Amanda Nedham at Le Gallery

Amanda 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 same: Drawn from Napoleon's love letters to his wife, Josephine, Nedham builds, in her words, a "pathology of desire" by reassembling, piece by piece, bodies long ago turned to dust. Brrrr. Later, we talk; now, go see at Le Gallery,  1183 Dundas Street West.

Tonight: Team Macho book launch at AGO

You'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. 

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 to great things ahead. 

Photo by Charla Jones

Jack Chambers: Christopher Dewdney remembers, Wednesday night at the AGO

The 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. Tickets $20.50. 

Above: "401 Towards London No. 1," 1968-69

Strength Through Numbers: Laura Kikauka closing at MKG127

It'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 scene of an angular river, wending its way through a wonky landscape bears the phrase "Every junkie is like the setting sun," from Neil Young's majestically understated "The Needle and the Damage Done.") All is not so grim -- a cute thatched-roof cottage is encircled by Randy Bachman's eternal "We love to work at nothing all day;" an awkwardly rendered stork perches on one leg with a phrase from the Talking Heads' "Pyscho Killer" -- but there's a potent unity here in the agglomeration of unpracticed hands given singular voices not their own. One might even call it a canny confluence of popular cultures. You think? Only until Saturday, so move quickly. MKG127, 127 Ossington Avenue, www.mkg127.com.

Want to see more? Here. 

Kim Adams wins the 2012 Gershon Iskowitz Prize

And 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

Governor General's Award winners in visual arts announced

And 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 was won by Calgary goldsmith Charles Lewton-Brain. 

Congrats to all. 

 

Gerhard Richter in Toronto, in film and on canvas

Speaking 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, low light cast a sombre tone over the show, and your eyes are magnetically drawn through the shroud to Richter's 1966 work "Helga Matura," one of his early pieces experimenting with the imperfect visual resonance between painting and photography, and one of his signature works painted from newspaper photographs of murder victims. It is haunting, visceral magic and virtuosic painting; the chances to see the work are all too rare, so don't squander this one and go.

The blogger is present

It 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, she's in town for the Reel Artists Film Festival  with "The Artist Is Present," a documentary about her exhibition, and piece, of the same name that became a sensation at MoMA a couple of years ago. The fancy people gala is tomorrow night (Wednesday) but it re-screens on Sunday. It's a great film, in my humble opinion, so see it if you can. If you can't, don't worry; with the accolades it's receiving, it'll be released in theatres before long.

 Photo: Keith Beaty/Toronto Star

Stephen Andrews at Trump tower

I 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, I imagine, and frankly, provided a field of visual interest that made the piece just mysterious enough that I wasn't 100% sure it was Andrews. It was a nice little revelation.)

Anyway, with the Andrews piece at Trump and James Turrell's glowing panels across the street at the Bay Adelaide Centre, Toronto is finally getting its Section 37 money's worth (see item 5.5). Better way, way late than never, I guess. 

Photo: My lousy iPhone