Katz and Koffler settle; project to go ahead at later date

 

From what I understand, Reena Katz and the Koffler Centre have come to some sort of agreement following the debacle that preceded the opening of Katz's project, "each hand as they are called."  

Katz and Kim Simon (at left), the project's curator, told me that they've settled with Koffler, which unceremoniously dumped the project after it learned of Katz's affiliation with groups that oppose Israel's current Palestine policy.  Moving forward, it seems that Katz and Simon have figured out a way to mount the project without being associated with Koffler -- a fact, no doubt, that comes as a relief to both parties.

What remains to be seen, however, is what, if any, punitive measures will be levied against Koffler by the Toronto Arts Council, one of its principal funders. Closed-door meetings of the TAC board this month to determine whether or not Koffler violated the TAC's anti-discrimination policies for its summary dissociation from Katz over her political beliefs are expected to be made public -- at least somewhat; we'll probably never know what was really said in there -- in the near future.  

However they soften it, I do know that the TAC has demanded changes from Koffler as a requisite for it to continue to receive funding from it. I don't know if the other government agencies (the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council) will follow suit, but it seems to be an important precedent not just for Koffler, but all institutions.

However it shakes out, it seems certain that the TAC will sharpen how that policy is applied, as to avoid this kind of conflagration in the future; and if there's anything positive to be gained from this whole sordid affair, I suppose it's that.  When I get more details on what's really the most important part of this tale -- that is, the actual mounting of the project, a lovely, gentle-sounding public intervention about interwoven diasporic identities in the multi-culti environs of Kensington Market -- I'll let you know.

Bowie @ Clark+Faria, Air Conditioned Jungle @ Diaz, and more, more more

A little mid-summer burst of activity in art's otherwise sleepy season is on the docket for this evening, with a couple of playfully ambitious group openings, and a handful of other goings-on. A little movement would be advised tonight, as both of the biggies, Clark+Faria's Bowie and Air Conditioned Jungle at Diaz Contemporary, are at opposite ends of the city from each other.

But finally, it's a lovely night for a bike ride, so why not saddle (and, for the love of God, helmet) up? You can start the night in the Distillery, with Bowie, Clark+Faria's tasty pop treat of rock's greatest aesthetic chameleon, David Bowie. I'm looking forward to an early, early (1973!) piece by the Vancouver photoconceptualist Roy Arden. Called "Sun Machine" (above), after that piece of psychedelic pop perfection that serves as the protracted outro to Space Oddity, it's a collage, the likes of which suggest a desperate, obsessive teenage fandom -- shades of Arden's fellow Vancouverite, Stephen Shearer, but decades before.

Also good for a giggle are Derek Liddington's extremely precise, fine-lined graphite renderings of Bowie's constant shape-shifting -- Ziggy Stardust to Thin White Duke to whomever -- here represented only by his hairstyles.

And for my money, the economically-clever award goes to Dave Dyment for his piece, "15-minute Fame:" The Bowie single from Scary Monsters slowed down its logical, Warhol-esque length. It's a elegant bit of tongue-in-cheek layering -- Bowie, of course, having devoted a weirdo bit of acoustic pop perfection to the artist ("Andy Warhol" is on the lesser-known masterpiece "Hunky Dory":); it's also apt, in another bit of art/rock/film cross-pollination, in that Bowie played Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat (about Jean-Michel) ... which was directed by the painter Julian Schnabel. Phew.

Meanwhile, the Diaz show gets a little more serious. Curated by 2009 Nuit Blanche curator Gregory Elgstrand, Air-Conditioned Jungle drags a hefty dose of urban grit into the gallery's usually pristine space courtesy of a dozen gallery artist, among them Tony Romano and Brendan Fernandes; others make guest appearances, like Kerri Reid, whose hand-made Trident wrappers strewn about the floor were, for me, a personal highlight. I suppose you could call it authentic pastiche: Cool white walls plastered over with faux red brick paper; bits of trash strewn around the stick-down sidewalks; and balconies above, from which to view the street scene.

There's not much mention, pre-opening, of who did what; but I'm anxious to see the space for what I anticipate to be a big, messy, collective experiment in (ahem) relational aesthetics.  You might even call it a happening. But let's not do that. Still, the transformation should test your willful suspension of disbelief -- hopefully in a good way.

Speaking of (ahem) relational aesthetics (I really, really don't like that term, for its pretentious, artspeaky-ness), DeLeon White opens a solo show from Quebec/Ontario sculptor Natalie Quagliotto. Called Public Circles, she takes the term literally, transforming childhood confections and playthings into opportunities for forced engagement, adult-style. Take two old-school merry-go-rounds, fused together in tight proximity (she calls it the "Maturity Playground" set of sculptures), or a lollipop with 2 sticks. The objects are a touch literal for my tastes, but I like the idea; and in person, all bright-and-shiney yellow, daring you to spin, swing, or suck, they're darn seductive.

And finally, for the late-night crowd, an launch party at Narwhal Projects on Queen (a quick ride up from Diaz, on Niagara) for the ultra-hipster, ultra-young quasi-art/fashion/film/general too-cool-for-school Bad Day Magazine. Features the balls-out rock of Bishop Morocco (an offshoot of the Tangiers) and work on the walls by Asher Penn, Ben Schumacher, Seth Fluker and Brent Wadden. Rock on.

Tastes Canadian/Canadian tastes: Natalie Laluque at Station Gallery, Whitby

Apropos, I think, of my recent visit to the McMichael gallery, where I wrote about Diana Thorneycroft's truly excellent bit of Canadian cultural iconoclasm, the Group of Seven Awkward Moments, I was interested to learn of an exhibition of work by Natalie Laluque at Whitby's Station Gallery, called The Canadiana Project, via an ever-reliable source, the View on Canadian Art blog. 

Thorneycroft, of course, applies her acid wit and eye for the signifiers of our culture, both sacred and profane -- that would be the work of the Group of 7 and such lesser, but no less well-known, lights, Bob and Doug Mackenzie (at left) -- and combines them in a seductive pastiche that, I think, serves as both send-up and engagingly clear lens through which to view our sometimes-stuffy national identity. 

For Laluque, who emigrated from the Ukraine in 2003, the view on such signifiers is through a much longer lens -- a foreign eye that regards our sometimes-mixmaster self-image as both funny, and problematic. 

To this, she offers a suite of paintings with a set of juxtaposed icons her eye captured, in the swirl of newness that confronted her: In Known and Unknown Heroes of Canada (above) Montreal Canadiens great Howie Morenz and the Leafs Charlie Conacher pose alongside ghostly painted images of Chinese railway workers; in Tastes Canadian (below), lunching office workers munch on fast food while a bloodied walrus is dragged from an airhole by Inuit hunters.  

Like Thorneycroft, Laluque's questing after Canadian iconogrpahy is elusive, indeed. But sometimes it takes an outsider to let us see ourselves more fully, and Laluque has certainly done that. Until Sept. 6 at Station Gallery. 

Merce Cunningham, dead at 90

You might wonder why I'm acknowledging the passing of Merce Cunningham, a groundbreaking choreographer, here, on a visual arts blog. 

Well, aside from the fact that Cunningham was one of the boldest artists in any medium, probably ever, he was a seminal figure in what we now take for granted as the glorious post-conceptual free-for-all that is the art world of today. Along with John Cage and Robert Rauschenburg at Black Mountain College, Cunningham helped reframe the notion of artistic expression, bringing conceptual, experimental, performative work into the realm of dance -- and vice versa. 

Along with Cage, who was his life partner until his death in 1992, Cunningham's penchant for cross-fertilization between dance and art resulted in formal associations with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as innumurable collaborations with such artists as Tacita Dean, Rei Kawakubo, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Frank Stella, Benedetta Tagliabue, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. 

He's one of the true innovators in our recent cultural history, a sort of hub that allowed new visions of what art actually is to be formed and enacted, and he'll be missed. 

A few things

Turn your back for a couple of weeks, and everybody goes and opens stuff on you -- Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman at YYZ, Janet Cardiff at Miriam Schiele. Needless to say, I have a lot of catching up to do, but let's start with today and work our way back from there. Tonight, Nicholas Metivier opens his summer slate with characteristic marketing aplomb. But the title is apt: Mayhem, it's called, and bombast prevails: the Sanchez Brothers loudly announce they've just joined Metivier's roster with the very literally-titled Bloody Bed (2002), a glossy crimson wash pooling deep atop what I imagine to be the bed in a Tijuana Motel.

The stiff pair of feet resting on its edge push the picture from eerie to dark parody, and I prefer the former, but no-one's ever accused the Sanchez's of an overabundance of subtlety. I'm thinking mostly of the wrecked bus that spent the month of May, 2007, in the parking lot at MOCCA, in which the Sanchez's installed a video projection of hapless passengers ascent to the heavens (I think). The piece was called Between Life and Death; and though it was heavy-handed, it was lush, perfectly produced, and engaging -- all of which, for me, sums up much of their work.

Speaking of heavy-handed, the show also features work by painters Martin Bureau (in this case, a flaming F-16 fighter jet morphing into rather displeased waterfowl as it plummets towards earth), an inward-turning urban nightmarescape by Rachel McFarlane, and a piece by Michael Smith that teeters nicely between representation and abstraction, and, visually, burns white-hot.

But the winner for me is John Scott's General Dark Matter (2009), a grimly opaque Napoleanic figure he's returned to time and again. Scott's work is well-known -- Governor General Award winner and all -- but never fails to surprise and unnerve. I never get tired of looking at this work, however often it appears.

Also opening tonight at Stephen Bulger is Scott Connaroe's By Rail, a series of images exmaining the North American rail systems' drift into semi-anachronism as the world has sprawled around it and  shouldered up against it, but also its vital role in knitting together distant points and allowing the march of colonialism to spread into the continent's every corner.

Whether or not that's a good thing is open for debate, and Connaroe's images leave it that way. The image at left, Prairie Tracks, Saskatchewan (2008) is a sentimental favourite; but the full range of images offers a pleasingly cohesive whole. 

And do let us not forget my favourite event of the week, if not the month, and maybe the summer, the dual opening of Diana Thorneycroft's and Charlie Pachter's at the McMichael in Kleinberg tonight. I'll have much more to say about it in the actual paper on the weekend, but for now, let me just say: Go.

Openings, closings, and summer holidays

I'm officially on a week's vacation as of yesterday, but didn't want to vanish without pointing the way to at least a couple of things to see this week. First off, there's Transformer, at Jessica Bradley Art+Projects. My first guess is the title refers to the apparent ease with which JB's is able to place members of her ridiculously strong roster in important collections and events. The National Gallery just finished acquiring a large scale installation by Hadley + Maxwell, who are represented at Transformer by a tryptic of photographs of an installation the artists built for a sightless man in his apartment, which, visually, is a web of twine connecting various points to one another. Meanwhile, two of the five Sobey Award finalists -- Luanne Martineau and Shary Boyle -- are with JB.

All that aside, Transformer is as far from a summer place-filler as you'll find, as Bradley has curated some lovely synergies between the photographic pieces -- Zin Taylor's sanctified spitballs, looking oddly primal in that surrealist way, dried and mounted on pegs, next to an image by Pascal Grandmaison, of a crumpled sheaf of paper, shot reverentially on a crisp white backdrop, a studio convention conferring on the throwaway a keen sense of value (that's one from that series, above, but not the exact one in the show). There's work from Jed Lind, both astronomical and vernacular (go, and you'll see what I mean), as well as Nicolas Baier and Kristan Horton, who has a show opening in the fall.

Meanwhile, at Katherine Mulherin Art + Projects, painter Kris Knight's show is wrapping up next weekend. While I've never been a huge fan of the work, there's something stirring about Knight's devoutly Canuck hipster androgynes -- and it might just be the novelty of being able to say those four words together as a literal, non-ironic description. Technically, Knight is neither innovative nor masterful, falling just past very good comic book work; but he's bold and original in his content, and for the moment, that's enough to keep us looking for what he'll do next.

Happy July.

Sarah Anne Johnson: House on Fire at the AGO

Probably the most provocative (and to my mind, best) museum show of the summer so far is nothing of the blockbuster variety, which, to me, signals how hard it is to cohere large-scale shows into something with resonance. No such problem with the AGO's recent installation of Sarah Anne Johnson's "House on Fire," a chilling true-life history of government conspiracy, cover-up and abuse. In Johnson's case, it cuts close to the bone; it wasn't a story she became interested in from afar -- her grandmother lived it.

You may recall the mind-blowing revelation in the late 70s that a Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute, had been enlisted by the CIA in the 50s to head up Project MK-ULTRA, conducting experiments in drug-induced mind control, shock therapy, and medically-induced prolonged sleep in his unwitting patients. One of them was Johnson's maternal grandmother; on learning of her participation, the family, along with many other patients, sued the CIA in 1977, when Johnson was a year old.

The spectre of this abuse, and its ongoing legal consequences, hung over Johnson's childhood, and her photographs in this show embody the haze that shrouded her youthful experience of her grandmother. Images of she and her sister, embraced on her grandmother's lap, are lacquered in macabre doodles; one particularly chilling image, of Johnson's mother as a child, is a hazy black and white, barely discernable for the blur and stencils layered on it.

Accompanying the images are a series of tiny sculpted figures, all escapees from the nightmare of a tortured childhood -- anthropomorphic semi-human creatures consuming tree trunks, or being absorbed by the earth. Add to this a dollhouse, its every room containing a twee version of hell -- a lab-coated figurine twirling a naked doll in a forced waltz; a kitchen where it's winter indoors -- and the unambiguous vision of the hardship Johnson's family endured in the name of American national security chills to the bone.

This is stern stuff, and worth whatever the AGO is charging for admission these days all on its own. If the AGO can keep up this kind of programming, I might consider forgiving them for that humiliating King Tut show they're endlessly touting. Might, I said. Only until Aug. 24, sadly. So hurry up.

The Old College Try: Sasaki + Jessica Valentin at Red Bull 381

It's a sports metaphor, the "old college try" is, an anachronism rooted, I would imagine, in the still-innocent, romantic era when schoolboy knickers and all-male literary societies were seen as more fraternal than fey. Which suits Jon Sasaki well enough, to be sure, as his practice of "romantic conceptualism," as he's called it, often has a charming sheen of the elegiac.

For Jessica Valentin, the title is a bit more literal, in that, until very recently, she was actually in college; a very recent graduate of the University of Toronto's Art History program (as well as Sheridan College's Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning), Valentin is this year's winner of the William Huffman Award for Excellence in Studio Practice, named for the Toronto Arts Council's Associate Director. Part of the award is a collaborative exhibition with an established artist, which yields us the Sasaki/Valentin team.

Phew. Now that we've got the logistics covered, let's have a look at the work. Valentin -- exiled, as she has been, to U of T's suburban Mississauga campus -- engages the well-worn theme of suburban disaffection; her photographs from her "Smithissauga" series (above), of such scenes as cookie-cutter houses dwarfed by much-too-close condo towers behind them speak a familiar visual language for anyone aware of photoconceptualism as long ago as the late 1970s. Her social excursions are more interesting, using the UTM campus as a tableaux in which to test -- or highlight -- the dislocation inherent in these sorts of far-flung, commuter-populated places. Valentin would anonymously over-occupy cafeteria tables -- with bags andjackets, left as disembodied placeholders -- and then record the results. The result, it appeared, was a predictable as it was depressing; seat hunters would wander, glance around, shrug and move on, preferring quiet annoyance to actual engagement.

Sasaki's work in the show, in line with much of his practice, offers this cool estrangement a counterpoint; in much of his work, Sasaki's absurdist sense of kindness (and a seemingly-unrelated preoccupation with wayfinding) contrasts with the cool detachment of our urban lives. I'm thinking of another current show he's in, at the Blackwood Gallery, in which he meanders around Port Credit, easel and canvas in hand, painting landscapes -- a throwback practice, for one, and a decidedly anachronistic romanticism applied to the markedly un-romantic suburban landscape, as in Valentin's work. 

At Red Bull, Sasaki's work is similarly playful, but melancholic in its context. A roughly-made swing sits in the gallery, suggesting a childlike desire for play; while a film of a determined cyclist who nonetheless makes little headway speaks of a sad futility familiar to us all -- for all the earnest, old college trying, going nowhere. 
Until Aug. 8.

Trust No-one Under 30: Mercer Union's birthday party

 What seems like not that long ago, a scrappy breed of art space rose up in defiance to the staid institutional culture of its day. They were called a number of things -- parallel galleries being the one that always made the most sense to me -- but over time the label "artist-run centre" stuck, if only for purely pragmatic reasons: These were spaces -- I hesitate to call them "institutions," as would they, I think -- free of the stodgy institutional politics that plagued the big museums, and unconcerned with market forces that dictated what kind of art should be made. They were willfully political, defiant and engaged -- free spaces meant to facilitate unfettered expression.

That lofty ideal has played out to varying degrees of success over the years, and many of the original artist-run centres are undergoing identity crises as their original, anti-institutional raison d'etre seems to have morphed into an establishment mindset of its own (they worried as much at a recent conference on ARC's in Ottawa last year, put on, in an indication of just that, by its national governing body, ARCCO). Some have held fast to a political agenda, like Toronto's YYZ A Space, the city's oldest; while others have more readily embraced the contemporary currents in art, political or no.  

The flagship, perhaps, of that latter group is Mercer Union, which celebrates its 30th birthday on Friday. There's a lot to celebrate: Some strong new video work by Sarah Gregg Millman (a still from her piece, Interview, is above) and Johanna Billing; and, of course, a spectacular new building that gives Mercer's programming a, well, official-seeming vibe. Institutional? Maybe a little. But if more institutions could behave like this, maybe we wouldn't need parallel systems to defy them. 

The party, called Saturn Return (Saturn orbits the sun once every 30 years), starts at 8 and goes to whenever. If you've been to a Mercer party before, you don't need to be told that they're deadly. If you haven't, now you know.

An embarassment of riches: Ontario's Sobey nominees, tomorrow night at Cambridge Galleries

Back in 2002, a Nova Scotia grocery magnate decided that it would be a good idea to hand out $50,000 every couple of years to an up-an-coming Canadian artist, to help a promising career gain momentum. To say that it's worked is an undestatement. By focusing on young (under 40, that is) emerging artists, the Sobey Prize has generated a level of excitement and vitality the country's visual arts scene has probably never known: Putting the focus on future potential, not past achievement - like, say, the stuffy and  staid Governor General's Awards -- Sobey has done what no-one else in Canada has been able to do: Generate actual enthusiasm about the country's visual culture.

Now an annual affair, and upped to $70,000 (the winner takes home the $50K; each runner up gets $5K), Sobey has doled out its financial accolades to such artists as Brian Jungen, Annie Pootoogook and, last year, Tim Lee. And this year's field is probably the strongest yet, with the region-specific shortlist having been boiled down to Luanne Martineau, for the West Coast and Yukon; Marcel Dzama, for Prairies and North; David Altmejd for Quebec; and for Ontario, Toronto's Shary Boyle (that's one of her ceramic pieces, from 2008).

The betting line suggests it would be foolhardy to wager against Dzama, probably, along with Jungen, the most prolific, visible, bankable Canadian artist working today, of any age. But the long list for Ontario, meanwhile, reveals the embarrassment of riches we have in emerging artists here. With the shortlist whittled down to one representative, Boyle, the talent left on the floor seems worthy of another award all on its own.

There being no local grocery magnate stepping up on that count -- Westons, take note; the Loblaws Prize has a nice ring -- we'lll have to settle for the Cambridge Galleries' upcoming show of Ontarian Sobey long-listers, which includes Derek Sullivan, Luis Jacob, Kelly Richardson, the team of  Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, and, of course, Boyle. The show opens tomorrow (FRI) at 7:30, with a free bus service departing the Gladstone Hotel at 5:30 pm. For a tour through your hometown/province's explosive artistic potential, it'll be hard to beat.