Caught in Traffic

Hi there. It's been a while. Sorry about that. September is the full-on silly season around here, and I've had my hands full, plowing through pieces on David Hoffos, Shary Boyle and TIFF, among others.

This week is no less busy, starting with the full freeway tour of Traffic (pardon the pun), the sprawling survey of the history of Canadian conceptualism that opened Friday.

First, though, I started my suburban tour at the AGYU to chat with Terence Houle, who's GIVN'R opens there this week; not part of the survey, of course, the only traffic I encountered there was on Black Creek Drive, which inched along at a crawl on the way up.

From there, I embarked on my Traffic tour, cruising out to the Blackwood Gallery, which is mostly a survey of NASCAD's emergence as a conceptual hub in the late 60s (that's one of John Baldessari's projects there, "I will not make any more boring art," above) on to the Doris McCarthy Gallery at U of T Scarborough, which hosts the Southern Ontario portion of the show.

Not surprisingly, that was my day -- 3 galleries, 164 km, 7 hours. I'll be heading to the downtown portion of Traffic soon, but my initial impressions are both overwhelmed and impressed. How to digest it all? No idea. But I was reminded, gleefully, of the innocent, pioneering spirit of exploration of discovery and defiance of convention, that conceptualism was all about. It kind of made me giddy. More later.