That which happens, happening tonight

Several openings of note this evening, and the top of my list is Will Kwan's survey show, Multi-Lateral at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at U of T's Hart House. I stopped in on Kwan this morning for an early preview (I'll be writing on it for the Sunday paper this week) and was struck by both his conceptual breadth and gift for understatement.

Kwan, whose concern, broadly, is the peripheral, collateral effect of globalization, reveals that concern with stirring conceptual quietude. It would be painfully easy to tread into pedantic territory, but never once does Kwan make that mis-step; take the simply-put "Clocks That Do Not Tell The Time," a familiar-seeming grid of Ikea clocks, reminiscent of a hotel lobby, that indicate the hour not in world centres but places like Lampedusa, in Kenya, where illegal African migrants are detained en route to the first world, or Sonapur, the sqaulid migrant labourer's district that allows Dubai its opulent sheen. Kwan subtly suggests that, in a globalizing society, international focal points cast the mechanisms that make it possible in shadow.

Kwan, a hybrid himself, born in Hong Kong, raised in Toronto and, after a long hiatus in the U.S., Asia and Europe, back here again permanently, says much of his work is about wayfinding, either literally or psychologically, in a world where borders are said to be falling -- at the same time as new ones grow.

Other openings of note include Vancouver artist Matilda Aslizadeh at Para Nadimi, Susanna Heller at Olga Korper, and the Lonsdale Gallery's 15th anniversary show "Looking Ahead," with work by Alex McLeod, Ruth Adler and many, many more. Busy night. Start early.

Hive mentality: Penelope Stewart's Apian Screen at Harbourfront Centre

A couple of days ago, I wandered over to Harbourfront Centre to write about an exhibition that had a few favourite names of mine involved, Fastwurms and Diana Thorneycroft in particular. It's called Hinterland, and it explores the idea of life at the margins -- which, in this humongous country of ours, are pretty wide, indeed.

In any case, the show, which was first mounted in London, Ontario, was pleasing, as expected. The Fastwurms piece, "Getaway Cars and Safe Houses," didn't disappoint:  It's a collection of surreptitious, paranoic snapshots of the Wurms' neighbours' houses and cars in their own personal hinterland near Creemore, ON., and they're neurotically hilarious; the Wurms label their unknown neighbours from a set of internal suspicions ("juice monkey" reads one snap of a late 60s Buick; "private dick" festoons an image of an innocuous, beige Ford LTD).

But in a tiny space at the back of the main gallery, I found a real revelation. There, Penelope Stewart, who has shown various architecturally-based drawing and photographic projects at Edward Day over the years, was installing a scale model of a utopic urban vision, rendered entirely in beeswax tiles, 4 inches square.

It was such a tight little package, aesthetically and conceptually, that I felt a little giddy; based on futurist architects' observations of the beehive as an idealized, naturalistic social order, Stewart took the idea both literally and poetically, all at once; Stewart had built her own radiant cities, using the very material architects like Walter Burley Griffin had looked to as metaphor. Conceptually sharp, it was also visually striking, in its varying shades of golden brown; it's also a full sensory experience, the faint, sweet odor of honey permeating the space. And, as a bonus, Stewart encourages viewers to touch. When was the last time a sculptor did that?

Anyway, I was struck by the piece's warmth and cleverness -- so much so that it usurped the space I had planned for Hinterlands. It's the first time the work has been shown here in Stewart's hometown. It's in the paper today, but go have a look yourself. It's a keeper.

AA Bronson named an Officer of the Order of Canada

How this one slipped by me I'm not sure, but last week, AA Bronson, the surviving member of the artistic triumverate that was General Idea, became an officer of the Order of Canada on Nov. 5.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the remarkably faithful reconstruction of two of General Idea's early projects from the 70s, "Going Through the Notions" and "Reconstructing Futures," currently on show at the Art Gallery of York University. The group's later years would see them engage the AIDS crisis both conceptually and as activists -- their Imagevirus series, from 1989, was the blunt re-imagining of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture, with the letters A-I-D-S, multiplied on posters and distributed virally, by GI's many fans -- and it was that work that gained them the most international fame.

But the early work, in which they showed remarkable prescience about the growing mediasphere, and imagined themselves a product of their own hype, seems almost eerily soothsaying in retrospect. They were at once irrespressibly cheeky and intellectually potent, and the nascent avant-garde in this country -- and many others -- gathered around them, largely through their brilliantly subversive magazine, FILE.

Bronson, who lives in New York now, received the award from Michaelle Jean in Ottawa last week. His partners, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, long ago succumbed to the AIDS virus, or else they would surely have joined him. It's hard to know what his 1977 self might have thought of it, but he seemed postively thrilled. Congrats to him.

After the flood? Kevin Yates at Susan Hobbs

 

While we're on Tecumseth, we can hardly bypass Kevin Yates' excellent new show at Susan Hobbs. Those who know Yates will be familiar with his weirdly complementary fascinations with disaster scenarios and the archaic convention of miniature sculptures. I say weirdly complimentary because the spectacle of disaster, to even achieve that status, need to be monumental; but Yates, in reductive scale, pushes them forward in our understanding as what they become for all but those who experience them first-hand: Distant specimens, gawked at from a safe distance.

In the current show, Yates has painstakingly constructed modest, abandoned houses, some with bald trees, which would be creepy enough; but he's also created mirror-images of the houses on their horizontal axis, so they appear to be barely above water. Yates' vision is after the flood -- spectral remnants, barely treading in the wake of calamity. They're an exceptionally compelling suite, each needing the other to suggest the community absent in the aftermath of whatever disaster occurred here. Yates' empty stage is set, leaving you to complete the story.

Hey, over here: Micah Lexier's Provenance Project

In a curious feat of collective cooperation last month, Micah Lexier, one of the city's most accomplished mid-career artists, gave over one of his elegant forms to 13 commercial dealers and independent spaces, to be displayed however they saw fit.

It's done in conjunction with "---> the title is an arrow," Lexier's first commercial show back in Toronto (he spent most of the past decade in New York) at Birch Libralato, and by means of re-introducton, it's exactly the kind of clever engagement you'd expect.  Aptly called Provenance, the piece, a hand-scrawled arrow laser-cut in different sizes and colours in aluminum, is Lexier up to his old minimalist tricks; the arrows' installation here, there and everywhere, from commercial galleries, like his own, to nominal competitors like MKG127, Diaz Contemporary, Susan Hobbs (next door to Birch Libralato), to public spaces like the Convenience Gallery on Lansdowne, necessarily question the object not only as a singular work of art, but its, well, provenance as just that very thing. By multiplying and dispersing it, Lexier playfully exits the conventional gallery context, making the gesture at least as important as the work itself.

 In the various titles to the pieces, Lexier puts a finer point on it, surrendering authorship to function and, in a few cases, other people -- at least to some degree. "THIS IS AN ARROW WHOSE COLOUR WAS CHOSEN BY MY 5-YEAR OLD NEIGHBOUR OLIVER" reads one; "THIS IS AN ARROW IN A VITRINE POINTING TO OTHER THINGS THAT HAVE ARROWS ON THEM" reads another.

Using gentle wit, Lexier engages in a little goofy semiotic subversion -- arrows, at least in their contemporary meaning, are wayfinding means,or indicators of something of significance, or at least utility -- but Lexier's treatment reduces them to simple forms, leaving function dangling without intent. Which, dovetailing nicely with the multi-venue installation, might say something about art itself, I suppose. But I'll leave that to you.

What I can do is include a handful of images of its installation in various places. Lexier's Birch Libralato show closes too soon, on Nov. 14, while the arrows elsewhere are probably up to the various proprietors. Keep an eye out. 

BGL: Mellowing out at Diaz

I wandered by Diaz Contemporary this week to have a look at BGL's current show there, New Sellutions. Those who know them enter the gallery with caution; their well-earned reputation as consumer carnage-driven pranksters demands nothing else. BGL doesn't so much show in galleries so much as commandeer them; who could forget their 2005 show at Mercer Union, which, at first glance, seemed to have been thwarted by the building suddenly coming apart at the seams? The gallery was sodden from a leaky roof, and debris was everywhere; half a Chevy Cavalier has burst through the wall leaving drywall to grow soggy on the floor.

It was only when you stood up on the car and looked above the radters to see the leather-clad rocker with the word GOD riveted into the back of his jacket, taking a leak on the gallery below, that everything made sense -- at least as much as it ever does with BGL, anyway.

So in that sense, at least, the Diaz show is pretty mild. Quiet and, believe it or not, kind of pretty, BGL fiddles with some of their favourite subjects like death, decay and excess, and our necessarily unnatural relationship with the natural world -- a cartoony, pinwheeling tree, chopped and teetering on its stump, counter-balanced by a chainsaw ("Pinnochio"); a cauldron thick with a

disturbing amount of charred marshmallow, resting on a red, orange and yellow lucite cut out to mimic flame ("Cauldron/Tribute to the Group of Seven")-- but the looming threat of chaotic mischief never really materializes. Maybe they're mellowing with age, or just their ever-increasing market success. Whatever the case, there's a subdued sense to the work here that I hadn't seen before, and I'm not sure I like.

Trying to make sense of BGL was always a bit of a fool's game; it was either transparent, like the motorcycle wreck that they coated in fine black velvet flocking that seems to speak so clearly about foolhardy excess, or befuddlingly mesmerizing, like at Mercer, challenging the sometimes-chilly convention of viewing art in a gallery, period. What was consistent, though, was what Diaghilev urged a young Jean Cocteau: "astonish me;" they almost always did that, tackling whatever they did with unbridled, infectious glee.

That's not to say it's entirely absent here; it's all very clever, and fun. I imagine it's an oxymoron, but I expected to be surprised; finding a quietly clever, curiously precise array of objects certainly did the trick. Just not how I expected. 

Sitting Pretty: Post-portraiture portraits at Red Bull 381 tonight

In all the intellectual and aesthetic contortions that art’s been through over the ages (most of them in the last 100 years or so), if there’s been a single constant throughout, it’s been that most familiar of all forms – the portrait. There’s just something about the simple intimacy of a single figure, rendered by a single artist, that never gets tired; maybe it has to do with the tension of that one-on-one relationship, or the mystery of what it contains – what’s Mona Lisa smirking at, anyway? – that keeps it fresh. Or maybe it’s all the claptrap of formal representation boiled down to a simple human interaction we can all understand. Whatever the case, a show of fresh portraits open tonight at Red Bull 381, upstairs at 381 Queen Street West. Called Sitting Pretty, it includes work by local (and now local) contemporary luminaries like Stephen Appleby-Barr (of Team Macho fame) and Paul Butler, promises new takes on an old convention: Butler’s portraits have a tendency to excise their subjects, while another artist, Tibi Tibi Neuspiel, works with beeswax with disarming verisimilitude, making toast-like renderings of such worthy subjects as Karl Marx, Stephen Hawking and Abe Lincoln (and a little baloney and cheese, apparently, too). The most familiar form, finally made foreign? See for yourself.

EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS! The opening is also a launch party for the inexhaustible C magazine. Issue 103 drops tonight ...

Beautiful Fictions at the AGO: Can we talk?

In today's paper, I talked about the AGO's "Beautiful Fictions," a survey of contemporary photography (and some video) that explores the  deceptive nature of what one once might have described as a primarily documentary medium.

That's the premise, anyway, though photography hasn't really been exclusively documentary for several decades now, and even when it was, was it? Nevermind the solarizing manipulations of Man Ray: As any photojournalist -- or journalist, period -- knows, the story is as much in what you leave outside the frame as what you choose to include.

Such as it is, I wasn't able or inclined to  talk about every work -- there were dozens -- but rather, just the ones I liked best.David Moos, the AGO's curator of contemporary art, took a little exception to that, and I believe you have to be willing to get as good as you give, so in the interest of fairness, I'm happy to include a response directly from him here:

"Murray’s review is perceptive, but misses a few key aspects of Beautiful Fictions. Despite Whyte’s observations about the anchor works that construct a familiar frame of reference for photographic practice from the late-1960s to the present, a different motive underpins the exhibition. Although he is unimpressed by the apparent re-stating of conventional narratives of contemporary photography (Gursky, Wall, Sherman), Whyte fails to mention any of the artists whose innovative work informs the rise of the more celebrated artists. Why no mention of N.E. Thing Company’s Kodachrome light-box from 1969, depicting a nude posed in a fur coat set against a verdant backdrop produced a decade before Wall’s lightboxes? Suzy’s Lake’s unscrolling images of herself in costume performed for the camera in the early 1970s are an acknowledged precedent for Cindy Sherman’s work. These important examples underscore the curatorial intent of Beautiful Fictions to invite visitors—and also critics—to rethink where lesser-known and under-appraised Canadian artists fit into the familiar international discourse.

That is why major works by Barbara Astman, Janieta Eyre, Arnaud Maggs, Michael Snow and a new work by Kristan Horton are all featured in this exhibition, precisely to illustrate that contemporary art history is being re-imagined and newly articulated at the AGO."

In the case of Lake and Eyre, this is good, instructive curation, and in answer to the various "why's," I didn't  make the connection Moos describes, for which I'll take partial blame -- partial because nothing in the installation suggested any of this to me. No insult to Astman, Maggs, Snow, or Horton, who's a personal favourite; but hanging his piece  in a passageway where it could be easily missed didn't particularly encourage the dialogue Moos describes.

What I didn't want to say in the piece was that the exhibition, for me, didn't contextualize some of these "lesser-known" Canadian artists -- some of whom, like Astman, Maggs, and Horton, are favourites of mine -- so much as pallorize and diminish them against their glossier, famous and higher-production value peers. It's an old curatorial saw to "create a dialogue," as they say, between seemingly disconnected art practices, and while they're contemporaries, what I saw were minor works set against celebrity international super-hits.

For those interested in talking even more about all this, there's a symposium planned Jan. 21-23 at the Gallery.

A new path: Wayfinding at MKG127 with Michael Dumontier

Michael Dumontier, of the once-famous, now-defunct Royal Art Lodge, has the difficult task of functioning as a solo artist in the wake of a collective that was surely greater than the sum of its parts. The cynic will say that it was just one of those parts, the Lodge's one-and-only superstar, Marcel Dzama, that gave it a sum to add up at all, but I'd disagree.

You can see the evidence of that in Dumontier's current solo show at MKG127, "this way/that way," a quiet, spare suite of etchings, drawings and installations that showcase Dumontier's gift for earnest understatement.

Simple and arresting, most of the work seems carved out of opacity (his tableaux are exclusively white), and there's an undeniable tenderness to all of it; in "tree," Dumontier etches his subject out of a white panel using a bare minimum of lines, but still conujures something fully-formed. Quiet, simple and spare, Dumontier infuses a minimalist aesthetic with an unassuming, yet undeniable, emotional sense. At once discretely affecting and charmingly naive, the show has a lovely serene warmth and sincerity.

Full disclosure: I own a doll collaboratively made by Dumontier and fellow member Drue Langlois (that's him, below, on the far right; the tag on his arm says "As I stand before you, my home crumbles to dust"). I say this not to inflate its value -- because I'd never sell it -- but rather to point out that the Lodge was a hive of varied and hectic creative expression and not, as some seem to think, a support system for Dzama to crank out more and more and more of his undeniably famous, crowd-pleasing drawings.

Short film and video, sound works (I hesitate to call what Dumontier and Langlois made "music; the dolls were made to accompany a Lodge subset they called "Eyeball Hurt and the Medicine"), costuming, performance -- all of these came out the Lodge's dishevelled Winnipeg studio; in a sense, its members grew up there, workign their homespun collaborations against the perpetual chill.

Cast out of the nest officially as of last year (their site reads "RIP RAL, 1996 - 2008," though with Dzama having moved to New York several years before, it's been functionally longer than that), most members, like Jonathon Pylypchuk, Neil Farber and Adrian Williams have quietly continued their careers outside the afterglow of the spotlight that still tracks Dzama's every move; on the whole, they tend to ply the same territory of the darkly fantastical -- bears and bats and barefoot girls with rifles -- that made Dzama, and Lodge's name.

Dumontier, for me, is both bolder and more interesting, choosing to be an individual, rather than cling to the vestiges of the collective's brand-name. His path leads somewhere new, and it's worth following to see where.

Fond farewells: Lois Andison at Olga Korper and Derek Sullivan at Jessica Bradley

I had a chance over the weekend to poke my nose into a couple of shows that opened while I was away, namely Lois Andison's engagingly elegant, fantastically fun show at Olga Korper, and Derek Sullivan at Jessica Bradley.

Andison, who teaches at Waterloo, offers work here that's very much up my alley: Cheeky minimalism with just the right touch of humanity. To the point: "Heartbreaking," a 2 1/2 foot scroll in which the word, in rough, typewritten courier font, is repeated in various fragments. Aside from the obvious word play -- leave out the right letters and you get "hate;" you also get "herb," which, though the drug of choice is usually ice cream, has its applications here too, I'm sure -- there's something warmingly droll about Andison's mechanized attempt to parse the incomprehensible. It echoes the confused obsessiveness of the feeling itself, looking for the point where it all went wrong, and never finding it.

Another piece, the unfortunately named "the floor's the limit" shows three women, each on their own screen, racing aroudn the empty gallery, pre-installation, on roller skates. It's exhilarating, unapologetic fun, and while it addresses the space's performative possibilities, it also seems to challenge its main, relatively sedate purpose of showing art ( I've always thought Olga's gallery would be the ideal place for a floor hockey tournament; if you've been, you know what I mean). Whatever the subtext, the piece itself is a kinetic, sincere, rule-breaking pleasure and a visceral thrill, and on that level, works perfectly. 

Meanwhile, speaking of Minimalism, at JB, Sullivan continues his ongoing Poster drawing series. In a nutshell, it embodies the artist's deconstructionist impulse to take simple aesthetic tropes -- patterns and forms -- and explore how they become freighted with meaning. Think of Martin Kippenberger's anti-modernist 1987 gingham paintings, or Sol LeWitt's anti-art object wall drawings -- from simple graphite pencil doodles to repetitive etchings to large-scale colour geometric forms and panels -- and you're getting there. A couple of generations later, simple forms take on heavy meaning under the weight of such references, and Sullivan plays them to full effect, then makes it explicit by re-titling the pieces with each showing (the old one sits legible, but crossed out, as in "#25 Well Hung Snow White Tan, Cadmium Light Red People, 2007," at right). The idea, as you can guess, is to suggest an open-ended continuum where the simple grows more complex with each layer of interpretation. Which is a brainfull, to be sure; but fun to wrestle with all the same. 

Lois Andison, "moving still," closes on Nov. 7; Derek Sullivan, "Waiting Game," closes Nov. 14.