VSVSVS: Graffiti Removal Removal

VSVSVS is a collective of young artists based in an industrial space in the Port Lands on Toronto's eastern waterfront. Current members include Stephen McLeod, Wallis Cheung, Miles Stemp, Laura Kreviazuk, Ryan Clayton, Anthony Cooper, Jemma Egan, Laura Simon, and James Gardner.

"Graffiti Removal Removal" is a public art project which VSVSVS has recently done as part of Art of the Danforth 2012 . This festival  is a welcome newcomer in the Toronto free-art, community-engagement scene. Bracketed roughly by the Greenwood and Woodbine subway stops, "Art of the Danforth" celebrates a stretch of the Danforth that has yet to see much in the way of gentrification. The festival runs from May 20 through June 10 this year, but "Graffiti Removal Removal" should be around for some time to come, or at least until someone removes the removal removals.

Graffiti Removal is what you get when city workers, or private property owners, attempt to erase graffiti by painting over it. You see these erasures everywhere, as floating and layered blocks of colour which almost, but not quite, match the tones of the underlying surfaces on the original buildings or fences. The resulting forms can be pretty interesting, if unintentionally so.

I have not asked the members of VSVSVS, but their project seems to be the logical extension of ideas introduced in the wry mocumentary short film "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal" (2001, director: Matt McCormick, narrator: Miranda July,  based on an original idea of artist Avalon Kalin).

"Graffiti Removal has become one of the more intriguing and important art movements of the early 21st century. With roots in abstract expressionism, minimalism and Russian constructivism, Graffiti Removal is both a progressive continuation of these movements and an important step in the future of modern art. What makes graffiti removal particularly intriguing, though, is that the artists creating it are unconscious of their artistic achievements."

Here is a clip:



And so, we have "Graffiti Removal Removal". Works of "removal art" are unintentionally made by city workers and property owners who have the conscious intention of erasing that which they do not sanction as art. With the addition of carefully chosen colour and occasional sculptural elements, VSVSVS consciously and deliberately "removes" the graffiti removals in such a way as to elevate the erasures. The graffiti removals now become validated and sanctioned works of ART as we more commonly define it: that is, work created purposefully and thoughtfully by professional artists. As is always a trademark of VSVSVS at their most successful, this project manages to be tongue-in-cheek and utterly serious at the same time. Unsanctioned artists make graffiti, which the city and the property owners do not consider to be art. The city and property owners make erasures, which they do not intend to be art, but which are now defined as such as a result of the intervention of professional artists. Next up?

Three of my favourite works in this series can be seen in the laneway which runs from Greenwood to Linnsmore Crescent, behind the stores on the north side of the Danforth. (Shot with my iPhone, and not the best. Go see for yourself, if you are in Toronto.)

The door, the post and the stairs have been painted in the same colour as the removal removals.

Sculptural elements are sometimes included in the removal removals: note the addition of spray-foam insulation on the right of the door. Note, too, the dash of aqua at shoulder height to the left of the door, nicely enhancing the divot which a truck has taken out of the corner of the building...

...and a pink-painted padlock installed on the pole.

The colour of the removal removal on this fence was inspired by the weathered siding on the adjacent garage.

The property owner attempted a white-wash removal of an entire wall of graffiti, but could not paint around the permanently parked van. VSVSVS helpfully added the text, reading "WHITE PAINT" (vinyl lettering, thus itself easily removable).

Pearl Van Geest: A Love Affair with Paint

Pearl Van Geest loves paint, and in a very literal way, the paint loves her back: the boundary between herself and the canvas could be described as a semi-permeable membrane. She paints with the sort of id-soaked, primary process-driven intensity often associated with "intuitive" or "outsider" art. However, she and her paintings are far from naive: she is a broadly educated, well traveled person, and a highly skilled, technically adept painter.

In the tradition of the Automatistes, she appears to be able to allow her subconscious to free itself from rational restrictions. Her colours are saturated and sensual. The subject matter, and her very technique, is carnal and oral.

Jean Paul Riopelle said: "Painting is an illness. It's a germ you catch one day". I think he was referring to the experience of simultaneously consuming, and being consumed by, the creative process. Van Geest speaks of her art in similar terms:
"Can the boundary or skin between the human and natural world be dissolved or made transparent by the energy of desire, by Eros, by love, by ecstasy and a desire to connect: to be at once subsumed and to possess what we see, feel, touch, taste and hear?"




“Spoiled in Rubies”, 2002. Oil and lipstick on canvas. 72″ × 72″. (Collection of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre)

Above is one in a series of paintings begun in 2001 in which "the canvas is first covered in lip prints/kiss marks; used for their mutable symbolic significance and also for their remarkable morphological similarity to other natural forms, suggesting by implication, in addition to love and sensuality, our essential corporality and connection with the rest of the natural world."

Actual lip prints, actual lipstick.

In 2006 she began her "flower-eating" paintings. These paintings are self portraits, painted from a series of photographs of herself in the act of consuming lilies. Lilies are sexy, with male and female sex organs exposed and unashamed. As the series progresses, these paintings become increasingly disinhibited. In the most recent, the pollen is smeared on her face, a sensual merging of self with the natural world.



“On Possession 1”. Oil on canvas. 48″ × 48″.

I've never met Van Geest, but we have recently had a brief e-mail correspondence. She wrote:
"In the flower-eating paintings I was interested in playing with the lily contrasted with the datura. The datura and its family relative Belladonna, has a darker association in mythology and also pharmacologically, having being been used "recreationally" as a hallucinogen and also apparently having been given to women during labour. Among its active ingredients is atrophine and women used to put drops their eyes to dilate their pupils to appear more alluring. Witches made a "flying salve" which included datura of belladonna as one of the ingredients. The lily in medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary, represented the virgin birth and in some versions of Roman mythology, Juno impregnated herself with a lily."

This seems as a good place as any to mention that Van Geest was originally educated as a scientist, and entered art school after several years of travel and teaching high school Biology and Chemistry. I asked her about her transition from the world of science to the world of art. She wrote: "I love science - the observing, looking closely, inquiry, problem solving, knowing something about the inside of things and how things work and exploration. I like how learning about science makes the world seem even more miraculous. I love grand views and the worlds inside small intimate things like lichen and club moss. I like observing the same things over and over again, seeing the changes. I always drew, painted and took art courses while doing my BSc and also in high school. In grade 13 I received the art award and the biology award so the split (which as you know more than me isn't really as some people make it out to be, science and art both being creative and open endeavors) was always there..I was longing to go to art school. Making art became more and more of an imperative. I wanted to do it all the time. ."

Twenty years after first entering Guelph University to study biology, Van Geest graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design. She enjoyed critical recognition straight out of the gate, with awards and grants, and shows at some impressive Toronto and area galleries. In 2003, she was a finalist in the prestigious RBC painting competition, and in 2008, she was recognized by inclusion in the "emerging artist" category for Magenta Foundation's "Carte Blanche 2".

From Van Geest's website: "I am interested in the intersection of art and science, with questions that arise about the nature of reality and the natural world, our place in it and perception of it. In my paintings I explore the boundary or “skin” between the human and the natural world and ways in which our consciousness, and sensual and cultural perceptions can both facilitate and impede an experience of the natural world."

Van Geest has spent productive stretches of time in residence at Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. The result has been landscape paintings, which begin "as simple pencil line sketches, some done while sitting on the cliffs recording the pattern of the waves on the sea over a period of time ". Here again, her method recalls one technique of the Automatistes, in which paintings emerged from gestural, "automatic" drawings, the purpose of which was to over-ride the conscious influence of the ego and subvert the influence of culturally specific aesthetic judgement.

In Newfoundland, she became "compelled by openings and splits in the world...
The perspective is reversed, the mouth has become a cave".


“Love on the Rocks”, 2008. Oil on canvas. 60″ × 48″.



"Cove" 2010. Oil on canvas, 48" x 48".

The exploration of boundaries, permeability and portals are constant themes in Van Geest's work. This is the common thread through the three bodies of work. In Freudian theory, the individual whose development has been arrested at the oral stage forever struggles with boundary issues. Unable to differentiate between the self and the other, the person remains un-individuated, and forever unfulfilled in the wish for impossible merger and "perfect love". However, the straightforward application of this kind of analysis to Van Geest's work would be reductive, and do a disservice to the subtle complexity of her dance with paint and canvas. Psychoanalyst Ernst Kris used the phrase "regression in service of the ego" to describe the creative life of the successful artist. This is what she accomplishes. She has the ability to go "there", to use her considerable skill and artistic gift to translate the experience, and then to "bring it back". Her paintings are gorgeous celebrations of the most fundamental aspect of being human.

Visit Pearl Van Geest's website for more images, and details of upcoming exhibitions.

The Sweetest Little Thing

Here is an early Valentine from New Brunswick.

The Sweetest Little Thing is an annual fundraising event for The Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre. You can participate in the auction online. That is a lucky thing for those of us who can't be there, because there are some terrific works on offer. Here is a sampling.

Andrea Mortson, Sackville Souvenir, 2009


Frederick Squire, 7:43:47, 2010


Micah Lexier, I Kept the Board, 2010


Mario Doucette, Soldats Anglais, 2010


Alexandra Flood, Delilah in the Woods, 2009

Widening Gyre

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"

William Butler Yeats

Here is a stream-of-consciousness spiral-inspired art hop on a theme of the land and the landscape, intervention and impermanence.

Starting here, with "Respect: A Photo Odyssey Celebrating Canada's Boreal Forest" :

Photo Credit: Dan Riedlhuber

According to the press release, "RESPECT takes an innovative and thought-provoking look at Canada's Boreal Forest. Nine Canadian photographers braved weather and time constraints to collectively create a vibrant picture of Canada's North. The sweeping vistas captured digitally convey the fragility as well as the brutality of the Boreal Forest.The Boreal Forest accounts for 58% of Canada's land mass. 70% of it remains untouched. It is also home to two-thirds of the 140,000 species of plants, animals and micro-organisms identified in Canada."

The exhibition runs until October at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.


Next stop: Utah...



Photo Credit: Francisco Kjolseth


Photo Credit: George Steinmetz

...and Robert Smithson's extraordinary earthwork, "Spiral Jetty, 1970", on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. The work is owned by New York's Dia Art Foundation. "Owned" does not seem to be quite the proper word: I think the idea of stewardship is closer to the spirit of the thing. Spiral Jetty is in a constant state of flux as the natural conditions of the Great Salt Lake change. During periods of drought, it is exposed. It can be submerged for years at a time when the water level is high. Originally black basalt rock, it is now largely white against pink due to salt encrustation and lower water levels.

Entropy and temporality were central concepts in Smithson's work: he wrote at length about mutability and impermanence as it applied to his art. He was killed in a plane crash on July 20, 1976 while surveying sites for his work "Amarillo Ramp" in Texas.

Early in 2008, change threatened Spiral Jetty, and not the kind of change that
would in any way be sympathetic to Smithson's ideals. It was announced that there were plans for exploratory oil drilling approximately five miles from the jetty. There is a sad Canadian connection to the story, in that the company in question is Alberta-owned oil sands player Pearl Montana Exploration. Their application was quashed after effective protests from both the arts and ecological conservation communities. In January 2009, Dia learned that Pearl would resubmit its application.There has now been a reprieve and the company's plans have been put on hold due to a reorganization of the company and falling oil prices.

Just two days ago, Dia reported a new threat to Spiral Jetty: an application has been filed by Great Salt Lake Minerals to increase the number of solar evaporation ponds which they use to extract potassium sulfate for fertilizer. Some 80,000 acres are proposed in the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake where Spiral Jetty is located.

(Addendum (July 13): Thank you to Michael Buitron for alerting me to his amazing aerial photographs of Spiral Jetty, taken on a trip last fall. Go here to see them, and to read a very interesting commentary on Smithson's choice of Rozel Point as the location for Spiral Jetty. Buitron points out that Smithson chose the location not only for the extremes of the natural environment, but also because of the lengthy history of man's industrial exploitation of the area (oil from the tar pools: minerals from the water). If Smithson were here to speak for himself, would he applaud Dia's preservation/conservation efforts, or would he prefer allowing natural (an unnatural) forces to simply take their course?)

And on to Edward Shalala.

(Look closely: These works are very subtle and do not translate well to the small screen.)


string painting, 2006
documentary photograph
Martha's Vineyard, MA
digital print 11"x14"  

raw linen canvas thread painting, 2009
documentary photograph
basketball court, Sara Roosevelt Park, NYC
c-print 11"x14"  


Thanks to Joanne Mattera's blog for introducing me to Edward Shalala's work.
Here is his artist statement:

"In 1973-76, while in graduate school at The University of Wisconsin, I began making abstract paintings using pieces of torn canvas in which I would poke holes, rip, cut, glue and assemble. I used aluminum and black paint mostly then, and later because I was aware of the work of Fontana from Italy, I made paintings using no paint at all. Often I used wire, jute, or narrow strips of torn canvas. As my graduate work developed I continued to make work using these materials, and these were included in my MFA show in 1976.

After graduating I moved to Boston Massachusetts, where, in 1977, I made and outdoor painting using only string, I documented that piece with a photograph. That year I moved to NYC where I have continued to work. Today I use raw canvas thread, and raw canvas dust, to make outdoor paintings. I work in NYC parks and grasslands and document the canvas thread paintings with photography. The paintings and pictures are simple and complex. They involve the ground, the sky, the weather, grasses, plants and trees, fences, sidewalks, architecture and people. This is a landscape and arena like no other space for abstract painting. My work suggests a different type of surface for the painting. The painting is 360 degrees around the thread and dust and is involved in an intricate crossing back and forth across the ground creating interior shapes of open space on the ground. The work is different from the familiar warp and weft of the canvas, and is expressed in canvas thread and dust. I am making an effort to add to the dialog after Fontana and the minimalist. My paintings focus also on the idea of flattening the painting. They go to the outdoors and nature. They flatten beyond the gallery and architectural walls.

Being on the ground and vulnerable to the elements, these canvas thread and dust paintings are temporary in nature."



Shalala's work made me think of a beautiful Cal Lane installation I saw a number of years ago:

Cal Lane, Dirt Lace installation at Wynick Tuck Gallery (Toronto, 2004)

Lane was born in Halifax and raised on Vancouver Island. After a brief career as a hairdresser, she became a certified welder. She then went on to an M.F.A. from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It was there that she developed her highly unusual artistic practice: producing impossibly delicate lacelike sculptures from decidedly macho steel objects, using a plasma cutter. From an earlier series involving earth-related objects such as shovels and wheelbarrows, she has moved to progressively larger and larger works, and outdoor installations.


Over time, her work has become more overtly political:

"I have always been interested in embracing the very thing that repels me in order to understand it: I prefer to make sense of things or in order to suspend (or pass) judgment."

Her most recent work involves drums and tanks used to store or transport oil. The titles of her two most recent series, Sweet Crude and Crude, not only refer to the original uses of the drums and tanks but also comment on the consequences of our dependence on oil.

Lane's next project is scheduled to begin in October, 2009, in Tivat, Montenegro. The object of her affections this time will be a 62 foot long submarine.


Finishing the spiral with work that takes us back to the subject of trees and the land:

Melissa Doherty paints aerial views of trees in settings which are neither wild nor natural.




Doherty presents an imagined suburbia, where man encroaches on nature, retaining and enclosing groupings of trees as captive specimens of beauty. Doherty is a recent graduate of the FIne Arts program at the University of Waterloo. She currently has work in a group show at Edward Day Gallery.

Melanie MacDonald: Home Court Advantage

Melanie MacDonald is an emerging artist with a remarkable facility for capturing light and reflection. Working in acrylic on canvas, she paints highly realistic, somewhat off-kilter, close-up depictions of everyday objects. Paintings in the current series consist of vintage board games, ceramic figurines, and dishes: images from a pre-digital world of domestic kitsch. Two generations removed from Mary Pratt, MacDonald similarly explores the quotidian and seemingly mundane aspects of domesticity as a means of providing a symbolic allusion to the human condition.


MacDonald was included in Carte Blanche 2 (2008), flagging her as one of Canada's best and most promising emerging artists.


Kitsch, by its nature, undercuts the precious and turns the precious inside out as cheap, all too accessible objects. We can supposedly have it all through kitsch, but the desire to have it all is evidence of an inner void that longs for a kinder, simpler world. (Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, 2002)


Artist Statement:

"I regard my contemporary domestic paintings as visual poems marking the brief, curious, moments that punctuate the everyday. I attempt to realize small particulars within a close-up domestic foreground. In this kind of kitchen-sink realism, objects are isolated, set apart, and gathered together' without any deliberate, overriding purpose. My wish is to see and hold small moments caught on the fly, the fleeting shapes of ordinary living as they shed light on what is constant in our human condition. In the tradition of the still life, my paintings arrest time for the sake of contemplating the transient nature of our lives.

As Dennis Lee has observed in his exploration of Al Purdy's poetry, the everyday physical world can at times seem other-wordly, an alternate galaxy that is both utterly present and wholly transparent, a window into some ineffable dimension where [the individual] is at once lost and at home (Dennis Lee, Body Music, 1996). It is this kind of window that I attempt to realize with paint on canvas."

Melanie MacDonald
"Home Court Advantage"
July 3 to August 8, 2009
A.K. Collings Gallery

How Young Artists Live

Photo credits: Jordan Prussky

Whether the economy is good or bad, young artists have always been adept at finding creative ways of supporting themselves and their artmaking. For some, this means leaving the city for a more affordable rural or small town existence. For most, it means a day job, and a live/work arrangement. Robert Malinowski and Erin Glover are a case in point. They share a 900 square foot space which provides both living accommodation, and studio.

The couple lives in a re-purposed mattress factory located in the arts-rich and still (marginally) affordable Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. In spite of space constraints, and some unusual "architectural" features, Robert and Erin have created a welcoming home and an effective workplace, consisting of a cozy bednook, an all-purpose living room with a galley kitchen, and a separate studio area for each. Their space was formerly the shipping and receiving area for the mattress factory. The freight elevator is still functional. A vaguely menacing industrial sculpture consisting of wheels and turbines hangs over their bed: it is the motor for the elevator. It is conversation-starter to be sure, and , when in operation, also a very effective conversation-stopper. Fortunately, the elevator does not see heavy use, and is not in operation at night.

In addition to their own art, the couple also has found room to display some very fine work by fellow artists. The painting above the sofa is a gift from their close friend, Paul Fortin. (Fortin is an artist whose paintings and sculptures I very much admire. He shows with Patrick Mikhail in Ottawa.)

Malinowski and Glover currently have an exhibition entitled "Ties That Bind" at A.K. Collings Gallery. This is the final week of the show.

New Paintings: David Bolduc

I hardly know what I can add to the discussion of David Bolduc. A masterful artist, who loves to move paint around on the canvas. Rigour, repetition of form, mathematical precision, colour field influences: lyrical abstraction with an increasing level of texture and intensity as the years have gone by.

Click here to see Linda Corbetts's documentaries/interviews with Bolduc, done for the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art Database project.

Some of the luscious paintings now showing at A.K. Collings Gallery.

2009 Governor General's Award Winners (Visual and Media Arts)

The winners of the 2009 Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts have been announced. The laureates are, from left, Tony Urquhart, Raymond Moriyama, Robert Morin, Kevin Lockau, Gordon Smith, Nobuo Kubota, Rita McKeough, Kim Ondaatje and John Greer. (Photograph: Martin Lipman)

The awards have recognize the following contributions to artistic life in Canada:



• Kim Ondaatje and Tony Urquhart, recognized jointly with an Outstanding Contribution award for their work on behalf of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens). 


• Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama, designer of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum and Science North in Sudbury, Ont. 



• Video artist Robert Morin of Montreal



• Glass artist Kevin Lockau of Bancroft, Ont., who wins the Saidye Bronfman Award for fine crafts



• Ninety-year-old Vancouver painter Gordon Smith



• Zen-inspired Toronto sculptor and musician Nobuo Kubota


• Calgary-based installation and performance artist Rita McKeough

• Nova Scotia sculptor John Greer


As a gallerist , I am very very proud to have shown the work of Tony Urquhart as well as Kevin Lockau.

Urquhart is absolutely one of my favourite Canadian painters. His self sufficient and wise attitude toward the artistic process is both grounding and inspiring: he is fond of saying that the great thing about never having been in fashion is that you never go out of fashion. (As I've noted previously, however, I believe really good painting will be very much in fashion again soon, as we generally tire of excess, vanity and greed as guiding principles in both the art world and the financial world.) Urquhart's career has spanned more than 50 years and he has received many awards and honours for his painting and sculpture. However, his GG, which he shares with Kim Ondaatje, is an Outstanding Contribution award for their work on behalf of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens).

It is the award to Kevin Lockau which I believe will generate the most gossip within the art community... or certainly within the craft community. The GG for craft (aka the Saidye Bronfman Award) typically has gone to an artist for whom technical prowess is as important, and sometimes more important, than concept. Lockau is certainly capable of virtuosity when it comes to technical matters; however it simply is not what drives him. He played an important role in developing the glass studio at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, where he taught for 20 years. Over his career, he invented three hot glass casting techniques, producing an unique material which he incorporates in his sculpture with carved granite and welded or cast metal elements. His work is raw and urgent, combining animal, natural and human forms. Lockau has largely eschewed the gallery "system", and has never been persuaded that saleability is a suitable motive for artistic creation. He chooses to live and work in relative isolation, on a plot of land outside Bancroft, Ontario. This rugged region, where rural farmland gives way to wilderness, has been his muse. The making of glass leaves an unfortunately large carbon footprint, and this is a conundrum for Lockau. He has been driven to reconcile his love of glass-as-matter with the fact that the process of creating this material is far from ecologically sound. This conflict is embodied in the raw and energized nature of his sculpture.


Lockau was nomnated for the GG by Lafreniere and Pai, his Ottawa gallery. Hats off to them: I am one of this gallery's many admirers. They support a roster of artists who consistently challenge and push traditional boundaries in the "art v craft" debate.

Angry Artist #1

I usually find myself getting peevish and cranky around the Ides of March. It is not that I feel sorry for Julius Caesar. It has to do with Daylight Saving Time and the weather in southern Ontario. Daylight Saving Time: a brutal and senseless exercise in mass sleep deprivation resulting in traffic accidents, medical errors, spousal arguments, etc., etc. The weather in southern Ontario: looks like spring, but it's a trick. Do not put your boots away and do not get your bike out of storage. Trust me. Another blizzard is just around the corner. Not even the prospect of green beer at my local pub can make me feel better today. No. That makes me feel much, much worse. Add it to my mid-March list of annoyances.

Best to channel that aggression by posting the following:

A man presented to the emergency room of a Vancouver hospital complaining of headache six hours after having been punched in the eye during a fight. A CT scan revealed the presence of a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had entered the brain through the left eye (bristles first, I might add).

The case was reported in a 2005 issue of Acta Neurochirurgica by four surgeons at the University of British Columbia (Drs. Mandat, Honey, Peters and Sharma).

"The authors report a case of penetrating head injury that presented with a deceptively mild complaint. To our knowledge, it is the first report of a paintbrush penetrating the brain. The patient reported being punched in the left eye and presented with a minor headache, swelling around the left orbit, a small cut on the cheek and slightly reduced left eye abduction. After radiological evaluation, a penetrating head injury was diagnosed. Under general anesthesia, through a lateral eyelid incision a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had penetrated from the left orbit to the right thalamus, was removed. No post-operative infection was seen at six months follow-up. This brief report serves to highlight that penetrating brain injury can occur without neurological deficit and that a minimally invasive surgical approach was successful in avoiding any complications."

Do not annoy, belittle, pester, or otherwise piss off an artist, at least not while he/she is wielding a paintbrush.

That was cathartic. I feel better already.

(This case has also been blogged within the scientific/medical community here and here.)

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.