It's been a busy time for openings -- and unfortunately so, if you want to see any of it in your daily newspaper, because procuring more than a postage-stamped bit of newsprint is nigh-impossible in these film festival frenzy days.
On the fortunate side, I have this blog, where time, not space, is the only issue; there's still a shortage of the former, but not quite so dire. In any case, the quick tour of recent evenings goes something like this:
Thursday
5:30 pm: On my way to China this week, I stopped at Nicholas Metivier to have a quick chat with Xiaoze Xie, whose new work is nothing short of sublime. His oblique realist paintings, of books, archives, and music, are beautiful, formal works, and suggestive of the ephemeral. And an exceptionally lovely guy, to boot.
6:30 pm: I stopped off at Red Bull 381 to check out Cedric Bomford's site-specific installation, Tower Block (that's not it, but an approximation, from an earlier work, above). This is "intervention" with a capital "I;" true to form, Bomford construction of an array of rough hewn-forms -- a bleacher, a shed, and most imposingly, a 20-foot watchtower -- is arresting and imposing. The best part, though, is its context; we all know 381 is an art project space, but it's still an office (for Red Bull, of course); the company deserves credit for fundign Nick Brown's clever curations, to be sure, but this is not peripheral decoration. The fact that people come here for work, for meetings and whatever other corporate what-have-you takes place there makes Bomford's installation live in a completely different way. And that's a great thing.
7:00 pm: A quick head-poke into Georgia Scherman Projects, where Anitra Hamilton's lovely show was taking place. Hamilton's collected by big shops like the AGO, and has been on the artist-run centre circuit for years; the fact that this is her first commerical show was a surprise, to me at least. In any case, it's a clever small-scale cross-section of her current concerns of hierarchy and militarism, in a variety of forms, and much recommended.
7:30: A happenstance tour of Micah Lexier's studio, which, for my money (and not just because it was free) is one of the best contemporary art museums in the city. Ken Nicol, Greg Curnoe, Kelly Mark, Janice Kerbel and (gasp!) Dan Flavin all share space on his walls. To say nothing of Lexier's work itself, of course, of which I've made no secret of my fandom
8:00 pm: On to MOCCA's abbreviated presentation of Arena: The Art of Hockey. Missing some key bits (No At the Crease? How could this be?) it's a mixed bag of great (James Carl, right, Jean-Pierre Gauthier) and not that great by otherwise interesting artists (Tim Lee, Wanda Koop), but worth a look.
10:00 pm: Pondering the Drake opening of bits and pieces by almost too many artists to mention (a few: Kelly Mark, Lexier, Paul Butler and Michael Dumontier) and Hunter + Cook launch at Wrongbar, my sore throat, growing more sore by the moment, imposes reason upon me. I packed it in.
Friday:
Another hectic night, with openings of the YYZ Mall, which I wrote about for the paper, and Mercer Union's opening of shows by Diane Borsato and Taku Dazai.
YYZ is a curious experiment, to be sure; given the gallery setting, I'm not sure the public will be hoodwinked into thinking this is even slightly sincere, as I think it needs to be for the project to have a real life, but you have to give Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman points for ambition.
At Mercer, Borsato's playful interventionist work, The Chinatown Foray and Italian Lessons, thrusts opposites together -- she took the Mycological Society of Toronto on a species-identification excursion through the exotic mushroom sections of various Chinatown supermarkets -- to extract something revealing both about context and identity.
Meanwhile, Saturday's main event (for me) was Jessica Bradley's opening of new work by Kristan Horton. Horton, who stuck in most of our minds with his brilliantly absurd project Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, which showed at the AGYU in 2007, offers here a suite of new images built on the inherent paradoxes of photography -- what it can do, what it tries to -- and what happens when Horton bends it to his particular will.
I'd tell you more, but that'd spoil the piece I've written on it for the paper, scheduled to appear Thursday. So I won't.
Also of note, to be sure, is MKG127's Laura Kikauka opening, "For the Love of Gaud."
The Hirstian reference, to his ridiculous, diamond-encrusted skull, which to me has always read as a slightly pre-apocalyptic (if disingenuous) plea for sanity to return to the idiotic art market of 2007, when it was made, is entirely intentional. In fact, it's almost a response to that plea: Kirkauka makes her skulls with cheap trinkets and costume jewelry -- faux excess vs. excess.
Phew.
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