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Murray Whyte: Contemporary art - Feed
Find the latest news stories from Toronto Star on the topic Murray Whyte: Contemporary art. |
 Amanda Nedham at Le GalleryAmanda Nedham crafts beautiful worlds of impossible, finely wrought horror, so visceral and mesmerizing you sometimes feel like they're inside your own head. Using graphite line drawings, Nedham ushers into being an array of nightmarish visions far beyond our reality, but chillingly suggestive of a grim future. Case in point: Past shows have focused squarely on the enforced servitude of our animal companions, and projected them forward into a grisly future of manipulated genetic hybrids engineered to function, like so many broken-down machines. Her show opening Thursday at Le Gallery, called "half of less than ten" promises more of the...
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 Hey, where have I been?Fashion week, for one thing (and another), to my own surprise. But back in the swim this week with a few things: - Review of Melanie Gilligan's dry, biting work at the JMB Gallery at Hart House - A chat with Margaux Williamson at the AGO - And on Saturday, a profile of Gaetane Verna (that's her), the Power Plant's very charming, and very game new director, three-weeks fresh from her last gig in Joliette, Quebec. I, like everyone else who crosses her path, it seems, was charmed by her forthrightness, her humour and her obvious, sincere enthusiasm. Looking forward...
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 Tonight: Team Macho book launch at AGOYou've seen the drawings, played the video games, scribbled your name in chalk, so now, buy the merch: Team Macho's book, The Merlin Years, is getting itself launched to great fanfare tonight at the AGO. And it has a magical kitty on the cover. Who doesn't love that? Photo: By the uninformed courtesy of Narwhal Art Projects, from whom I stole on the expectation of them not minding.
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 Jack Chambers: Christopher Dewdney remembers, tonight at the AGOThe great, big, long-overdue Jack Chambers show at the AGO has been a quiet highlight of the museum's recent programming, re-siting the gifted London, On. painter in the main of the Canadian art conversation. Chambers' story is tragic, having died of leukemia in 1978, leaving a young family behind, but his impact on his immediate community of writers, artists and thinkers has been everlasting. One of the most eminent of that group, writer, poet and cultural theorist Christopher Dewdney, offers an intimate take on his old friend tonight at the Art Gallery of Ontario at 7 p.m., at Jackman Hall....
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 Strength Through Numbers: Laura Kikauka closing at MKG127It's not every gallerist in town that would have the chutzpah to allow an artist to transform their space into a heartfelt tribute to rummage-sale art, but that's exactly what's been going on at MKG127 this month. Walk past the windows on Ossington Avenue and you'll see Laura Kikauka's dizzyingly intense show, "Strength Through Embarassment," covering almost every inch of the gallery's walls. Tiled side-by each, Kikauka festoons the gallery with thrift-shop art finds -- lovingly amateurish landscapes, wildlife, still-life paintings -- and adds her own embellishments, in the form of hand-painted song lyrics (my favourite: A painfully orange-hued winter...
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 Kim Adams wins the 2012 Gershon Iskowitz PrizeAnd along with it, $50,000 and a solo show at his hometown institution, the Art Gallery of Ontario, which administers the prize. Let me say: Yay. I've long been a fan, and it's been way too long since a substantial show of Adams' work showed up in these parts (though no complaints about last year's Diaz show, which I loved.) The show is slated for December of this year. Given the scale at which Adams most often operates (As he once told me: "Big!") he's better get cracking. Above: Kim Adams' work at Diaz Contemporary, Nov. 2010
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 Governor General's Award winners in visual arts announcedAnd they are: Jana Sterbak, she of the infamous meat dress (way, way back in 1987; nothing else Lady Gaga does is original, how could this be any different?); Toronto recipients are photographer Geoffrey James, whose images of parks and cityscapes in Paris and his hometown, among others, have won him widespread acclaim, and abstract painter Ron Martin; Vancouver performance artist Margaret Dragu; Halifax video artist Jan Peacock; and Waterloo sculptor Royden Rabionowitch. Diana Nemiroff, the former National Gallery curator who organized Sterbak's 1991 show "States of Being" won the "outstanding contribution award, while the Saidye Bronfman Award for crafts...
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 Gerhard Richter in Toronto, in film and on canvasSpeaking of the Reel Artists festival, tonight, you can go see a film about German painting giant Gerhard Richter at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, but first, why don't you head over to the AGO to see his work in person? Culling some extraordinary works from the permanent collection, the gallery has assembled Shift, a selection of outstanding pieces from 1917 to 1971, a period, as the gallery puts it, "of great change." Change? Over 50-plus years? You don't say. However arbitrary the frame, though, the work is strong enough to leave anyone agog, as is the staging: Deep charcoal walls,...
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 The blogger is presentIt may have escaped your notice, but I've been away for the last little while. I've come back and hit the ground running, though, having had the great fortune to sit down with Marina Abramovic for about an hour this morning. The story (hurried, too hurried) will be in the paper tomorrow, but in the meantime, I have to say this is one of the best experiences I've had on the job since, well, I don't know when. I think I may be an acolyte, try as I might to resist. Abramovic has that effect, I hear. In any case,...
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 Mike Kelley is dead; likely suicideGagosian Gallery has confirmed that Mike Kelley, one of the true giants of his generation, is dead. ARTINFO is reporting it was a suicide, but this is so far unconfirmed. He was 58. It's hard to know where to begin with Kelley's ouevre, which spanned the gamut from the viscerally grotesque to the more-than-occaisionally beautiful. In reviewing his 1993 survey at the Whitney, Times critic Roberta Smith observed that Kelly's work was "eccentric, obsessive, completely uninhibited and mind-bogglingly diverse." That being the case, there's not much time or space for me to touch on it here, other than to say...
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 Everything's opening: MOCCA winter exhibtions this SaturdayMOCCA comes out of hibernation this weekend (it's been closed since the end of December) with a pair of shows: Tasman Richardson's Necropolis, an epic videodrome on the culture of death and, in maybe a necessary restoration of equilibrium, a show of landscape works in the National Gallery of Canada's pocket gallery on MOCCA premises. I don't know much about the former just yet, but the latter, called Spectral Landscape, offers an intriguing slate of counter-intuitive groupings of such artists as photographer Sarah Anne Johnson and painters Tim Gardiner and Peter Doig. One thing they have in common, of course,...
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 Stephen Andrews at Trump towerI was wandering past the not-quite-open Trump tower in downtown Toronto this afternoon when I was taken by a spectral presence in the driveway -- an oblique, flesh-toned mush of randomly-sized ceramic tile, that, when you squinted just right, looked like a giant crowd scene, as seen through a gauzy scrim. Sound familiar? I thought so too, so I went and asked the concierge, and sure enough, it was a commission by Toronto painter Stephen Andrews, for whom such indistinct crowds have recently been a favourite visual trope (though usually in paint; tile's a little more friendly to outside air,...
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 Axis Mundi: Macho speaksTo go with their presentation of Team Macho's Axis Mundi, the Art Gallery of Ontario has made this (shall we say) instructional video describing the project. Visually a little less than thrilling, keep the headphones on; MAcho-ites Lauchie Reid and Stephen Appleby-Barr elucidate nicely.
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 A parent's nightmareI love this. But also secretly fear it. Art: only marginally better than meth.
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 Forget Europe; how about me?I went to a preview screening of Yael Bartana's film trilogy "And Europe Will Be Stunned" at the AGO this morning, and was quickly made a believer in the 41-year old artist. If it's possible to delicately render an absurdist take on the Holocaust and subsequent Jewish diaspora, this would be it; Bartana crafts a naivist narrative of moral restitution through the character of a well-intended but ultimately simplistic demagogue who seems to believe that all the Jewish ghosts of Poland's fractious recent past will be exorcized if he can just convince 3 million or so Jews to repatriate and...
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 At Tomorrow tonight: McClellan/Jansen openingSorry, couldn't resist the pun: That is to say, tonight, frequent collaborators Jeremy Jansen and Niall McClelland (The Barricades, for one, which, to borrow a sports network phrase, was a highlight of the night at last year's Nuit Blanche) are opening a short, personal show of posters that look a little closer into their personal indie-cultural histories. I don't really know what that means yet, but show up tonight at Hugh Scott Douglas and co's Tomorrow Gallery and see for yourself. Or don't rush. You've got all week. Until Jan. 27.
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Back to life: Winter season in high gear, starting tonight My dance card is filling up quicky, which means we've finally shaken off the Christmas doldrums. Thank heavens. The art world is humming again, with a bunch of openings tonight and this weekend worth your while, if you're up for braving the snow. Just off the top of my head tonight is Flavio Trevisan's intriguing Museum of The Represented City at 80 Spadina. Trevisan's an urban-minded sort, as his recent show at Diaz Contemporary, "Studies of a New Past," would indicate; so too would his work curating the always eye-catching Convenience Gallery, a storefront on Landowne just norht of Queen....
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 Gene pool: Shary Boyle's Canadian Artist opens at BMO Project RoomI was one of the lucky invited few to the opening of Shary Boyle's new installation "Canadian Artist" at the Bank of Montreal's Project Room last night. I'll have more thoughts on the piece itself a little later on -- suffice to say for now that it's infused with Boyle's unflagging rigour for craft and her particular, unique brilliance for social narrative, cross-fertilized with her gift for the fantastical -- but first, I wanted to steer you over to the project's web site. Boyle said the site is not so much a supplement to the work itself, but a necessary...
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 RIP H+CProof going to cocktail parties is good for something other than the free booze (not that there's anything wrong with that): Last night, while I was at the BMO event for Shary Boyle's Canadian Artist, I bumped into Tony Romano. As you may know, Romano and partner Jay Isaac have been running Hunter + Cook, a magazine, art gallery, and general hub of interesting cultural thought, for the past few years. A month or so ago, the pair quietly decided to call it quits; as working artists, editing, adminitstrating and general management malaise was taking away too much time from...
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 Marclay's time: "The Clock" coming to the Power PlantJust heard that the Power Plant will be presenting Christian Marclay's much- celebrated 'The Clock' this coming September. It's the property of the National Gallery, which cannily bought last year it in cooperation with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They showed it first, it's in Ottawa 2nd, and given what I image to be a very long loan request list, given its exceptional profile and popularity, it's a coup for Toronto to be 3rd.
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 Opening tonight: Will Munro at AGYUI almost hesitate to mention this for the crush of people that are sure to crowd into the space already, but tonight is the opening of the much-anticipated survey of Will Munro: History, Glamour, Magic at the Art Gallery of York University. Will was a much-loved creative force in this city whose memory is still being celebrated, and full-heartedly, almost two years after his death. Tonight's opening will surely be a nexus of such things -- fond remembrances, joyful celebration, and more than a few tears. Starts tonight at 6; as with most things with Will, when and where it...
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 Kahlo/Rivera show coming to AGO in OctoberThe hits keep on coming at the AGO, which today announced that it would host a major exhibition of revolutionary Mexican painters (and lovers) Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The show, imported from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, is called, fittingly, Passion, Politics and Painting, and will feature 75 works from Mexico's Museo Dolores Olmedo. It opens Oct. 12. Right: Kahlo and Rivera in 1932.
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 Renzo Martens' natural resourcefulness: "Enjoy Poverty" to screen, followed by talk, on Monday/TuesdayFor those of you who missed the Justina M. Barnicke gallery's enthralling, more-than-occasionally troubling video-heavy show "Models for Taking Part" last fall, here's your chance to revisit what I thought was its most troubling, and most brilliant, portion: Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, a film by Dutch artist Renzo Martens that took absurd hyperbole to prove a point to a unnervingly distant extreme. (See trailer, above) Martens is in town this week to talk about the film on Tuesday, but first, on Monday, the gallery will screen Episode III, filmed in Congo. Before Martens' talk on Tuesday, it will show Episode...
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 A little sooner: Brendan Fernandes closes at Diaz with performance of Encomium this weekendFor those who aren't familiar with Brendan Fernandes' work, you need to know it's structured around a disarming array of multiplicities in his wildly hyrbid identity. An Indian-Kenyan Canadian living in New York who's also gay, Fernandes has always plied his mongrel identity in his work to uniquely potent effect, challenging assumptions and typecasts with a clever knowingness. That's in part why his current show at Diaz is a little disappointing. Here, Fernandes, a Sobey finalist last year for the body of work I just mentioned, embraces the aching sincerity of contemporary dance -- he trained as a dancer before...
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 Team Macho to take up residence at AGO?Here's a charming little image to leave you with for the weekend:The four-chinned beast that is Team Macho, Toronto's own little tough-guy art collective (and authors of my nifty Facebook avatar, whether they like it or not) who, bizarrely, appear to be the AGO's next artists in residence. I told you about Paul Butler back in the fall, who inauguarated the office in September with his Toronto Now show and a bunch of different projects while in residence; at the time, I was told he'd be followed by Margaux Williamson and Heather Goodchild (two favourites), but that appears, at the...
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