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You've seen the drawings, played the video games, scribbled your name in chalk, so now, buy the merch: Team Macho's book, The Merlin Years, is getting itself launched to great fanfare tonight at the AGO. And it has a magical kitty on the cover. Who doesn't love that?
Photo: By the uninformed courtesy of Narwhal Art Projects, from whom I stole on the expectation of them not minding.
Fashion week, for one thing (and another), to my own surprise. But back in the swim this week with a few things:
- Review of Melanie Gilligan's dry, biting work at the JMB Gallery at Hart House
- A chat with Margaux Williamson at the AGO
- And on Saturday, a profile of Gaetane Verna (that's her), the Power Plant's very charming, and very game new director, three-weeks fresh from her last gig in Joliette, Quebec. I, like everyone else who crosses her path, it seems, was charmed by her forthrightness, her humour and her obvious, sincere enthusiasm. Looking forward to great things ahead.
Photo by Charla Jones
The great, big, long-overdue Jack Chambers show at the AGO has been a quiet highlight of the museum's recent programming, re-siting the gifted London, On. painter in the main of the Canadian art conversation. Chambers' story is tragic, having died of leukemia in 1978, leaving a young family behind, but his impact on his immediate community of writers, artists and thinkers has been everlasting. One of the most eminent of that group, writer, poet and cultural theorist Christopher Dewdney, offers an intimate take on his old friend tonight at the Art Gallery of Ontario at 7 p.m., at Jackman Hall. Tickets $20.50.
Above: "401 Towards London No. 1," 1968-69
It's not every gallerist in town that would have the chutzpah to allow an artist to transform their space into a heartfelt tribute to rummage-sale art, but that's exactly what's been going on at MKG127 this month. Walk past the windows on Ossington Avenue and you'll see Laura Kikauka's dizzyingly intense show, "Strength Through Embarassment," covering almost every inch of the gallery's walls. Tiled side-by each, Kikauka festoons the gallery with thrift-shop art finds -- lovingly amateurish landscapes, wildlife, still-life paintings -- and adds her own embellishments, in the form of hand-painted song lyrics (my favourite: A painfully orange-hued winter scene of an angular river, wending its way through a wonky landscape bears the phrase "Every junkie is like the setting sun," from Neil Young's majestically understated "The Needle and the Damage Done.") All is not so grim -- a cute thatched-roof cottage is encircled by Randy Bachman's eternal "We love to work at nothing all day;" an awkwardly rendered stork perches on one leg with a phrase from the Talking Heads' "Pyscho Killer" -- but there's a potent unity here in the agglomeration of unpracticed hands given singular voices not their own. One might even call it a canny confluence of popular cultures. You think? Only until Saturday, so move quickly. MKG127, 127 Ossington Avenue, www.mkg127.com.
Want to see more? Here.
And along with it, $50,000 and a solo show at his hometown institution, the Art Gallery of Ontario, which administers the prize. Let me say: Yay. I've long been a fan, and it's been way too long since a substantial show of Adams' work showed up in these parts (though no complaints about last year's Diaz show, which I loved.)
The show is slated for December of this year. Given the scale at which Adams most often operates (As he once told me: "Big!") he's better get cracking.
Above: Kim Adams' work at Diaz Contemporary, Nov. 2010
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