The Narwhal Surfaces on Queen Street

I would be remiss not to mention the opening and re-christening of the gallery space of my friends at Magic Pony on Queen Street, which, just a few days ago, they re-introduced to the world as Narwhal Art Projects (a single-horned aquatic mammal signifying, of course ... something) . Same vibe, different place (Narwhal is a block east of the shope) and name, from what I can figure: The inaugural exhibition, called Life Drawings included work from gallery favourites Lauchie Reid (of Team Macho; that's his work above), Tara Azzopardi and Marc Bell, to name a few, all in that familiarly cuddly-absurd tone that has become their hallamark.

What's a little different, I guess, is that the mission has been made explicit: " Distinguished by an earnest belief that art should be accessible to all, Narwhal seeks to find an avenue for art and life to coexist on a broader level, for a wider audience." Or in other words, can we just find a way to enjoy creative expression without saddling it with analysis? So I won't, but to say: Amen to that.

Newsflash: Artists are poor!

In the confirming-what-we-already-know department, Michael Maranda, an assistant curator at the Art Gallery of York University, today released the results of an exhaustive study of visual artists’ income in Canada. Drumroll, please: on average, they fall well below the average Canadian income of $26,850, at $20,000.

Not terribly shocking, perhaps. But Maranda’s study, “Waging Culture: The Socio-economic Status of Canadian Visual Artists,” contains a handful of revelations. Contrary to the anecdotal observations of Stephen Harper, the Canadian taxpayer is paying only a fraction of that $20,000 each year – on average, about a third.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the economic plight of visual artists in the country comes from Maranda’s analysis that the “typical” artist actually loses money from their studio practice – a $556 deficit each year. Quebec artists average the highest income from their studio practice, at $1383, while Albertan artists lose the most, at about $2000.

A money-losing career necessitates an actual job, and most artists have them; but as a group, they also volunteer their time more than the general population, at just over 3 hours a week. Add to the frustration that most of them are significantly better-educated than the general population: 84% have undergraduate degrees, and 45% have graduate degrees, compared with 23% and 7% of the general population.

Maranda’s study counts between 22,000 and 28,000 full-time artists in Canada (the definition being difficult to draw.) It’s the first such detailed study into the economic status of visual artists since Statistic Canada’s 1993 Canadian Cultural Labour Force Survey.

It's a little surprising, in this here information age, where we all seem to have swallowed whole the Richard Florida gospel of "creative cities" being the engine of future growth that it falls to a small wing of York's in-house art gallery to pursue hard data about the lives and fortunes of our creative grassroots.

You'd think the Canada Council, or the Heritage Department, at least, might have some interest in the socio-economic dynamic of the builders of the culture they're trying to foster. Not having it lends some support to the theory that cultural policy is in fact more tokenistic lip service than sincere pursuit (as if the current government needed more such evidence in support). But Maranda's study does more than confirm what we know; it confirms what he claims -- that "current cultural policy appears written in a vaccuum." The study does its best to  break the seal; stay tuned ...  

K. Nicol -- or so we think -- at MKG127

It opened last Saturday at MKG127 on Ossington, and I'm just getting around to it (such is the life of a multi-tasking journalist; last week was swallowed up by my spending quality time with uber-condo-broker Brad J. Lamb) but K. Nicol's A Room Full of Stuff I Made (and collected) is exactly the kind of show that gets my motor running. Quizzically playful, mildly obsessive all while gleefully skewering artistic pretension, Nicol presents us with a tidy grid of dead mosquitos, among other stuff, all of it presented specimen-like -- sort of ordering the detritus, to get a better handle on it.

It's not a bad metaphor for our throwaway culture, and you could choose to read it as a cheeky reminder. But this isn't even slightly pedantic work. Nicol reminds us that art can, and should, be fun, for heaven's sake, even while challenging us emotionally and intellectually -- which, incidentally, is what the folks at MKG127 have been doing with steadfast consistency when they first opened their doors not quite two years ago.

 

My first recollection of the place was in summer 2007, when its front windows (see above) were filled with a collaborative text effort between Christian Bok, a Toronto sound artist/experimental poet/folk hero and Micah Lexier, who is one of our best artists, period. Lexier wrote a brief text; Bok threw every character and piece of punctuation into a hat and rewrote it, using every last bit, for his own work. It might have been my favourite piece that year; seeing as I can't recall another one off the top of my head, let's just give it the title.

Anyway, my point is: MKG127 is a breath of the freshest air the Toronto gallery scene has seen in a long, long time. Their M.O. is part conceptualism, part Dada (not that there's a hug gap), and there's never a desultory moment -- wracked with self-importance as so many art spaces are -- where they fail to engage in a puckish, yet genuine way.

That in mind, I'm tempted to think K. Nicol might be MKG127's in-house R. Mutt (I admit to not knowing his work, and I missed the opening;  he's also entirely absent on Google, so I can neither confirm or deny his existence). But I suppose we'll have to wait for his next show to find out.

Space and Time at Clint Roenisch

You've got to hand it to Clint Roenisch. In the lull before his next opening of new work in April -- the stuff of which survival in this business is made -- by the affably enigmatic painter Chris Cran, from Calgary, he  cobbles together a selection of disparate works from an eclectic range of gallery artists that gives the casual wanderer-by  pause for a look see.

In 'Part One Is About Time, Part Two Is About Space' (I should hire Clint to rewrite my woeful headlines, I think), Roenisch assembles work from accomplished Montreal painter Harold Klunder (a huge, primal, chaotic piece that spans the entire wall of the gallery's front space; that's it above, with a Brett Lund sculpture in the foreground), Quebecois installationist/performer Massimo Guerrera, photographer Roger Ballen and the aforementioned Cran, whose contribution to the show, one of his signature oblique portraits, is at right.  

We'll leave discussion of Cran for the moment, as his much larger show is on the horizon; ditto Ballen, whose disturbing work in the backwoods of Afrikaaner South Africa evokes some of the worst of Shelby Lee Adams --  but chillingly and polemically, in a much more authentic way (Ballen is lecturing at OCAD on April 8, in conjunction with an exhibition of new work, currently on at the school's Professional Gallery). 

So let's wait, for the moment at least, andjust do what Roenisch is doing with this cluster: pass some in-between time with some great work, and enjoy.

GG's New Media and Visual Arts Awards Announced ...

... and you are forgiven for the inevitable headscratch.The Feds hand this out every year, at $25,000 a head, to a group of Canadians working either directly or obliquely in the visual realm, most of whom you probably haven't heard of.

While there have, of course, been notable exceptions -- Arnaud Maggs and Ian Carr-Harris in recent years among them -- the GG's are a somewhat odd version of a lifetime achievement award -- the achievement usually being endurance, rather than distinction.

This is meant as no slight to the winners -- I'm actually a fan of Gordon Smith's work, and Ray Moriyami's firm has done some important Canadain buildings, including the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.They're all to be commended for their dedication, to be sure; a life in the arts is not an easy one.

But it always leaves me wondering just what we're celebrating here. The GG's seem to deliberately eschew succesful artists at the peak of mid-career -- where's Rodney Graham? Jeff Wall? Ed Burtynsky? -- largely favouring instead a raft of artists closer to the end of a long, and largely less public road.

And I wonder, with the electric charge an award like the now-annual Sobey's Prize has given the Canadian art scene, giving our bonafide rising stars high profile and spurring on a vital new generation, if maybe this is a little too institutionally polite and thereby counter-productive. Endurance is to be respected; but is it really something to celebrate?

Anyway, I hate being negative about all this, and I congratulate the winners on their accomplishments -- particularly Tony Urquhart and Kim Ondaatje, co-founders of CARFAC, an artists alliance that established artists' exhibition fees back in the 60s. From the web site of the Canada Council, they are: 

For artistic achievement:

Sculpture artist John Greer

Sculptor, musician, and performer Nobuo Kubota

Interdisciplinary artist Rita McKeough

Filmmaker Robert Morin

Architect Raymond Moriyama

Painter Gordon Smith

Glass sculptor Kevin Lockau receives the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in the fine crafts, while Tony Urquhart and Kim Ondaatje share the outstanding contribution award for their work in establishing CARFAC.

Nicolas Baier and Valerie Blass closing at MOCCA ...

This blog is of course meant to be aimed at openings, not closings, but being on the other side of the country for the past few months necessitates some of the latter, namely, the exhibition of Nicolas Baier's work set to close next week at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art.

You might know that Baier, best-known for his digital photographic collages, is something of a darling of the current Montreal scene and, along with Pascal Grandmaison, among the forefront of a generation of artists there currently drawing international collectors like fat kids to a spilled box of Smarties (as a former husky lad myself, I feel somewhat justified in the simile).

Last summer saw the biggest and best instalment of the Quebec Trienniale, a brillaint showcase of local talent, and while it's not about to rival Venice, thanks to artists like Baier and Grandmaison, it's become a significant stop on the international circuit.

But I digress. Baier's M.O., for the MOCCA show at least -- is the self-consciously vain attempt at an aesthetic paradox: The abstract photograph (that's one of Baier's Paesine series, above, from 2008; it's a slab of stone the name of which, kind of obviously, translates to 'landscape,' which adds another layer to Baier's shtick).

To get all semantic for the moment, there is of course no such thing as an abstract photo: A lens opens, light enters, and imprints on the film (or digital register, most often now), and that's all it is. A photograph captures something -- whether you can discern what or not doesn't change the simple fact of its subject's physicality. Obscure light, extreme close-up, lack of focus -- none of it makes it any more abstract than Donald Trump's hair.

So it's kind of a simplistic pivot point, to take images of raw materials like stone and show them at a perspective and scale where they confuse the eye; but Baier's got a few more formal tricks here that are much more complex and compelling. Vanitas (installation view at right), for one, a massive collage of peeling antique mirrors that Baier has scanned and assembled in a giant mosaic. Still simple -- images of mirrors don't offer reflection, confounding expectation -- but much more magnetic than the staid close-ups of stone.

But the best work here is from Baier's Noir series (2007-2008), seen at left, alas, in a very poor installation shot from MOCCA. If you were to see the work in person, you'd see a grid of haunting cityscapes, flat and barely discernable, floating in charcoal ombre like some barely-remembered dream. Baier has taken black and white photographs and slowly (and digitally) stripped away layers of information, using this gently reductive process to render the images indistinct -- more evocative than particular, a sort of oblique dreamscape simmering with a quiet menace. Of everything at MOCCA, for me, at least, these are the things that stay, which in my books, is as good a measure of the work as any.

Not to give short shrift, Baier shares MOCCA until the end of the month with Quebec sculptor Valerie Blass, an up-and-comer that made a bit of a bang at the Trienniale last summer as well. Wildly provocative, adventurous, and more than a little hilarious (that's her Straw Man, or L'Homme de Paille, at right), Blais fearlessly combines unlike opposites in forms that challenge convention in a cheeky, sometimes mind-twisting way. Blass, no doubt, freights her work with conceptual intent; but you don't need to know a bit of it to embrace it simply as gloriously wacked-out eye candy.

America, unbroken: Phil Bergerson at Stephen Bulger

The title of Phil Bergerson's first book, Shards of America, published last year, is apt, if a little dramatic; the images culled from the Toronto photographer's peripatetic criss-crossing of our neighbour to the south over the past several years, Bergerson stopped in literally hundreds of cities and towns, capturing evidence of life at the fringes of American urbanity.The notion, simply put, was a sort of cultural archeology: Bergerson mining fragments of a weary American culture in an attempt, vain by his own admission, to render some semblance of a whole.

A few days ago, Bergerson opened an exhibition of newer work in the same vein at the Stephen Bulger Gallery on Queen, just west of Ossington.

Called Sublime Encounters, in these pictures, as in the book, Bergerson has gone looking for instances of self-declaration amid bleak urbanscapes in cities as diverse as Kansas City, Kansas, Pocatello, Idaho, and, at left, Martinsville, Indiana.

What he finds are an array of unique expressions of self in neglected corners of a country we often take to be far more homogenous than it really is.

The best of them, such as the one below, in Cincinnati, are quietly poignant, little personal flags planted on a faceless, usually decaying urbanity -- signs of life amid the impending doom.

For the most part, Bergerson carefully eschews the temptation to do things the easy way -- as many of us know, the tertiary byways of middle America (or Canada, for that matter) provide ample material for a photographic freakshow, as any viewer of Shelby Lee Adams work can readily attest.

Instead, for the most part, Bergerson gives us glimpses of the quietly exceptional; absent of people, his pictures abound with a humane stillness that suggests not contempt but a quiet reverence. 'Shards' suggests the rebuilding of a broken myth; I would think otherwise -- that through considered work like this, we can see it honestly, as intact as it ever truly was.

Life, not still: Shelley Adler

Also opening this week was a slate of new work by Shelley Adler, at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery on King just west of Spadina. It's the work of a mid-career artist who has clearly grasped that art is essentially about the open question: Primarily a portraitist, in these new works, Adler's faces are oblique and suggestive, inviting in an often-ominous way; there's something in each of them that you can't really know. To put a finer point on it, sometimes there's no face at all; like On The Beach, above, Adler's new paintings capture not so much people as moments -- and leave you dying to know what happens next.

The tiny world of Mike Bayne

 

What to do with Mike Bayne's tiny, exacting paintings? The first thing that strikes you is the feat of them: Bayne, who clearly has a gift for hyper-realistic renderings in oil, seems almost to be painting these works simply to prove he can do it: For all their precision, the accomplishment is made all the more impressive by the fact that Bayne's medium is almost exclusively a 4 by 6 inch panel.

So. Tiny and precise, Bayne uses this gift to capture what could aptly be called the exquisite banal: tired strip malls and worn-out suburbs, most of them framed as though with a disinterested glance -- cast back or sideways, for that just-passing-through sense of ambivalence -- and, for his current show at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, which opened last night, weary face-on pictures of chillingly modest suburban houses, a motel, a church.  Some are dusted with a thin layer of grimy snow; others sport the patchy brown lawn that is the hallmark of of lifeless suburban Canada for far too many months every year.

We know what Bayne is up to -- or at least partly. The exquisite banal wasn't his idea; it actually belongs to Edouard Manet, the original "painter of modern life," as Baudelaire liked to call him, for his eschewing portrait commissions from the wealthy in favour of excursions into working class Paris, where he painted the dank coffee houses and world-weary prostitutes. Jeff Wall, who seems a pretty obvious reference for Bayne, as does fellow Vancouver photoconceptualist, Roy Arden, took up Manet's mantle in the 80s when he started making his huge, backlit photographs of unexceptional cityscapes in Vancouver (that it was Vancouver mattered almost not at all; Wall, who Bayne seems clearly to be following, was rendering a vague postmodern Everywhere of suburbs and battered urbanity.)

Where Wall's is vast and glowing, Bayne's is wee and dour. I get it, I think -- Bayne's painter's skill, obviously capable of something grand, harnessed and curtailed into the service of the invisibly everyday. It's clever, formally, for sure. But Manet worked in pursuit of honesty, almost like a documentarian; and Wall would lay claim to the same, but at the same time, with scale and light, he was deliberately heroicizing the banal to create a tension in the viewer.

And Bayne? There's something being said here, certainly, about form and content -- snapshot-size paintings of buildings built an the era of snapshots, when painting, or figurative painting, at least, appeared to have been trumped by photography -- and indeed, on first glance, you'd be hard pressed to know they weren't just snapshots at all (the moment you get close enough to see the brushstrokes is actually a bit of a trip).

But the tension Bayne looks to introduce is so tiny, quiet and subtle it almost vanishes. The reductive scale seems to serve as surrender to his subjects' own lack of significance. They are, at the end, beautiful, tiny things; but if the artist himself seems to be doubting the worth of his subjects, why wouldn't we?

Fine Weiner

(A caveat: Bear with me on my awful headlines. I'm working on it.)

My day started with today with a chat with Lawrence Weiner, with whom I had the pleasure of meandering through his not-quite-completely-installed exhibition at the Power Plant (it opens tomorrow, with the usual Great Big Party in which the gallery specializes.)

Lawrence is in every sense a gentleman -- soft-spoken, thoughtful, and self-effacing -- a good quality for an artist whose pivotal role in art history is more or less entirely secure. After all, Weiner was in on the ground floor with what most of us take for granted in the art world these days, namely, the predominance of conceptualism (what we've taken to calling simply "contemporary," I suppose, to differentiate it from the fertile period in the 60s in which Weiner and his contemporaries were working.)

Call it what you want, the fact is, without the mischievous boundary-breaking of Weiner and Sol LeWitt, among others, we might still be stuck in the gallery looking at landscape and abstract painting, or figurative or oblique modernist sculpture. Really, it was Weiner and crew -- with a nod to Fluxus, of course, John Cage, and a deserved shout out to the Dadaists -- that busted art out of the gallery and broke it free from  the notion of precious object making, and catapulted it into the realm of the ephemeral, the experiential, and most importantly, something that we, the viewer, were actually part of.

The self-effacingness is really part of the ethos, and therefore the project, subverting authorship in artmaking and deferring authority. This is especially true of Weiner, who decided early on that he would no longer make art objects -- not exclusively, anyway -- but rather invitiations to all of us to do the same. Some are loose directives, others considerably more specific, like the one below:

 

Weiner can be just that helpful, right down to the colour and type of paint, or charmingly oblique (one of his suggestions at the Power Plant comes across as a gentle caution: 'More Saltpeter Than Black Powder;' whatever it is you're up to, I'd listen to him).

Either way, there's a lot contained in Weiner's work that goes well beyond the resultant, to use the high-school scientific phrase, of the artist's instructions -- namely, in this era of Damien Hirst's $23 million medicine cabinet, Weiner's open invitations serve as a playful but sharp reminder that art -- at least, I hope -- loses something significant when it's reduced to high-priced, collectable baubles at the expense of what all art should be: Real human engagement.

Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times a little over a year ago on the occasion of Weiner's 40 year retrospective, "As Far As The Eye Can See," wrote that Weiner's work "affirms that art ultimately triggers some kind of transcendence that can only be completed by the viewer." Or, to put it bluntly, Weiner's art belongs to everyone, no-one, and him, all at the same time. At the end of it all, isn't that the point?