Two From Winnipeg

I was born in a small city which occupies the longitudinal centre of North America, aka Winnipeg. My family did not stay there for long, so I cannot (unfortunately) claim much connection. It as a place of extremes: it is either really, really cold or really, really hot. There are two seasons: Snow and Mosquito. It is not a place that suffers wimps gladly. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And so, it has become Canada's most unlikely and fresh cultural incubator.

Continuing my homage to Toronto's David Mirvish Books, here are two bookish offerings from Winnipeg:

1): "The Winnipeg Alphabestiary"


To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Border Crossings magazine commissioned twenty-six wacky, wild, and wonderful works from some of Winnipeg’s most accomplished artists. The "Winnipeg Alphabestiary" includes full colour illustrations of the twenty-six original works, a foreword by noted American artist and Weimaranerist William Wegman, and contributions by Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright. From Wanda Koop’s A for Ape to Shaun Morin’s Z for Zebra, the animals that dwell in the pages of the alphabestiary challenge, conjure and inspire.
Viva la W!

The artists, from A - Z:
Wanda Koop, Aganetha Dyck, Shawna McLeod, Erica Eyres, Doug Melnyk, Kim Ouellette,
Janet Werner, Tim Schouten, Simon Hughes, Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Andrew Valko, Drue Langlois, Daniel Dueck, Jon Pylypchuk, Eleanor Bond, Dominique Rey, Diana Thorneycroft, Neil Farber, Adrian Williams, Sarah Anne Johnson, Alison Norlen, Bonnie Marin, Cliff Eyland, Melanie Rocan, Shaun Morin.

2): Cliff Eyland



"Bookshelf File Cards"
Feb 21 - Mar 21, 2009
Leo Kamen Gallery

Cliff Eyland grew up and was educated in Halifax. He is a practising artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba School of Art in Winnipeg. Since attending Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the early 80's, he has made paintings and drawings exclusively in a 3"x5" index card format. Eyland believes that the library is the most important of all art institutions. Libraries should be the key to what is shown in art galleries, he insists, whereas the galleries should illustrate what is in a library.

His systematic devotion to the file card format began with a Fluxus-inspired student project, when he cut a copy of H.H. Arnason’s "History of Modern Art" into 3 by 5 inch rectangles and surreptitiously inserted them at random in the NSCAD library's file card system. He has since done many other library installations and interventions, including an invited project spanning a number of years at the Fogelman Social Science and Humanities Library at New School University in New York, in which he placed file card-sized drawings in books throughout the library.

In "Bookshelf File Cards", Eyland reengages his lifelong obsession with books and art by creating abstract images of books on shelves. These works begin life as digital illustrations on paper, which are then mounted on blocks the thickness of a package of file cards. Some of the images remain as digital illustrations, some are painted over in whole or in part. These little gems want to be displayed in groups of 3, 6, 9 or more, making a miniature library. Eyland is a master of colour theory and human colour perception: the highly saturated combinations tickled my visual cortex in a delightful way. I wondered what might happen if the work was on a larger scale. My curiosity was satisfied, as he reproduced a number of pieces in the show as posters. However, the larger format simply does not work, proving that 3"x5" is just right.

Roula Partheniou

Ceci n'est pas une livre.
Roula Partheniou delights in books as objects, and loves the look of print. In 2005, she began her series of "Handmade Readymades", stretched canvases of the same dimensions as books, painted to replicate particular books.

These individual paintings of books evolved to loose sculptural stacks of paintings, wherein the books relate according to particular themes:
Partheniou's work was also featured in the series of three one-night exhibitions entitled "On Painting: History, Surprise, Restraint" curated by Richard Rhodes at last fall's Toronto International Art Fair. Partheniou's library-like installation held the "Surprise" spot in the series.



The work is indeed surprising, and witty, and attractive, and very collectible. But, like all good art, it can be read on several different levels. Initially the work appeals as a cheeky nod to the importance of language and punning humour in contemporary conceptual painting.

However, Partheniou has begun screwing her canvasses together, in order to create permanent sculptural piles. Now, not only are these books you cannot read, they are paintings you are are not allowed to see. She explains that the act of screwing the canvasses together has a queasy sense of finality for her, in that the paintings have now been defaced and further, will never be fully available to the viewer.
There is something about this rescinding act that reminds me of the twin myths of Pandora and Lilith. In Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology respectively, Pandora and Lilith were each first-created human women who were reviled and punished for their intellectual curiosity and strength . In the common versions of the myths, they were disobedient, and as a result, unleashed evil in the world. In other versions, what they did was to change human nature by acquiring and sharing the power of language. Partheniou's permanently unreadable sculptural stacks reminds me that language and literacy changes everything. Once emancipated by literacy and a free press, the only means of imposing absolute control upon social groups is through brutality or complacency... and in the latter case, we all get just what we deserve.

A small collaborative installation by Partheniou and Micah Lexier "Works, Works 1, Twice" can currently be seen at "Queen Specific", a vitrine gallery next door to (and sponsored by) Dufflet Pastries at 787 Queen St. West, Toronto.

Tom Phillips: A Humument

Thr grand-daddy of altered books would have to be British artist Tom Phillips' A Humument . In the mid-1960s, Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W.H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new.

" I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. "

The revealed text on the page reproduced above reads as follows:

a door opened
on a glitter of fanciful
passages and rooms.
on the net (the net)
his mean
mosaic and
suite of
night
routine

Over the past four decades, Phillips has continued to revise and re-work A Humument. A version of it can be had as a paperback book, and as a small hardcover miniature.

Phillips also maintains a blog, in which he writes about his creative process. Here is a passage that is fascinating from a neuropsychological perspective:

"At art school we worked in silence. When eventually I graduated to independent studio life it occurred to me that listening to music would enhance the day: my LPs of Beethoven and Bartok string quartets could be just the thing. I was wrong. If I listened I stopped painting and if I painted I failed to listen, hearing just the first few familiar bars but only becoming aware of the piece again as the final cadence gave way to the hiss of needle on vinyl.

But priorities are priorities and I was always able to pay attention to the Test Match commentaries. Far from hindering concentration the spoken word seemed to take up the slack of a brain that would otherwise have inwardly burbled on about money and quotidien anxieties. When rain stopped play it was a double blow, although, as in winter, there was always BBC drama to look forward to after lunch. "

I cannot resist adding this tidbit: In the 60's Phillips taught at the Bath Academy of Art, where one of his students was Brian Eno.

Artist Books from Art Metropole

This week, all posts will be bookish, to honour the final days of David Mirvish Books.

Collecting artist books is an interest of mine, and since these books are often fabulously inexpensive, it always surprises me to find that some of my favourite editions are not sold out.

I have three books to suggest, and you can own them all for less than the price of a very cheap dinner out. Eat at home, and buy some art!

All are available at Art Metropole, itself a landmark institution in Toronto. They celebrate their 35th anniversary this year. Visit in person, or online.

Book #1:

Stephen Andrews, Three Hundred Sixty Five Pictures, 1998
$40.00
"A beautiful and thoughtful collection of the artist's works frm 1994 to 1998. 17 b/w tipped-in images plus one unique Fingerprint portrait included with every copy. These drawings reflect on the resilience of the human spirit undaunted by the challenges of time, love and loss. Includes "Sonnets", "Album", "Fingerprints", "Personals" and "Crosswords" pieces. Essay by Cheryl Sourkes."
(Update: No longer available at Art Metropole)

Book #2:
Barbara Balfour, M, 1998
$10.00
"Artist's book bringing together the psychological and somatic states of skin cancer and melancholy, linked etymologically to the word melanin. Includes autobiographical texts written by the artist. English and French texts with b/w images printed on sandpaper and mushroom speckled paper."

Book #3:
Katie Bond Pretti, Sonority of Words, 2007
$15.00
"Three chapters designed to develop a narrative as the drawings progress from beginning to end. Though not containing any literal message, the lines and shapes which form each drawing direct the viewer through a sequence of events. Similar to way in which the letter-symbol elements of sound poetry necessitate that the viewer forms their own associations, this story depends upon handmade marks to express dynamics and intonation. The format of the book echoes the linear theme featuring fold-outs to accommodate larger and continuous images, while its scale maintains intimacy."

David Mirvish Books

Seven days and counting. On February 28, David Mirvish Books will close its doors forever. For 38 years this Toronto bookstore has been the place for books on art, design, architecture and related fields. As independent bookstores often are, it has also been a community hub, a place for surprise encounters with art, books, ideas and people that made you think.

To honour that history, for the next week, posts to this blog will be bookish.

A wonderful Frank Stella has graced David Mirvish Books for years. I hope we will be lucky enough to see it on public display elsewhere in the future.


To visit the David Mirvish Books website, click here.

Dave Dyment's Long Term Memory

Earlier last year, Fluxus-inspired Toronto artist/writer/curator Dave Dyment was selected for the prestigious artist in residence project at the Glennfidich Distilleries in Scotland.

The result of his three month residency is "A Drink To Us (When We're Both Dead)"

A reinforced barrel, filled with uncut spirit was buried in Warehouse 8 at the Glenfiddich Distilleries. It will be excavated in 2108. This whisky is being pre-sold now, though it will not be available to drink for 100 years. Buyers will receive an empty sapele wood casket for the future bottle, a map of the warehouse, a small diary in which to document the experience, and a contract to pass on to their descendants.

Dyment says the work is about trust, history, patience, investment and mortality. I am charmed by the sense of generosity, hope for the future, and utter lack of cynicism in this work. Absolutely refreshing!



























"A Drink To Us (When We're Both Dead)" is available in an edition of 25. I understand that the edition is not yet sold out. For more information, go to Dyment's website.

Play is Child's Work

Related to yesterday's discussion of the serious play underlying Cybele Young's art, I've posted this video clip, because it vividly illustrates how important it is to a child's development to have freedom to explore and play on his own terms. I know the creators of the clip intended it as a bit of humour, but when I watch it, I feel as if I can literally hear this infant's neurons clicking, grinding, firing and connecting as he gets busy with his work. As it turns out, the infant in this video is the son of a young Quebec photographer, Francis Vachon.


via

Cybele Young at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington

The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington is another public gallery that we love, and that loves us back. Located in Bowmanville, about 40 minutes east of Toronto, it is situated riverside, in the 100 year old Cream of Barley Mill. Do not underestimate this gallery based on its suburban location and small size: director Richard Toms and curator Maralynn Cherry manage to deliver very sophisticated programming while still fulfilling their community mandate.

It is well worth the drive from the city to see Cybele Young's exhibition, which opened Sunday and runs for the next four weeks.

Young is a Toronto artist who exhibits and is collected nationally and internationally. Her miniature and poetic sculptural works are made of Japanese papers with copperplate etchings. She depicts quotidian objects in odd juxtaposition: Chestnut husks on a milk carton, a shopping cart rising skyward courtesy of a hot air balloon, a view camera pointing at a circa 1975 office chair on wheels.

These are familiar tactics to the mnemonist who is able to remember long lists of unrelated items by making visual images that link them together a very personal and idiosyncratic fashion. The artist is building and rebuilding an internal lexicon. We viewers are invited to read along with her and make our own connections. The work comes from that place where where episodic memory meets semantic memory.

Young hints at this process in her artist statement/poem:

"I knew a lot when I was sixteen,
quite a bit at twenty two
some at thirty
but now, honestly, I know very little.

I know the smell of the yogurt container in which I housed
my grade four caterpillar collection.
I know the cat-like shape of shimmering metal near the train
tracks down the street.

Memories and impression inspire me and I know that if I
Don't harness them, and others that jump out at me from the
neighbour's garbage or the bottom of a soup pot, I lose them
and all the knowledge they might hold for me.

So I make art as a way of building a personal dictionary.
I have faith that by creating new words from abstract and
familiar forms, they will compose their own sentences, and
make up new stories."


The wall installations and the groupings of multiple sculptures in large shadowbox frames are impressive. However, I find the smaller works containing two or three elements to be the most engaging. They are haiku poems, dense with interpretive possibilities. These pieces resonate deeply, and while they are lovely and tiny, they are neither twee nor precious. The artist's sincerity and astonishing skill allows the work to be simultaneously playful and serious. Anyone who has spent sufficient time with small children knows that play is in fact serious work. As an artist, Young seems able to tap that unfettered creativity that most of us sadly have lost somewhere around the age of ten.

Young has also extended her practise to the production of stop-action animation. The videos are mindlessly mesmerizing. That is not an insult: it was a tonic to move away from the consciously analytic and sink into the process and the gesture of her work. She tells me that she may put one or two of her films on youtube. If she does, I'll download and post them here in the future.

We Love Museums...Do Museums Love Us Back?

Pinky, you are very funny! Please come visit us in Toronto. We love the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Ontario loves us back. The new curatorial approach is fresh and engaging, and Frank Gehry's architecture makes our spirits soar.

Belgian Chocolate


Happy Valentine's Day!
Yesterday, roses. Today, Belgian chocolates, with Wim Delvoye looking as dapper as an ad agency creative director. No more on this, I promise.

Roses for Valentine's Day

Kelvin Britton: "Roses 8", oil on canvas, 48 x 60".

Kelvin Britton was born at the Covered Wagon Trailer Park in Fort Garry, Manitoba. He was educated at the University of Victoria and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he studied painting under Gerald Ferguson. He collects, repairs and rides vintage motorcycles. He paints roses.

"I choose to paint roses because of the universal recognition of beauty inherent in them as subject/object. The roses are an entry point into what is an essentially abstract painting. The paint handling is a visceral experience and can take a very long time to evolve, sometimes years. I paint one or two roses on a painting, and then move on to the next one, rotating the paintings themselves.

The act of painting takes the form of a conversation, a unique experience, a journey. A new dialogue is engaged in with each new approach to the work, new layers of discovery are revealed, realms of consciousness, otherwise inaccessible become apparent.

The different stages/aspects/ layers of the painting represent a record of a dreamlike encounter. Looking at the evolution of the paintings feels like an archaeological expedition through time and space, through interior and exterior realms, through form and feeling.

I have a need to engage in the process where the canvases evolve through various stages, some overtly messy, even ugly. I add the many layers until the beauty is revealed. It is not a complex process to recognize a rose, or to assume its beauty. The complexity lies in the process of discovery, journeying beyond the obvious to reveal what may lie hidden, the surprises that are revealed in the interaction between painter and subject /object. "

...but is it art?

More on Belgian artist Wim Delvoye.

(The highlighted article "An Inedible Meal on Ottawa's Tab" clipped from the National Post will give you the background on the current installation at la Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal. There has been a fair amount in print and on the web about this exhibition over the past month, most of which has been sensational and misses the point. If you are not familiar with the work, take a look at the National Post article first.)

Cloaca No. 5 is Wim Delvoye's latest in a series of machines which duplicate the digestive system. This new iteration of Cloaca is more elegant, and anthropomorphic, than the earlier versions. It is beautifully crafted and imposing, displayed solo in the serene and windowless lower space of the gallery. Delvoye has also refined the science, in as much as the machine's "artistic output" was solid and well-formed, and hardly stank at all. When I was there, a group of children was attending as well. We had fun watching the art student top up the glass vats containing digestive juices, and we all giggled at the "potty humour". The cafeteria scraps which were fed to the machine had been modeled into sculptures by Montreal artists. So, the machine was fed art, but the "value" was in the turds.

In our society, we consume a lot, and we place high monetary and social value on things that aren't really worth very much... Delvoye's message is quite transparent and not at all deep or complex. Very easy to grasp, and from what I saw and heard, the kids pretty much "got it". Just in case it was not clear enough, Delvoye hedged his bets by appropriating familiar corporate logos and fonts: Coca Cola's for Cloaca, Walt Disney's for Wim Delvoye and so on.

It was an enjoyable gallery-going experience, and it was gratifying to see children engaged, having fun and thinking through some "big issues" all at the same time.

Kurt Schwitters said, "I am an artist. If I spit, it is art". Change the letter "p", and you have Wim Delvoye. However, in my opinion this work falls more comfortably in the area of design/marketing/semiotics. No doubt, Delvoye is brilliant at marketing.

The exhibition closes on Valentine's Day. It would be a great outing for you and your honey, if this year your gift is a Hershey Bar instead of Godiva. Worthwhile family outing, too. I do not really think this is "Capital A" Art, but I also do not think it is nonsense, or insulting to taxpayers. Cloaca No. 5 is an interesting, beautifully engineered object and the gallery-going experience was fun. It provoked conversation, got kids engaged and thinking, and may even have saved a few relationships. Art or not, I think this small, publicly funded, university gallery delivered good value with this exhibition.

Wim Delvoye on painting: the artist, conflicted

.... a passage from the Border Crossings interview with Wim Delvoye (issue 96, November 2005).

(If you are not familiar with Delvoye's controversial and provocative work, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to read about his more traditional "art creds" first. His installation at la Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal will close on Valentine's Day. I'll post more about that tomorrow.)


"BC: You like to draw?
WD: It’s very strange but, unlike most artists I admire, I'm a product of an art school. I went to art school, I learned to paint, for example, and I know how to draw. I also know how to draw in an academic way. The drawings are getting important now. They weren't when I started. I had Neo-geo guilt when I was a young artist. It’s only been in the last five years that I have been able to show my drawings without any embarrassment. It's funny because I never had any embarrassment doing the concrete mixers and other things. But I had a lot of difficulty showing my drawings. I was hiding those skills. That was against the zeitgeist. If you were an ambitious German artist in 1986 or '87 and admitted you liked to draw, you would be regarded as one of these dumb painters who were getting dropped everywhere. So I certainly was not betting on painting. I have nothing against painting, I just didn't see much for myself in it. I just thought I had more important things to do as a young artist. Ambitious art in those days was not about drawing skills. But basically I'm a painter. I've always been one but I never dared to paint, maybe because I value it too much or something."

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Lights

...a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms.

Richard Nicholson's series of photographs and brief essay seems a very appropriate follow-up to the previous posts.

Darkrooms are disappearing. Polaroid film: going, going, gone. Yet, an increasing number of young photographers are interested in working with these analogue technologies. They are intrigued by the hands-on craft of darkroom work: the engagement of all five senses in the art making process. Something similar accounts for the recent resurgence of respect for painting at art schools in this country. Ditto, the massive interest in DIY and "upcycling" amongst young designers. The zeitgeist is evident at the cutting edge of other academic disciplines as well: ideas like "embodied cognition", and the flourishing of research into mirror neuron systems are two examples from cognitive science and neuroscience, respectively. These ideas have taken off in the context of a society-wide paradigm shift in the technologies we use, and in how we think about communication (Web 2.0, for instance). In a recursive fashion, the technology itself has given legitimacy to areas of exploration which previously were considered "infradig". It has become OK in art, and in science, to seriously explore affect, intuition, empathy, and to give the body it's due. Our embrace of digital technology has left more space around the edges for different sorts of creative thinkers, and that is a good thing.

I'll be returning to this theme over the course of future posts. But for now, let me leave you with this thought:

Obsolescence is a terribly over-rated concept.

Kertesz, by Maggs

Above, a portrait of Andre Kertesz, by Arnaud Maggs. And below, one from Maggs' series on Joseph Beuys.

Maggs won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2006. He is 83 years old, as productive and creative as ever, and well worth collecting.

Must-See Exhibition

This child is lost in the quiet, personal, and tactile, act of reading. He's made a nest of his newspapers, and is absorbed in a way that can never quite be achieved with the digital "equivalent". This series photographs (by the incomparable Andre Kertesz) was made between 1915 and 1970. The photographs were also published as a book ("On Reading") which has recently been re-printed.

Andre Kertesz: "On Reading"
Stephen Bulger Gallery
Feb 7 to March 7, 2009