Shake-N-Make's Homespun Angst at MKG127

Summer's a good time for a little warm and fuzzy homespun craft, but if you're from Hamilton, that can mean something entirely different. Take the current show at MKG127, Michael Klein's always-excellent space on Ossington Avenue. It's from the Hamilton collective Shake-N-Make, and it is, in simplest term, a gleefully noir-ish recollection of a childhood hatched in the anxious era of the 70s.

After the repressed, imposed normalcy of the 50s and the mass social upheaval of the 60s, the anxiety fallout of the decade intensified with the Cold War, energy crises, and shockingly horrific fashion options. So it was normal -- if more than a little disingenuous -- to retreat to the homely comforts of craft. The show, I Can't Stop This Feeling, shows a collection of such things, but produced by anxious compulsion, perhaps, in an effort to self-distract. I'm thinking of an array of velour cozies, for tea and anything else (I think one was for a toaster; the others come across as nervous perpetual sewing projects of indeterminate form and function).

And then, there's the portrait wall of such luminaries as Jimmy Carter and Rene Levesque (Vive Le Quebec Libre!) rendered in Shrinky Dinks, a fleeting 70s kiddie fascination -- requiring, in what could very well be illegal in this kidsafe age, a scorchingly hot oven to make -- about which I can only say: You had to be there (I was; made a keychain or two of them myself).

But the pieces I really love, for their subtle, simmering repressed domestic angst, are derived from images like the one above, from the Betty Crocker recipe card library. Betty, icon of picture-perfect homemakerhood as she is, by the 70s was surely looking a little out of place in the burgeoning feminist era that exploded after the sexual revolution; a lot of the art of that era addressed gender roles, usually with the subtlety of a meat cleaver.

A few decades on, and with the benefit of hindsight, Shake-N-Make offer a quiet, humour-infused provocation of smouldering desperation. Accompanying recipes for Betty's favourites, like a Ladybug birthday cake, complete with dayglo ju-jubes and sprinkles that were no doubt bursting with Red Dye #2 (it was my sister's 5th birthday cake; it might help explain her early hyper-activity) read slices of narrative suggesting a behind-the-scenes, Ice Storm-esque reality to Betty's picture-perfect domestic fantasy.

Accompanying the Butterscotch Fondue, "He might've said he was in love," it reads, "but only if you defined love as something that caused you to memorize a girl's moves, the way her body flowed, and to live for the few moments she might smile at you." Brrrrr.

Heffel auction tomorrow

After a weirdly up-and-down auction season for (ahem) "important Canadian art" (in May, up at Joyner's, where lots of estimates were beaten; and a little down at Sotheby's, where several "important" pieces failed to sell) Heffel Brothers puts its offerings on the block in Vancouver tomorrow.

If there's a market bellwether to be found this season, it's got to be Emily Carr's ca. 1935/36 oil-on-canvas "Wind in the Tree Tops," which Heffel pegs at a high estimate of $1.2 mln. If it meets or exceeds that, it'll be a new record for the BC painter's work -- as good an indicator of market health (or lack thereof) as to be found ...

Late catch-up: A few things

Sorry to be slow. I had a busy week. Between the Power Plant opening and trying very hard to be even-handed in talking about the seemingly-irreconciliable differences between the Koffler Centre for the Arts and its erstwhile political renegade (in case the medium doesn't translate sarcasm, this is some) Reena Katz, I've had my hands full.

Quickly, on the Power Plant's Universal Code: This is, as the man once had it, A Really Big Show. I wrote about it on the weekend, and I suppose it has to be, considering it presents a pondering of the vastness of the unknowable parameters of reality as we know it, as parsed by 22 artists from all over the world. As you can guess, this ends up being something of a blank canvas, and open to interpretation, and PP director Gregory Burke has offered minimal restriction of it (most of the works Burke chased for the show, so that breadth of interpretation is largely his own.)

There's a lot worth seeing here (though with the abundance of video and sound, I would have preferred better soundproofing, as the pieces sometimes impose on each other), and some that I just passed by. Such is life. We all connect to different things, particularly when ruminating on the limitless. But I defy any one of you to walk into the appropriately-grand gallery space that houses Henrik Hakansson's Monarch - The Eternal, and walk out unmoved. A meditation on life, the universe and everything? That's up to you. But to my mind, revelation occurs in the detail, not the broad strokes.

Now, on to Katz. I'm not sure what more I can say at this point. The Koffler Centre, which is majority funded by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto (and, as I mentioned, to a less-significant, but still-large degree by all three levels of government) has adopted an intractable position on Katz, saying a) she advocates for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and b) it can't associate with her, because that stand contradicts its core value.

Katz offers a more nuanced argument, saying she opposes Israeli action, both military and otherwise, in  the Palestinian territories; and that she, as a Jew, doesn't define her Jewishness necessarily by Israel being a nation governed exclusively by Zionist principles. 

Phew. I just didn't think I could get into that, other than it seems logical to say one's own definition of self, whether ethnic, faith-based or otherwise, can and should be as individual as the person him or herself. But let's depart from that. The central complaint I've heard from a lot of people in the art community is simply that, if you're funded by public money, you need to adhere to governmental anti-discrimination policies. That means on the basis of ethnic, religious and, yes, political views. The Toronto Arts Council is talking about that now, in regards to Koffler; they should have some kind of comment by their next board meeting next month. Stay tuned.

Watch this space

I've been a little neglectful, I know. But much catch-up to be done. Soon.

Keith Jones at Hunter & Cook

Until Canada Day (or so) Hunter & Cook is showing the very involved work of upcoming Vancouver/Victoria artist Keith Jones. This is intensely worked stuff; on massive sheafs, Jones renders perplexingly dense urbanscapes in a style that can be described as technicolour Modernist primitivism; what you see above is a small detail of a huge tableaux that, Hunter & Cook co-boss Jay Isaac told me, took almost 3 years to render.

The result is a sort of Garden of Earthly Delights merged with Social Realism that collided with a Crayola truck. The visual field is so intentionally flat that the overall effect is an anxious claustrophobia that you couldn't pull away from if you wanted to. It's dizzyingly magnetic; just when you think you've seen it all, you realize you haven't. The gallery is tiny, but with Jones' work looming on 3 walls, you could get lost in there. So go, but leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way out.

Luminato loses another: Binary Waves shut down by ESA

Luminato's string of rotten luck continued this week as Binary Waves, an outdoor installation by Belgian collective Lab(au) was shut down by the provincial Electrical Safety Authority after it was deemed that its wiring and structure wasn't up to Ontario standards. (The above image is from its installation along the Seine, in Paris).

It is, needless to say, a shame when these things happen; the installation sounded apropos for an urban intervention -- 32 plastic panels wired with infrared sensors that allowed them to respond to electromagnetic waves -- cell phones, radio waves -- and motion around them, gently rippling as they pivot and transfer light from one end of the row to the next

It sounds eerily poetic -- a gauge, really, of invisible, omnipresent forces in our technology-ridden lives. Not that we'll have a chance to see it; the ESA said the European wiring wasn't up to local standard, and that there was some concern that the internal LED lights would melt the 10' x 2' panels -- which has never happened anywhere else in the installation's exhibition history.

And this after hail damaged the building where R. Murray Schafer's opera The Children's Crusade was meant to premiere, and Kurt Perschke's Red Ball lost a venue during its 10-week run here, due to construction at the Roundhouse, not to mention the unceremonious dumping of Reena Katz's installation, each hand as they are called, by its supporting institutions. What next?

Sarah Lazarovic @ Luminato Box

The Luminato Box gallery continues its rather odd practice of daily programming Tuesday with work by Sarah Lazarovic -- she of the Montrose Portrait Gallery, and a million other things -- that filters the myriad random musings of Twitter through the iconic hucksterist font of Honest Ed's signboard artist Wayne Reuben.

Indeed, they seem made for each other -- a kind of an old-meets-new fusion the unique language of non-sequitur-ese, and a fine marriage if there ever was one.

"People write all these great things about life, the city, cupcakes, etc on Twitter...and then they disappear into the digital ether. Why not archive them in glorious tempera?" Lazarovic wrote in an email shout-out to any potentially interesred parties. (The installation also has a Facebook page, naturally).

I only say odd only because the get-it-before-it's-gone school of thought is kind of a weird thing to apply to art (if not Honest Ed's sales rack): Hurry up and comtemplate! Hm, doesn't really work for me. But what do I know.

Instant Coffee's Disco Fallout Shelter at Toronto Sculpture Garden

Summer would't be summer without a trippy installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden (neither would fall, winter, or spring, but you know what I mean.) The garden is on a good streak right now, following up Katie Bethune-Leamen's Mushroom Studio with Instant Coffee's Disco Fallout Shelter, which opened a month ago, above.

The ever-playful collective, now sharing members in Toronto and Vancouver (it was once a Toronto-only phenomenon), offers their take on the notion of exclusivity, then and now; where fallout shelters were built for heads-of-state and other Very Important People in the depths of Cold War paranoia -- because who cared about we legions of plebes being vaporized by nuclear armageddon? -- Instant Coffee suggests an inner circle of a different kind, in this hipster-ridden era of gross superficiality; you can look inside the shelter via a video camera, which shows members of the collective chilling, fully tricked out and too cool for school (the video is taped, in studio; there's no actual 'there' there, don't worry).

At least, that's my reading -- of a perpetual adolescence where the cool kids can lock the door on their groovy happenings, leaving we squares to be annihilated by the horrors of the mainstream.

I say this knowing (or at least, always assuming) that IC's M.O. has always been engagement and accessibility; and that just such a scenario would be good for a laugh, hyperbolized to the Nth degree to reveal its massive self-regard. Or maybe I'm just revealing a little too much about myself. So I'll stop.

Disco Fallout Shelter runs until Sept. 15.

McFarland, Kydd, Gillmore, Kurland and everyone else at Clark & Faria

Better late than never, I feel the urge to offer a few words about the summer show at Clark & Faria, formerly known as the Monte Clark Gallery, in the Distillery District.

It's the general convention of a summer group show to be a sort of place-holder for those in-between days where no solo show of gallery artists are in the offing, and typically involves the dusting off of unsold stuff in storage to fill the walls in a fallow period.

Not here. Most of the work was made for this exhibition, and it shows what a ridiculously strong roster the gallery boasts. There's a Scott McFarland photo here -- big, broad and panoramic, as per usual -- depicting the swoopy forms of the late-modern penguin pool at the London Zoo (above). I've never really engaged with McFarland's work -- it's crisp and dry, and to my eye, intellectually over-planned and ultimately very clinical-seeming -- and this piece, though it deviates from his best-known garden series, isn't really an exception.

But I'd rather talk about the stuff I like, and there's plenty, from a glossy text-piece by a personal favourite of mine, Graham Gillmore (OFF-TOPIC, seen at left, reads the embossed text on a shimmering hide of acrylic that reads as the skin of a muscle car) to a heart-tugging video tryptich of existential quietude by Owen Kydd, in which very little happens, but everything does.

Not one for video as a medium in general, Kydd is one who's changing my mind, conveying so much in minor gesture, image and almost total stillness, but not quite, that I'm rapidly becoming a believer. In him, at least.

There's much more to love here, too, from a couple of viscerally hilarious pictures, one of which is at right, by Justine Kurland (who has come a long way since I last saw her work, a few years ago; Kurland has stepped in close from her previous intellectual distance to engage on a very human level) to  work by emerging Toronto artist Derek Liddington, whose compositionally cheeky piece lives with its title: The Destroyed Room (after Sonic Youth after Jeff Wall after Eugene Delacrois).(sic)

I'll leave you to have a look and see if you can figure it out. It's a minor brain-teaser, which, like most of its ilk, has much of its satisfaction in the resolution.

The list goes on: Roy Arden's picture of an ingloriously uprooted tree stump, lying in the foreground of a subdivision in progres; work by Howard Ursuliak, Greg Girard and Derek Root. But it's only on until June 14, so hurry hurry. Well worth the trip.

Monday morning catch-up ...

... necessarily means trying to get a grip not just the stuff over the weekend but the tail end of last week. First, I feel some need to address Kurt Perschke's Red Ball (or RedBall, apparently), which I wrote about on Friday.

I played it pretty straight, reporter-like, because, like Perschke, I didn't want to tell anyone what to think, but rather let them react to it, and let the piece -- which isn't the ball itself, but that reaction -- tell its own story (though I did write a bit about its place in the tradition of public interventionist art, and its abundant company in this city's art scene recently, which was predictably trimmed by editors in the final version. Ah well.) 

In any case, judging from the online comments, that story is a pretty harsh one. No big surprise. There's no shortage of people, whether actually involved in the art world, or sniffy punters, who would look down the end of their nose at the project as no more than a goofy prank.

It's exactly this dismissiveness that keeps art a private club and closed circle -- a phenomenon many in that realm prefer, no doubt. For my part, I sort of think accessibility it pretty important; unless, of course, inhabiting the cozy confines of a self-affirming echo chamber is what your idea of art is about. But it's not mine. Simple and engaging, Perscke's project isn't trying to make a grand statement, or activate a discussion about the academic history of aesthetics and representation. Its goal -- and judging from my observations Friday morning, successfully achieved -- is what the goal of any good art ought to be: To provide a starting point for a discussion that will go in as many directions as there are people who see it.

It lacks revelation, certainly; and in that sense, it's not my ideal piece. But I do have to give credit for its undeniable magnetism, and the range of response it seems to elicit. As the comments -- not to mention the crowds that gather around it -- will show, almost no-one is ambivalent about it. That's a crucial first step to a successful piece. The rest is subjective; but without  that, you're nowhere. 

Small addendum: My principle disappointment with RedBall was that it came with a public schedule; I felt that ate away at one of the piece's core elements, which would be the element of spontaneity and surprise. While I still believe that's true, Perschke made the good point that, for 99% of people, the ball would still be a surprise, a tiny proportion of potential viewers having any idea what it was beforehand, or that there even was a schedule. And besides, he said, there are always those few that want to be able to follow it, day to day. Fair point. But I think  those folks might enjoy the spontaneity of playing hide-and-seek with a 15-foot sphere, no?