After-birth?

 Is that too creepy a headline? Probably. Sorry. But given the subject it's probably suitably so: Ron Mueck's 16-foot long sculpture of a newborn baby, "A Girl" (above) arrives at the Oakville Galleries today, a couple of year's after Mueck's unsettlingly hyper-real works touched down at the National Gallery for a provocative exhibition alongside Guy Ben-Ner in 2008. 

The exhibition is re-created here, though not all of it; Oakville's small spaces can only accommodate a portion, and in its intimate spaces, Mueck's out-of-scale pieces will only seem even more confrontational, turning the artist's intent, as they say, to 11. 

The openings is Friday night beginning at 7.30 at Centennial Square, where Mueck's work is displayed, and moves to the Galleries' lovely lakeside mansion at Gairlioch Gardens to close out the evening, which shoudl be lovely -- and far enough away from Mueck's work to enjoy. 

Things I'm glad to have not missed, part 2

Next door to Birch Libralato at the Susan Hobbs Gallery, Shirley Wiitasalo shows a suite of new paintings that seem conjured from a half-remembered dream; while obviously abstract, the mind wrestles quietly to extract form from the delicate wash that the eye delivers. Wiitasalo's technique is something obliquely referred to as "transfer," which to me suggest a careful layering of material and colour to obscure, but not quite, the one that came before. The result is an engaging invitation to travel its depths, while remaining stuck on the surface, looking down. Until July 26.

Things I'm glad to have not missed, part 1

 
Anyway, on to happier things. One of the irritations of May/June on my schedule is the densely-packed schedule of festivals and institutional openings; between Contact, Luminato, multiple openings at the AGO, the Power Plant, MOCCA and now the ROM, for heaven's sake, it's a struggle to keep up with the commercial gallery scene. 

This is a long way of saying I finally worked my way down Tecumseth street today to have a look at the galleries strung along it, from Queen all the way down to Niagara. The first I feel compelled to mention is Mitch Robertson's completely engaging show at Birch Libralato, A Bit of Luck. I do my best not to be too predictable, but there's no accounting for taste, and I've made no secret of my love for work that couples gestures, systems and prosaic materials with a healthy dose of good humour, and Robertson hits all these points with a uniquely subtle, contrarian grace. 

I'm a sucker for mildly obsessive gestures, self-consciously executed, so Robertson's delightful "A set of coins tossed each day until all tails prevail" gave me my first little moment of giddiness. (The piece is exactly as it sounds, the coins collected in a box in a vitrine, a charcoal rubbing of them where they lay on the wall). Another piece, "A ball of tape made to the width of my doorframe" has a similar, because-it's-there quality (a sort of domestically introverted Everest, cobbled with available materials; to each his own pinnacles, I suppose). 

There are several other pieces here I loved, but I can't wrap up without the best, which I've saved for last. One wall of the gallery holds a grid of 24 black frames, which contain what appear to be sketches of the number 666 -- the beast, for those non-Judas Priest fans among us -- in various fonts and proportions (that's it, at the top). Which would be enough of a giggle, I suppose, if not for the accompanying text, which tells us that Robertson trekked around Ontario finding houses with the address 666 and took charcoal rubbings of each. The thought of 24 houses or businesses labelled with the number of eternal damnation makes plain the absurdity of the conceit itself: Resigned, oblivious, or whatever, Robertson's gesture neuters the power of myth with playful hilarity. 

At the same time, the gallery is showing new paintings by Ben Walmsley, which I remember about a decade ago involving a colour field-esque abstraction serving as a background for immaculately-rendered, photorealistic paintings of liquor bottles. This time, the backdrops remain, but the booze is replaced by small children. Walmsley does a lot of paintings of children, mostly as commissions for clients; these are his personal work, and his exceptional ability to extract subtleties of expression and emotion from his young subjects aside, Walmsley plays an engaging formalist game, pitting chilly abstraction against perhaps the gloopiest sentimentality possible in figure painting, the children's commission. 

Walmsley fiddles happily with expectations, particularly with a suite of works in which the children are seen from the back, as though gazing confusedly at those flat colour bars behind them; it's a clever comment on painting's widest rift, played with the gentle curiousity of a child. Who could blame them?

Quickly, a note on Danby

It took some time, but several vitriolic responses to my take on the Ken Danby show at Odon Wagner have started arriving, and in force.

Several of them were submitted in the comment section of this blog, but had not been approved for publication by our web staff; I'm assuming they wanted to run them by me first, but no need -- everyone deserves their opinion to be heard, so long as it's thoughtful and considered (and in a few cases, ahem, Mr. Smits, even when not) so I've gone ahead to ensure the comments were published myself. You can find them alongside the relevant post here.

While I don't want to respond directly to the letter writers here, suffice to say that there's no accounting for taste; I know what I like -- as do we all -- and I think my reasons for not seeing Danby in the light of an accomplished master, realist or otherwise, don't need to be re-stated.

To those who assume I'm simply part of the "anti-realist faction," as one letter writer put it, I can point them to enthusiastically supportive pieces I've written about Alex Colville, and both Christopher and Mary Pratt, true Canadian masters of their genre in a way Danby, in my opinion, never came close to achieving. And while it's not exactly in the same vein,  I'm also truly excited to see the Doris McCarthy show that spans the University of Toronto's downtown Art Centre and the Scarborough campus's Doris McCarthy Gallery. To me, these are Canadian artists of that generation worth their iconic stature for their truly transporting gifts -- gifts that allow me to see the world a little differently each time I see their work. 

You see, the problem for me is not with a blanket exclusion of a kind of art, but a lack of engagement, connection or even true sense of craft with the work of one artist in particular. I explained clearly why in the paper; it was far from a snipe, but rather -- I thought -- a thoughtfully self-conscious dissection of Danby's work, and the rift between the "factions" the letter writer suggests.

I now find myself in the unfortunate position of having to declare publicly what I always take as a given: Don't take it personally. It's not. And despite what some of you have said -- I mean, really, people -- I never do. My mother, on the other hand,  upon reading some of those comments, might not be so forgiving. You are warned ...

UPDATE: I feel obliged to report I have been called an "imbecile" for the first time, by a fellow named Rob  Smits (see the comments section here). Tip a sacred cow, however justifiably, and there's no end to the rage you can inspire. I guess I've arrived ...

Sobey 2010 short list announced!

And it is:

Emily Vey Duke and partner, Cooper Battersby, representing the Atlantic region; West Coast and Yukon, Brendan Lee Satish Tang; Prairies and The North, Daniel Barrow; Ontario, Brendan Fernandes, and Québec, Patrick Bernatchez.

Some surprises there, not the least of which being Fernandes (though not undeserved); competition including John Sasaki, who had a particularly good year, would have left Fernandes on the outs, methinks. 

In any case, my money's on Barrow, who you could have seen at the AGYUup until last week; Fernandes, meanwhile, is showing at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Game on!

ALSO: Canadian Art has put a portfolio of each nominated artist online, which you can  find here:

http://www.canadianart.ca/online/slideshows/2010/06/17/sobey-finalists-2010/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=EWeeklyCampaign&utm_content=470439721&utm_campaign=CanadianArtWeeklyJune172010&utm_term=Readmore

Pop Life: Pretty good

Just back from Pop Life at the National Gallery in Ottawa, which I'm writing about today for the Saturday paper. I went in the proper cynic, and came out, if not coverted, then a lot less so; the show is both huge, bombastic and shamelessly crowd-pleasing while managing at the same time to have depth, counter-point and meaning. As blockbusters go, with their cozying up to the greatest breadth of the ticket-buying public, this is almost as good as it gets; amid all the hype and prudish scandal -- genitalia? Nazis? Horror! -- there's a centre of gravity under the froth. I'll let you know more on Saturday.

Photo: Maurizio Cattelan's "Untitled," 2009

And, and down below there, for those interested, is NG director Marc Meyer snagging a Skittle for himself off the snack tray at the press conference yesterday. The man jumps in with both feet.

Danby fallout -- some hate, no death threats (yet), and a diamond in the rough

  

Pretty busy these days with big 'O' obligations -- the AGO, the first of many being Playing With Pictures, which was a pleasure, the National Gallery's Pop Life, and Luminato -- but as I mentioned, I felt like I couldn't let the show of Ken Danby's work pass unmentioned. 

Aside from the predictable hate mail (this is a divide never to be bridged, alas), I had a great exchange with an artists named John Mahnic; John's a painter not terribly unlike Danby in the sense that he's a (semi) devoted realist, but at the same time, acknowledges the hard road such work has to travel in the fine art world and has since been making what I expect is a good living in the mass-produced realm of posters and prints; his rendering of Santa has sold 140,000 copies, and -- no surprise -- he's devoted a lot of time to hockey legends, too. 

In any case, he drew my attention to one of his pieces, "The Canadian Game," a pretty awesome, totally folksy historical cross-section of great moments in Canadian hockey's history (my long-suffering Calgary Flames make only a passing appearance, but no matter). In any case, I loved the thing; straight-up, sincere homage, delivered without pretense. Take that, Danby lovers (and no offence to Ken, who I understand was a very nice man). 

AGO joins G20 jitters, shuts down for opening weekend

I heard from the AGO this morning that the museum will be shutting down early on Friday, June 25, and be closed entirely through the first weekend of the G20. Hard to blame them -- right in the middle of the supposed hot zone, there could be pretty major disruptions along University Avenue, just a few blocks away. Nonetheless, visitor security is just one thign to worry about -- the fancy new Frank Gehry facade has a lot of glass ...

Louise Bourgeois, dead at 98

Louise Bourgeois, the French sculptor best-known for her giant, gnarled metal sculptures of spiders, died in her home in New York this week. She was 98.  

The National Gallery in Ottawa owns one of those iconic works, "Maman," which has sat perched outside the main entrance since 2005  like some kind of sentinel in a B-grade sci-fi horror film (it's a perfect work in other ways, too, being remarkably weather-proof and immune to Ottawa valley winters). 

Bourgeois was French but is recognized mostly as an American artist, given the fact she moved to New York in 1938 and didn't really achieve the widespread notoriety she died with until she was well into her 60s. Lost in her monumental works is a playful, idiosyncratic practice of object-making that could be delicate, bawdy and mildly ridiculous, as well as an experimental urge to try anything from performance to doodling. 

Whatever else can be said about Bourgeois, she leaves behind an exuberantly eclectic body of work that reads like a diary of a life lived in the constant thrill of doing what she loved. We should all be so lucky. 

Hmmm.

There's just no way around this one. Odon Wagner is mounting a large retrospective show of the work of Ken Danby, who most anyone on earth -- or in Canada, anyway -- knows as the guy who painted the most iconic hockey painting (a thin field, I know) of all time, At The Crease.

The show opens to the public on Saturday. I'll be writing about it on the same day. What I'll say, I have no idea. I'm open to suggestion.