Archive for the ‘galleries’ Category

trees in Brookfield Place

Posted: May 7, 2015 in galleries
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‘Tree’ by Myoung Ho Lee,
an art installation at the Allen Lambert Galleria, Brookfield Place,
part of CONTACT Photography Festival,

large banner with a photograph of a tree against a white background hangs in Brookfield Place with its high rounded glass and white steel ceiling.

Six large banners (12.5 x 10 ft) are hung from the ceiling such that they look like they’re standing upright.
Each banner has a picture of a lone tree taken with a white canvas backdrop.

Three large banners photographs of a tree against a white background hangs in Brookfield Place with its high rounded glass and white steel ceiling. Some people walking past, ignoring the pictures
According to the description of the installation, Lee “transforms the common tree into a highly theatrical and mysterious entity”.
I’m going to disagree.  It’s an interesting visual effect having the large banners arranged as they are but I see the trees as static, captive entities.  Trees as museum pieces.  That’s my two cents worth.

large banner with a photograph of a tree against a white background hangs in Brookfield Place with its high rounded glass and white steel ceiling.

Obsolescence

Posted: March 22, 2015 in galleries
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Obsolescence, by Shelagh Keeley, 2014
at The Power Plant, Harbourfront Centre

A man is looking at a large art piece on a wall. A collage called Obsolescence by Shelagh Keeley,

The piece covers a wall that is 25 x 40 feet in a room that is only 10 feet wide.

close up of part of a large collage art piece on a wall

The large collage includes photographs taken inside an abandoned textile factory in Monchengladbach Germany.

close up of part of a large collage art piece on a wall. One of the pictures is of a typewriter

A dictionary definition: “Obsolescence: being in the process of passing out of use or usefulness; becoming obsolete.“

close up of part of a large collage art piece on a wall

One of the inspirations for this piece was Marshall McLuhan’s 1970 “Notes on Obsolescence” which opens with the lines:  “When print or the motor car is referred to as “obsolete” many people assume that it is therefore doomed to speedy extinction. A casual glance at the historical record indicates the contrary. Gutenberg did not discourage handwriting. There is a great deal more handwriting done even in the age of the typewriter than was ever done before printing”.

And it ends with: “Obsolescence is a very large and mysterious subject that has had very little attention in relation to its importance.” The present paper may … thus help awareness of the role of obsolescence in sparking creativity and the invention of new order.”

A woman is looking at a large art piece on a wall. A collage called Obsolescence by Shelagh Keeley,

Like all art, it is subjective.   Like good art, it has the potential to make you want to linger in front of it and even to reflect and think.

The upper part of a collage by Shelagh Keeley at The Power Plant gallery. This is the top part of the piece which is 25 feet high.

This piece is scheduled to remain at The Power Plant until 17 May 2015.

no competition

Posted: March 5, 2015 in galleries
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Florence has ‘David’ and Toronto has ???

Three sculptures in a museum. The one on the left is a naked man from mid-thigh to the top of the head, although the arms are only stumps. The middle statue is also a naked man but he is all there. He is composed of pieces of different men all put together. The last sculpture is more abstract and it is hard to see in this photograph

left:  ‘Torso of a Young Man’ c1993 by German artist Gertrud Mohwald.
A collage of earthenware, porcelain and broken pieces of glass amongst other things.

center:  ‘Mith’ 1994 by American artist Doug Jeck.
A “fractured assemblage”.

Gardiner Museum

still looking for spring

Posted: February 25, 2015 in galleries, locations
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Flowers, a sign of spring.  No real flowers outside yet and probably not for quite a while!
Instead we’ll have to settle for European pottery florals from the Gardiner Museum today.

below:  Ewer and basin, Sèvres France, 1757,  porcelain, attributed to Jean-Claude Duplessis.  Pink ground with foilage-like edges.

1757 Sevres ewer (water jug) and basin in pink and white with a tiny bit of blue, floral patterns

below: Purple flowered mullein plate, from Derby botanicals, pattern 216, England, c1800.

yellow rimmed plates with pictures of flowering plants in the center

Memory Unearthed

Posted: February 17, 2015 in galleries
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Photographs of the Lodz Ghetto (Poland 1940-1945)
by Henryk Ross,
at the Art Gallery of Ontario until 14 June 2015

Ross was a Polish Jewish photographer and one of the official Lodz ghetto photographers under the Nazi regime.

A girl is standing in front a photography exhibit where many black and white photos are grouped together to form one big picture.

In the autumn of 1944 as the Lodz ghetto was being shut down, Ross buried his 6000 negatives in jars.  The Red Army liberated Lodz in January of 1945 after which Ross unearthed his negatives.  Water damaged about half of them.  Of the surviving 3000 negatives, about 200 form the ‘Memory Unearthed’ exhibit.

Close up of photo display showing black and white photos of people in portrait like photos.

Some of the photos are ordinary pictures – portraits of people, children playing.  Other photos look ordinary until you learn the context, what is really happening in the picture.  Many photos document suffering and despair.  They elicit a lot of uncomfortable emotions but as an historical record the collection is excellent as well as much needed.

Last Folio

Posted: February 17, 2015 in galleries, history
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Last Folio, A Living Monument to the Holocaust
An exhibit of photographs by Yuri Dojc,
at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Yuri Dojc was born in Slovakia but is now based in Toronto.
Starting in the 1990’s he has returned to Slovakia a number of times in search of traces of Jewish life from prior to WW2.

a close up of a photograph of an old book, open, with the pages on one side all curled up. The photo is taken from the top of the book.

Details of one of the photographs in the exhibit.

There are only eight photographs in this exhibit but each one tells a story.   Narratives of loss and of life interrupted.
But also stories of memory and remembrance.

 More information about the Last Folio project.

 

the walk

Posted: February 6, 2015 in galleries
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Seen in the ‘Genizot: Repositories of Memory’ exhibit

 by Bonnie Eisenstein,

at the Royal Ontario Museum until 8 February 2015

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“Concentrate all your strength, and compel yourself to do the loftiest deed, to endure the most difficult trial, and to survive the most arduous struggle.”

from The Walk by Robert Walser, translated from the German, Der Spaziergang written in 1917.

Douglas Coupland at the ROM

Posted: February 5, 2015 in galleries
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Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything

Royal Ontario Museum
until April 26, 2015

entrance to an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum featuring a large yellow wall with the name Douglas Coupland in large black letters. In the distance are two women standing in front of a painting that is hung on point.

In the background is a large painting of geometric abstract shapes in yellows, reds and greys. In the foreground is a close up of two stacks of blocks. The blocks are old children's wooden building blocks but they are alll different. Three have letters of the alphabet on them, one has a picture of a birds nest.

The 21st Century Condition
“I want to explore how it feels to be inside the 21st century brain as opposed to the 20th century brain”

Six paintings arranged three across by two down, on a wall. One in grays, one in pink, one in purple, one in ornage and one in pale pink.

a large wall is covered with coloured rectangles and in each rectangle is an expression that has become common. For example, get a life, oh my god, delete entire history?, etc. A woman is standing to the left of the wall, taking a picture of it with her cellphone.

view of an art exhibit, some people are walking through it and a couple of people are looking at the art on the walls

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Painted with dots.  When they are hanging on the wall, they look abstract.
When they are shrunk down and viewed on a smartphone, the picture comes into focus.

three paintings hanging on a wall in an art exhibit. One is of Osama bin Laden and the other two are 9/11 related, New York .

update:  Here is an interesting article that appeared in the Torontoist on 24th Feb about this exhibit.

Douglas Coupland at MOCCA

Posted: February 4, 2015 in galleries
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Douglas Coupland’s
everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything
at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Queen St. West
until 19 April 2015

Secret Handshake
What makes Canadians Canadian?
What do we identify with that others don’t recognize?

close up of part of a quilt. One of the squares is made from fabric with a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player on it. Old chrome hubcaps have been added to the quilt.

A quilt made of plain beige fabric into which dreamcatchers of various sizes have been incorporated.
A low hutch with three drawers. The handle of each drawer is on old pepsi advertisement on an old bar from a door - the kind of bar that you would push on to open the door.

 One of the rooms of the exhibit features Coupland’s re-imagining of famous Canadian paintings,  paintings by Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven to name a couple.
In the center of the room is a black metal structure that is supposed to represent a damaged hydro transmission tower reminiscent of the ones damaged by the eastern Canada ice storm of 1998.

A large metal structure that is supposed to represent a damaged hydro (electricity) transmission tower is in the center of a room. There are paintings on the walls.

A large metal structure that is supposed to represent a damaged hydro (electricity) transmission tower is in the center of a room. There are paintings on the walls.

***

Growing up Utopian

A portion of three Douglas Coupland creations are visible. In the foreground are numerous lego houses complete with yards and garages all laid out in a grid. In the background are wood shelves with household articles from the past. In the middle are lego towers in bright stripes and interesting shapes.
below: Towers, 2014
An urban jungle of imaginative lego towers created from selected parts of towers that were “crowd-sourced” at building events at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Close up of some of the brightly coloured lego towers in the art exhibit

below: 345 Modern House, 2014
One hundred identical houses built from a kit that was first issued in 1969.

A grid of white lego bungalows with black roofs with detached garages, green lego lawns and red fences.

 

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Villa Toronto

Posted: January 22, 2015 in events, galleries
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An art exhibit in the Great Hall at Union Station, January 16 to January 23

I’m going to out on a limb a bit here and say like most contemporary or modern art, this exhibit was combination of  some shoddily thrown together nonsense and some well executed and interesting pieces.
One of the things that caught my attention was how people reacted and/or interacted with the different parts of the exhibit.  Union Station is not an art destination.  It’s a space that people walk through on their way to somewhere else.

A view of the Great Hall of Union Station with the provincial flags along one wall, the archway over the window at the end of the room, and an art exhibit in the main part of the hall. Two woman are looking at sculptures on one side. A video screen is showing a video about the exhibit - a man sitting in a chair is what is seen in this picture.

In the above photo, the women are using a computer monitor to learn about The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, an installation by Iris Haussler.  In 2006 she turned a house on Robinson St. in Toronto into a ‘discovered’ home of a reclusive older man who had filled his house with over 100 sculptures that he had made.  At that time there was some controversy when people learned that there was no real Joseph Wagenbach, that his story was fiction.   There is a  Joseph Wagenbach Foundation with its own website.

A colletion of small sculptures of life like figures in grey and black.

Some of the Joseph Wagenbach sculptures.

A relief sculpture of a woman's head, on the ground. In the background are people and some of the booths of Union Station.

 ***

A corner of a dimly lit white walled room. In the

‘Marbled Meanings’ by Navid Nuur. 
top right: ‘Broken Diamond’  made of neon, broken glass, argon neon blue light. 
center: ‘Threshold’ made of green florist foam blocks

With the above collection, I found that the light and shadows were more interesting than the green column.  I don’t know whether or not this was an intentional part of the exhibit.

Neon art piece on a wall. It is shaped like a V, it's turquoise blue in colour and it is a bit bigger than the size of a hand. It is mounted on a wall with the electrical wires visible. It is shadow.

close up of ‘Broken Diamond’

 ***

part of a piece of art that is a pillar like structure cover with bits of colourful paper. There is also a child's drawing in pencil on an 8 by 11 piece of paper. Also a sign in blue letters that says . In the background there are a couple of people walking past.

“I’m going to use the two hundred dollar artist fee from this project to pay my phone bill and with the money left over I’ll probably buy a pack of smokes and maybe order some Chinese food.” 
Is this a statement about the value of art?  Is this a f*ck you statement – if you, or society, don’t value art why should I (as the artist) care about my work?

 

A large translucent rectangular piece of fabric hangs from the ceiling. It sort of has a face on it, yellow eyes and a small slit mouth.

Floating overhead and watching us with yellow eyes.

 

This photo was taken looking into a mirror. A man in a long black winter coat and red scarf is taking a photo of some art on a wall.

reflections

 

Four people, two are standing together while one texts, and two others are walking past. Four large square paintings (or photos?) are behind them on a white wall.

I know that art is subjective but I fail to see the appeal in large monochromatic pictures in an ugly shade of green.  They aren’t profound; they’re not making a statement; they elicit no emotion.

 

The projector is playing a loop of blank screen to a garbled soundtrack.

The projector is playing a loop of blank screen to a garbled soundtrack.

 

An art piece, a shiny silver coloured porta potty stands in the middle of the floor. A trash container (real) is behind it.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the juxtaposition of the arty porta-potty and the real trash container behind it.  Someone tried to open the door of the potty but it was either locked or not real.  Note to artist: Why?

video art installations at an art exhibit. The large clock and departures board of the train station are seen over the top of the temporary walls of the exhibit.

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