obscure historical artist has the capacity to surprise me. This time, it’s Swedish painter Anders Zorn on the occasion of an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. As Sharon Butler points out in her overview of the artist, there are elements in Zorn’s work much like John Singer Sargent, but there’s also something stark, more prescient of modernity’s advance, that really grips me in these paintings.

A Shattering Slow Motion: This could be saying something about the general condition of the art world, but I have seen my share of contemporary art that takes a shattered beer bottle as its subject (Simon Starling’s early work Plecnik, Union (2000) comes to mind) yet few of those works match the cyclical wonder of Jonathan Schipper’s Measuring Angst - and hell, I’m just going off the video documentation here. Using robotics and computer programming, Schipper’s beer bottle endures a 12 minute loop of being slowly hurtled across space
and exploding against a wall before the robotic arms pull the bottle back to its beginning. A beautiful work well worth watching.

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Dave Hind, Aluminum, Quilting and Society, recycled aluminum siding (photo: Stephanie Vegh)

Also included this month are two of the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s new exhibitions for 2012. Both Mark Lewis and Kristin Bjornerud didn’t open until the same day as my Akimblog deadline so I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude to Melissa Bennett and Steve Denyes at the AGH for arranging a cheeky preview while installation was still in progress.

Kristin Bjornerud, When you look at the night sky, what do you see?, 2009, Watercolour and gouache on paper (photo: Mike Lalich)

I should probably also thank Melissa twice for tolerating my giddy exuberance over Kristin Bjornerud’s Safe Harbour in particular, though I’m pretty sure she fully understood my reaction. In case the Akimblog post didn’t make this obvious, I was utterly blown away by her drawings; the tight miniaturist precision is impressive enough, but to see it employed with such smart restraint is something else entirely. This is one that will definitely be worth a second (and third… fourth?) visit once the Kurulek show is up and running at the end of the month - it’s the sort of show that appeals to my inner technician and has me itching to get back to the studio even after last month’s hand-breaking marathon. If only I weren’t vacating my studio at the end of this month… but that’s another matter entirely.

From the Ground Up at b Contemporary continues until January 28.

Jeff Nye, Abandon, by the Old Dirt Road continues until February 4.

Aluminum Quilting Bee at the Mulberry continues until… well, I’m pretty sure it’s the end of the month.

Mark Lewis & Kristin Bjornerud continue at the AGH until May 21.

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Illumination (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The official version:

Stephanie Vegh
The Fisher King & Other Mythologies
January 5-31, 2012
Gallery on 4, Hamilton Public Library

Vegh’s book-based drawings respond to the peculiarities of illustrated histories, creating a tension between the book’s status as inalienable fact and the reader’s imagination. In a new series of drawings, scenes of medieval Europe conspire with displaced marine life to evoke the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King and that story’s condemnation of the knight Perceval’s failure to ask questions of the marvels he beheld there.

Mont-Saint-Michel: The Soaring Spirit of an Era (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The story of the Fisher King has much to offer within the wider concerns that have attracted me to the most overlooked elements of civilizations under threat, from the rats of The Plagues to the vanishing honeybees of our own time. When the fledgling knight Perceval arrives at the castle of the Fisher King, he finds an ailing realm ruled by a crippled king whose sole pleasure comes of fishing the river nearby. The Fisher King can be cured, but only if one arrives with a willingness to inquire into the strange ritual that takes place in the castle every evening - the procession of a bowl and a ceaselessly bleeding lance, relics of the crucifixion. Perceval, while deeply curious, refuses to question the meaning of the ritual for fear of appearing foolish; the Fisher King’s suffering, therefore, continues unrelieved by the critical inquiry that might have saved him and him kingdom both.

Deliberations in the Chapter Hall (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

From a technical standpoint, The Fisher King presented unique challenges apart from those of Age of Enlightenment (excerpts of which are also included in this installation). It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve now drawn hundreds of honeybees - variations in form aside, inserting them into the printed fabric of a book page was eased by practice. The Fisher King tackles a wider diversity of aquatic life (I’d simply say “fish” if it weren’t for that beached whale) even more alien than bees. This also represented my first foray into manipulating greyscale images - while they lend a sombre mood to the medieval character of the series compared to the lavish colours of Age of Enlightenment, the palette is also staunchly unforgiving of error. Where erasing into the book page was previously a technique to establish the drawing’s footprint, in works such as Deliberations in the Chapter Hall, the majority of the drawing is done by erasure with limited use of black pencil to define forms - more than ever, the slim margin for error in these works is laid bare.

A World Under Siege by Demons and Tempters (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The Fisher King & Other Mythologies continues at Gallery on 4 until January 31 - please refer to the Hamilton Public Library’s website for their exceptionally generous opening hours.

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Case in point: the opening reception for Named Spaces, a group exhibition at Earls Court Gallery in which my work is included, took place nearly two weeks ago and I’m only getting around to mentioning it now - note to any student readers, this is not how it’s done. But the show is running until January 7th so anyone with an interest in certain of my bee-focused works might want to have a look.

More importantly, I found myself in excellent company with an unexpected array of works that loosely take the lived environment as their theme. Both Bill Schwarz and Brian Harvey take on the modest underside of built dwellings with a rich density of colour - the blue depths of Harvey’s shadows are also Yves Klein-ish in their intensity - while Randy Hryhorczuk enters more nebulous territory with abstract horizons that were among my favourite works. I was also drawn to the meticulous whimsy of Michelle Purchases’s intimate etchings of tree houses, and beyond impressed by the two fine craft artists who rounded out the exhibition. Christopher Reid Flock’s non-functional raku teapots push the limits of the medium with the appearance of a seductively crumbling beauty that is echoed in the visual disintegration and distressed copper of Silvia Taylor’s glass pieces. The interactions between the works selected by Earls Court curator Andrea Skelly are subtle but undeniably present, leaving a lot of room for personal exploration and interpretation.

Detail from Mont-Saint-Michel: The Soaring Spirit of an Era, 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

A few days before Named Spaces wraps up, I will also be installing a solo project at Gallery on 4 for the month of January. The Fisher King will premiere a new series of book-based drawings that take a departure from honeybee extinction and instead insert forms of aquatic life into scenes of medieval Europe. The themes that have evolved from this project - sustainability of life, the tension between blind faith and critical questioning - bear a relationship to my last body of work on Colony Collapse Disorder, but drawing something apart from bees already feels like a refreshing change of pace.

And once that last show is done and dusted, I look forward to enjoying a somewhat manageable workload where studio research can unfold at a more gradual pace - months in which to digest the Bronte sisters is exactly what’s in order. Who knows, I might even have time to blog in 2012 - hope does prevail.

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As you’ll note by the exhibition dates - upArt closes tomorrow on Sunday October 30 - I’m doing this whole self-promotion thing wrong by not having shared this sooner. But in the likely event that you aren’t able to make it to Toronto at such short notice, I’d like to share a few views and thoughts on A Vanishing of Bees, my installation of new and existing works in Room 205.

The first thing you’ll note is that, content aside, the title is a bit of a misnomer as there isn’t so much a vanishing of bees as an insane profusion thereof.

Stephanie Vegh, Rapture, 2011. Water-soluble pencil on paper, 150 x 340 cm.

I’m starting with the work that reveals itself last when entering the space, but Rapture is the focal point of the installation and a work that takes my previous bee drawings to a larger scale that gets that much closer to the apocalyptic dimensions to which I had been aspiring. The creases of opened books that were made more literal in the earlier stages of this series are more ambiguous now that they tilt on a diagonal axis away from the horizon of the implied Earth. Furthermore, the larger scale of the drawing allows for the bees themselves to swell to greater monstrosity with the addition of two massive bees; they’re slightly smaller than my dog, but not by much.

In-progress detail of Rapture, 2011.

Of course, jumping to this scale also pushed the limits of my media of choice for these works. I’ve been a loyal adherent to Staedtler’s water-soluble pencils and have long found their combined depth of colour and softness of touch are well suited to rendering bees. When taken to a larger scale, however, the labour intensifies with the greater quantity and variety of marks needed to describe more detail.

I tend to run through the pencils quickly enough at the best of times. But Rapture pushed my supplies to the limit, especially at a time when my local art supplier stopped carrying open stock in this line of pencils (only years of thankless retail work kept me from losing my shit in the store - I could tell those young artists/retail slaves were just as annoyed by that Head Office decision as I was). As I worked away with what could have been the last fresh Karat Aquarell 175-76 I would have in hand for who knows how long (until I find a new pusher supplier, at least), I was suddenly grateful for my weird, hoarding side that had kept the stubs of all my previous pencils - those extra millimetres of buttery, water-soluble goodness were a lifesaver.

Those scarce pencils were also applied to the creation of further bees on a more familiar scale that also allowed me to take a further step beyond the barriers of the traditional framed drawing. Applied to the walls of the room to imply a swarming retreat, they complete the movement implied in Rapture and activate the otherwise neutral space occupied by both the viewer and the work.

I’ve also been enjoying these individual bees as objects that create a tension between the illusionistic treatment of the drawing and the paper-thin fragility that gives the game away. The work of hand-drawing each bee limited my capacity to create as many as I’d have liked - otherwise, the installation would have likely featured piles such as these in addition to those placed on the wall. I might well need to think about a return to printmaking (haven’t been there since undergrad) if this series is going to grow past what’s been done here for upArt.

As said earlier, upArt is open for viewing until Sunday October 30 at 5pm, and features a curator’s talk on that final day (i.e. tomorrow) at 2pm.

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Takashi Murakami as action figure by Mike Leavitt (Source: artinfo.com)

Are critics the best thing for art since artists?: I think the reason I keep reading Jonathan Jones at the Guardian is precisely because of his ability to have me both humming happily in agreement and grinding my teeth at his uniquely English elitism. In this case, I can get behind Jones’ belief that the critic is uniquely able to speak to art’s value through the joining of academic knowledge, experience and opinion, but claiming that “critics are the only real art writers” is a statement that was clearly designed solely to raise my ire. “We are the only ones,” he continues, “who acknowledge, as a basic principle, that art is an unstable category – it lives or dies according to rules that cannot ever be systematised.” The only ones, really? Surely there are many artists who possess that same knowledge, critical context and if anything, a more direct experience of art’s instability - one need only read the writings of Rothko or Richter to see how artists can also be “real art writers.”

Solidarity against Sotheby’s: As Sotheby’s continues to employ untrained workers to carry on its auctions despite the striking professional art handlers outside their doors, the cause is given support inside the auction from Occupy Wall Street protesters. It’s easy to see the commonality behind these causes as protesters stand up during five and six-figure auctions to call out the facts of Sotheby’s reprehensible move to strip its workers of job security and health benefits in the wake of $680 million profits and a 125% raise to their CEO. The video footage embedded at the Hyperallergic post is fascinating, not only for the orderly actions of the protesters as they are swiftly escorted out one by one but also for the unnerving lack of visible response in the auction’s audience.

Money, its myths and meanings: Toronto art critic Leah Sandals was asked to contribute to Instant Coffee’s current edition of Good News with a response to the question, “Do you believe money has succeeded in devaluing art?” Money and art are often entangled in thoughts about art, but Sandals brings a refreshingly honest response to the table by delicately dismantling the power infused into the concept of money and pointing out the obvious fact that the majority of artists practicing today don’t have the luxury of sufficient money for it to have any impact on their work. Another triumph of the common sense of the 99 percent over the preoccupations of the slim minority, if you ask me.

Money doesn’t devalue art, stupid commercials do: I don’t watch television often enough to have seen this insipid, insidious Marshall’s commercial as often as I have. But that 30-second spot of vacuous women dismissing “modern art” in favour of handbags has been spoiling my Coronation Street viewing this past week and turns out I’m not the only one seething at the anti-art, anti-intellectual message at work (and it’s not just artists who are annoyed). Ed Winkleman explains the ugly ideas at work in this ad far better than my snarling disdain ever could, not just once but twice.

Hilariously, the same commercial just ran on the CBC during the Corrie rewatch while I’m pulling together this post and Marshall’s must have heard some of this outrage because the script is totally changed now. Rock on, blogosphere.

Saturday morning cartoon and breakfast cereal not included… yet: To shift gears to a far more fun-tastic commodification of art, Mike Leavitt has designed a line of contemporary art star action figures. Naturally, some of them are gross-out creepy (Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close) but others are primed for a comic book (Claes Oldenberg) and the Kara Walker figure is simply amazing.

8-bit Abramovic: It might be one departure too far off the primary theme here, but without having made it to MoMA myself, going to see Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present via an 8-bit video game is the next best thing. Note that the game will only let you enter MoMA during its opening hours in real time, but once you do you can reap the rewards of 8-bit renditions of the permanent collection and, of course, the unmoving line of spectators waiting to engage in a staring contest with Marina (spoiler alert: the line never moves).

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The most recent issue of C Magazine looks an absolute treat to my love of printed matter with its thematic focus on libraries. While taking the time to enjoy the in-depth articles on the Whole Earth Catalog and Dexter Sinister, I would also not-so-humbly recommend a read of my review of The Birds and the Bees, an outstanding group exhibition curated by Marnie Fleming at Oakville Galleries’ Gairloch Gardens.

Aganetha Dyck, The Promise and The Whisper. From the Masked Ball Series. Beework on figurine, both 2008.

Anyone who is even passingly familiar with my studio research and work in recent times will understand exactly why I latched onto this show as a subject of review. There are gorgeous works on the ever-admirable works of bees, not least of which are excerpts from Aganetha Dyck’s Masked Ball Series of figurines. To paraphrase myself in the review, this exhibition would have been unthinkable without her.

Kristiina Lahde, Hive. Altered telephone books, 2009/2011 (Source: www.kristiinalahde.com)

The greater strength in The Birds and the Bees is in Fleming’s knack for bringing well-known names like Dyck and Liz Magor together with artists whose works were rather new to me. Kristiina’s Lahde’s Hive was a strikingly concise addition to the conversation, and I even warmed to art that was all birds and no bees, such as Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s entrancing filmed footage of a habitat for zebra finches with electric guitars installed at London’s Barbican Art Centre.

My review, in preview of its first two paragraphs:

Nested amid manicured grounds on one of Lake Ontario’s more pristine shorelines, Oakville Galleries’ Gairloch Gardens is an artificial adaptation that has forged a garden from what was once a wild shore and a gallery from what was once a home. Groundskeepers clad in an unnatural shade of orange keep the grass trimmed to orderly precision alongside Canadian geese grazing beyond the former mansion’s walls; these iconic birds are unperturbed by the roar of leaf blowers and the curiosity of tourists, as placidly domesticated as the grass they eat.

Gairloch Gardens’ tamed wilderness provides an inescapable context for The Birds and the Bees, a group exhibition curated by Marnie Fleming that rapidly wings itself away from the naïve courtships implied by such a title. With so many gallery windows offering views of those carefully kept gardens, the exhibition invites that element inside as part of a sometimes delicate, but more often strictly human negotiation for space alongside the birds and bees that also seek a home on this tenuous planet.

Pick up an issue of C Magazine 111 to read the rest.

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