(Source: Neon Monster)

Jeff Koons Freaky-Monkey CT Scanner: While I’ve got to applaud the concept of making hospital visits less frightening for children, I wonder if the inescapable unpleasantness of being inside that thing is just going to make children fear those monkeys like the guardians of some all-consuming Moloch.

Do Artists Need PhDs? (via Art21): The title is a bit misleading as the conversation with George Smith, founder of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, is aiming less at a universal standard and more towards the specialized notion of the “artist-philosopher.” Still, it adds another interesting piece to the wider debate around the Visual Art PhD.

Dave Hickey on the Evils of Creationism (via Art Fag City): This runs over an hour so you’ll want to make a cup of tea before settling in, but Dave Hickey’s sidelong insights are always worth the ride, especially with religious dogma on the menu.

Why Stephen Harper Will Continue to Attack the Arts: This one has already been making the rounds but extra circulation of Michael Wheeler’s assessment of Conservative tendencies towards fear-driven tactics over rational debate deserves as wide an audience as possible. As an added bonus, the article opens with a sickening photo shoot of Harper with Chad Kroeger of Nickelback; all it needs is Celine Dion to complete the Axis of Canadian Cultural Evil.

Share This

What makes these shoes even more conspicuous is that, not two days ago, I spotted another pair of shoes: again, used but precisely placed as a pair alongside a post on Vine Street, which is across the street and perhaps eight metres further west of this location.

That first pair of shoes - classic Doc Marten’s, laces removed if memory serves - felt like a simple urban aberration. A second pair placed in the same configuration, paired at the base of a strong vertical structure, is starting to look less like coincidence and - dare I say it - more like an act of art. The fact that both pairs are representative of consumer taste at the pricier end of the spectrum hasn’t escaped my notice either, if only because I’ve spent far too many years working in shoe retail.

While two may be more than coincidence, it might still take a third or fourth pair before I become truly paranoid. For now, I’m merely curious.

Share This

Einstein’s Bees #2 (detail), 2010.

In addition to these established milestones on the immediate calendar, this month marks the beginning of a new effort to create a more regular schedule of content that will, hopefully, resolve itself into something better resembling a structured editorial approach rather than, say, the erratic reflection of my frequently divided attentions. While September will be an abbreviated trial run of this method, a few core features will gradually settle into place in the weeks to come:

Friday Links: A short run-down of my week’s travels elsewhere in the blogosphere - and just plain elsewhere - will be consolidated in a regular Friday post starting this week.

James North Art Crawl: My coverage of Hamilton’s art crawl will resume this month, with the best intention of ensuring that the post goes live on the following Monday.

In-depth Exhibition Reviews: Last May I investigated Dave Dyment’s Between the Click of the Light and the Start of the Dream at MKG 127 across a week’s series of three posts, which allowed a more thoughtful, prolonged engagement than what is normally possible in a blog format. In the interests of proving that this degree of engagement is not only possible but also a good thing, I will be producing a three-part series of posts every month dedicated to a solo exhibition by a contemporary artist.

Monthly Book Feature: I own a lot of books, certainly more than I can afford. And while I’ve very occasionally mentioned a relevant volume or two on this blog, I’ve otherwise been neglecting to share the many art books I’ve collected over the years. While the contents of these shelves and others may not be quite as impressive as Bill Clarke’s various beauties guest-featured on VoCA, I certainly have enough material on hand to share an interesting nugget once a month.

In addition to the above, you can expect the usual mix of exhibition reviews and critical dialogue on an ongoing basis while I work these and other new features into place. I’ve got a few more ideas chugging around in the background, and would certainly be happy to hear any of your own suggestions for new content in the comments or by email.

Share This

More accurately speaking, this is not so much a break as an opportunity to reflect on the purpose and format of this blog and, more importantly for the present, to resolve a new body of work for my solo exhibition at the Leeds College of Art this fall. August is a notoriously quiet month on the art calendar and I hope to take full advantage of the relative calm and keep my head down. I don’t feel I can promise complete radio silence - the jury’s still out on whether I’ll attempt to cover August’s Art Crawl anyway - but I’m certainly going to try my best to draw, draw, think, draw, walk that puppy, draw and very little else.

Depending on how that plan goes, I’ll be back online in September. Enjoy the rest of your summer, folks.

Share This

Brendan Fernandes, Neo-Primitivism II, 2007, deer decoy, plastic African masks, vinyl (courtesy Diaz Contemporary; photo: Mike Lalich)

Besides his commentary on Hamilton, click here to read his reviews of Teri Donovan at Hamilton Artists Inc., Michel Proulx at You Me Gallery, and Brendan Fernandes at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The latter receives lamentably short shrift from Vaughn, but his positive response to the two James Street North exhibitions is highly validating for the ground-level efforts of Hamilton’s local artist-run culture.

Share This

Thankfully, the program has since been saved from the chopping block in a second defeated motion at the university’s Senate, though this doesn’t remove the need to educate the wider community on the value of Art History as an academic discipline that speaks uniquely to human society and progress and continues to inform art-making practices today. To this end, the Friends of Art History at McMaster are aiming to expand an appreciation for Art History to the wider public as well as support the on-going efforts of the program’s students, many of whom continue on to graduate studies in their field:

McMaster was the first university in Canada to offer Art History courses and these began in the 1930s with a Carnegie grant. As is the case for many universities today, it is not possible for budgets to sustain activities in all areas. The Friends of Art History seeks to offer support for education in the discipline and to foster Art History events for students and the community. Our goal is to promote the appreciation of Art History at McMaster and in its broader community. Donations will support the following: a visiting speaker’s series, visiting professionals who foster career development for students of Art History, and an informal program of Art History lectures for a general audience.

This is an excellent opportunity to validate all those efforts to keep Art History alive as an important instrument for dialogue in our creative community. Click here for more information about The Friends of Art History at McMaster, complete with downloadable files detailing how to join by donation starting at $10, and keep tabs on their efforts via Facebook.

Share This

Still, I was mildly covetous of the large, splashy fans hanging in Artword Artbar’s relatively cool basement gallery this month. Arcangles features a collaborative selection of painted fans and related constructions by Holly Briesmaster and Janice Jackson. The sculptural explorations of the arching formal structure of the fan are among the more interesting objects and bear a modernist concern that is reflected in the brightly blocked motifs applied to the found fans. These designs are not always painted convincingly, nor do they truly explore the dimensional qualities of the fan so playfully demonstrated in the sculptural assemblages, but the overall effect of the show remains visually pleasing.

The Factory’s one-night screening event for this month’s Crawl was Ashley Guindon’s installation A Great Mystery. Curated by Andrew Butkevicius, this ephemeral environment superimposes images and sound from three digital projectors in a virtually unreadable cycle of video, though the viewer can easily walk in front of a projector to eliminate a layer of imagery and make the others more visible. This non-linear ambiguity is rather the point of this “great mystery,” though the mundane found footage of commonplace group gatherings sourced from home movies of the artist’s church as a youth falls short of engaging the viewer in the sort of profound experience described in Butkevicius’ curatorial text.

From Butkevicius to Brad Isaacs’ curatorial work at Loose Canon, I am appreciating the increased visibility of the curator on James Street North with all the sharpened professional edge and critical writing that comes with that. Psychic Space also aims at the depths of human experience and hits closer to the mark with a refined selection of works by Katie Pretti and Amy Friend. The latter’s photographs (above) are wonderfully suggestive for all their crisp finish, pulling drowning white forms teasingly in and out of dense black waters. The amorphous shapes of these billowing Ophelias find their echo in Pretti’s grittier paintings across the gallery; despite the lighter, more forgiving palette these are infinitely darker works with references to Goya’s cannibals around the scumbled edges of bulbous shapes that imply bodies or land or the monstrous fusion of both in the wake of some uncertain disaster.

Carrying on an in-house tradition of highlighting the underknown places of Hamilton, Mixed Media is hosting an exhibition of Rafael Ferreira’s photographs documenting the considerable commercial decline of Barton Street. The romantic aura of the vintage storefronts is heightened by the metallic silver finish on many of the black-and-white prints, drawing the viewer even further backward in time into a past that is idealized for all its dereliction in the now.

Photography was out in full force on this Crawl, and most especially at The Print Studio with its annual community exhibition highlighting Studio 12, a photographic collective off-shoot from the Hamilton Camera Club founded in 2009. As an exhibition title, Four Corners most fittingly references the four corners of the world that seem to be the subject of many of the landscape-driven photographs, from Arctic glaciers to desert sand dunes - it’s content fit to make a person ache to travel. Envy aside, many of the works do achieve a visual transformation of content that exceeds mere documentation of gorgeous settings, such as the eerie flattening that occurs in Shirley Dennis’ Deadvlei Namibia (2009) or the painterly richness of Martin Renters’ Artist’s Palette (2009, above).

One might be tempted to say it’s the same naturalist routine happening down the road at You Me Gallery with Michel Proulx’s A Week at Rice Lake, but his photographs are, aesthetically speaking, of a rather different order of understanding. The volume of intense surface details combined with their presentation as grids contained within precise black outlines aligns this work with a sort of scientific survey of a chosen ecosystem unsettled by the illusion of otherworldly apparitions. The dense black edges of the pearlescent surfaces that dominate Proulx’s photo-manipulations does draw the mind disturbing close to the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s an association difficult to defend when images of oil spills sit so close to the collective unconscious these days anyway.

Next door, the James North Art Collective has compiled a summer group exhibition that offers a mix of new contributors alongside the collective’s familiar names. More Francis Ward is never a bad thing in my mind, and I did enjoy the quirky strangeness of her burbs in space (above right) and the indirect conversation it shared with Jim Mullin and Richard Mace’s Untitled #4 (above left). Great little sculptures from Doug Carter and Barb Sachs rounded out the light-hearted mood of the group, though the real strength of the show is in the sheer diversity of individually interesting works, and its fun in the effort of puzzling it all together.

Teri Donovan’s paintings in Half-Life at Hamilton Artists Inc. layer photographs of the artist’s female family members with wallpaper patterns and domestic tableaux in encaustic-rich compositions conflating personal histories and the social expectations of a given era. The creeping interference of painterly flourishes into these staid, wax-like figures complicates the polite vintage charm of the resulting paintings, though these touches are most effective in the instances where they are used sparingly and the florid wallpapers are reined back from becoming too comfortably decorative. At their most simplistic, these outdated women retain a powerful foothold in the present, demanding prolonged consideration of their place in time.

What to all appearances started out as an art student’s apartment-gallery is still going strong in the summer months, with Know Your Ghosts at 255 1/2 James Street North (through the nondescript door then all the way up the stairs) featuring a solo exhibition of drawings by Jason Lee. The many modest portraits in The Middle Ground are refreshingly direct precisely for that very modesty, which allows Lee’s deft draftsmanship to shine through in compositions that balance areas of decadent colour with brief, suggestive line. A more vulnerable, diaristic hanging of loose-leaf drawings presides over a hidden corner of the space, and features here primarily because it was the most easily photographed. If Know Your Ghosts is in this for the long run, I would implore its inhabitant-curator to invest in some decent lighting. And I do hope this space endures for a while longer yet - at the other end of the spectrum from curatorial essays, impromptu galleries in artist apartments can breathe fresh new life into an art community, and Jason Lee’s current showing there is a vital demonstration of that fact.

Share This

Since Art:21 is based in the US, I was intrigued to see today’s introduction of a new column, ‘Calling from Canada’, which “chronicles the burgeoning art scene across the border.”

Immediately, my eyes narrow on that word “burgeoning” to describe the entirety of Canada’s art. The word isn’t without its positive connotations - a quick check of my dictionary is rampant with talk of budding and blooming - but the sense of something incomplete or only-just-begun sticks unpleasantly in my teeth. Still, I can let that slide; even within Canadian art criticism there are frequent calls upon ourselves to step up our game and compete more favourably for the international spotlight. Perhaps that sort of burgeoning-as-wake-up-call is itself the point of the column. Or so I think, uncharacteristically optimistic, to myself.

Instead, CBC Radio host and fashionista Raji Sohal opens her first column with the requisite opening line on “The Great White North” followed by a broader mandate that is less an incisive instrument for critique and more a game of show-and-tell:

In my following posts in this column, I will look at exhibitions in Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver and provide an entry point to begin to talk about art in Canada and how it shapes the nation’s identity and cultural landscape. For a country that normally gets treated like the kid sister across the border, the arts are surprisingly vibrant in Canada, with many of its artistic exports doing well internationally. And this deserves some attention. Let’s start things off with Montréal.

Okay, leaving aside the “surprisingly vibrant” part of that paragraph (talk about your backhanded compliments), talking about how Canadian art shapes Canadian culture is circular to the point of nonsense. A more honest intent might simply be to draw attention to Canadian artists active in Canada for the benefit of this American context. While not exactly deep in scholarship, there’s at least a noble cause at hand. This much, I can also accept as a, let’s say, burgeoning effort.

But here’s the kicker. After a travel-guide introduction to Montréal and fleeting references to three Canadian artists represented in exhibits at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (only one of whom, David K. Ross, merits any discussion of his work), the article proceeds to devote roughly half its girth to a loving appreciation of Runa Islam’s projected film works, complete with Vimeo documentation of the installations at MAC.

Runa Islam, Be The First To See What You See As You See It, 2004.

Oh, I know exactly what you’re asking yourself. “But… isn’t Runa Islam a British artist?” Too damn right, she is! So that’s a gold star for you and no Turner Prize for Runa (though she was shortlisted in 2008, and deservedly so). And definitely no medals yet for Raji’s mission “to talk about art in Canada and how it shapes the nation’s identity and cultural landscape.” I read her rather lightweight descriptions of Islam’s work twice just in case I had missed the subtle point at which she placed the artist’s work within a Canadian cultural context, but no dice.

Unless, of course, the point is that Canada is - as my former English schoolchildren used to delight in reminding me - “the Colonies,” and British art is just about the same as Canadian anyway because we’ve got the same Queen and know how to spell properly. If that’s the case, may Elizabeth’s matching hat and handbag save us all. Or at least compel Raji Sohal to actually talk about Canadian art next time.

Note to my Hamilton readers: James North Art Crawl recap pending shortly, unexpected rant was unexpected. -SV