2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Linda Martinello

It’s been a proud month in the galleries on Queen West for my alma mater, with two graduates from theSheridanCollege/UniversityofToronto Artand Art History program showing within steps of each other. Clint Roenisch was packed last Friday with onlookers cooing over Dorian FitzGerald’s glossy images of luxury.  A general giddiness surrounded those lucky enough to get a look through FitzGerald’s imported stereoscopic spectacles to view two smaller identical paintings at the back of the show pop into 3D.

Across the courtyard, the walls of Edward Day Gallery are filled with the work of young artist Linda Martinello, a current master’s student at University of Waterloo. We met over coffee to discuss travel, the exploration of self, the sublime, and of course, art. Probed by her mentor, Denise Thomasos, to fully explore the timeline of her artistic inspirations and resulting practice, Martinello was well prepped to reveal to me the biographical and esoteric roots of her work.

Simplistically, her work is an effort to recapture the sublime sensibility and temporary ability to discard one’s sense of self that can be experienced during travel. This kind of rhetoric comes after years of the artist questioning the validity of landscape art as contemporary practice. The doubts are unsurprising given the highly conceptual framework of her art education, but unfortunate considering how landscapes were the animus for Martinello’s choice to attend art school in the first place.

Sipping on her black coffee and becoming increasingly more inspirited, Martinello took me back to her first trip abroad to a small village inItalyfor her grandmother’s funeral. The surreal experiences of meeting family with whom she could hardly communicate, visiting a foreign cemetery filled with ancestors’ graves, and seeing her lifetime in framed photos in an unknown grandmother’s home introduced the artist to the addictive experience of exploring one’s identity while immersed in the unfamiliar.

Though this excursion fueled the artwork of her OAC year of high-school, leading to a scholarship in visual art, Martinello virtually abandoned the panorama as her muse until her next trip toItaly3 years later. A trip to her mother’s homeland,Mexico, the following year, and an entire year spent inItalythe subsequent year led Martinello back to landscape exploration. It wasn’t until her brother graduated from architecture school however, that the artist happened upon her current method of working.

Inheriting from him a large roll of mylar, Martinello was finally able to produce work with the same abandon that she was feeling during her journeys abroad. Let go from the all-to-common fear of destroying the perfection of a primed canvas, she began to experiment on seemingly disposable reams of the acquired roll. Large scale mylar works remain as Martinello’s signature style. After laying down a quick ground with oil paint using colours noted in extensive non-visual reference made during travel- mostly words jotted within streams of consciousness- Martinello retells her feelings of that place, and within that moment in time, using graphite on the wet paint.

Her increasingly abstract sketches cause one to imagine the graphite twirling through her fingers as she draws. The surface of the paint is scratched away to varying thicknesses by lines alternately undulating and slicing through her almost random colour palette. Though she approaches the initial space with a vision of the geographic surroundings within her imagination, she makes no attempt to match the black graphite lines with the accompanying background. The artist encourages the viewer’s mind to wander along with her own, as her lines stray onto the uncharted blank spaces of the page.

Increasingly, her motivations; inspirations and research are embedded in musings on perception and consciousness. Her process continues to spiral further into a sort of meditative automaticity and absorption into memory. It’s debatable whether these works can even be called landscapes in the traditional sense, when so much of their creation relies on the artist’s visceral experiences. Ironic really.

Linda Martinello’s paintings are on exhibition at Edward Day Gallery until Saturday, November 26, 2011.

With just five weeks until motherhood, and the wintery silence of the art world nearing, I am expecting this to be my last post of the year. Thanks so much to everyone for reading and I look forward to sharing my conversations again in the spring.

Feel free to become a follower to avoid the anxiety of having to check in anticipating my next  post…;) And most of all, happy holidays!

Dorian FitzGerald at Clint Roenisch

Dorian FitzGerald will be hosting his second solo show, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, at Toronto’s Clint Roenisch Gallery tonight, Friday November 18, 2011.  Continuing with his familiar theme of excess, the monumental high-gloss acrylic paintings featured in the exhibition are completed in FitzGerald’s trademark technique using clear caulking to separate sections of colour within the piece. While in the past the artist has explored relics of  lost empires and collapsed pop-icons, this show will focus on the horded hauteur within the world’s more royally endowed lineages.

The artist will be in attendance for the opening tonight at Clint Roenisch Gallery, 944 Queen Street West.

Erin Vincent, Fight or Flight

I met up with Erin Vincent this Saturday at 99 Gallery. Though I was early, she was there when I arrived. I walked by her to catch a glimpse of the show before we began our talk. I later admitted to her that this was the first time I’ve asked an artist to meet with me before previewing their work. I guess the belaboured pace of my 34^th week of pregnancy is causing me to cut a few corners in my normal process. I had been charmed by the photo of Vincent’s work advertising her exhibition on Akimbo, and I was not disappointed by the show.

The exhibition is the culmination of 6 months of work, all incited by a traumatic break-up with a photographer/archivist. The resulting concepts orbit around nostalgic depictions of preservation and destruction, which Vincent insists are primarily coincidental collections from her sub-conscious.  Indeed, she explains all of the work through wandering autobiographical anecdotes. By the end of our conversation, I was unsure of which I found more intriguing- the work or the artist herself.

Entering the gallery, along the right wall is “Bombs,” the first of several wall installations. 77 tiny missiles, cast in cement from 11 different molds and each hand-finished with a blackened patina, discharge from the wall on pieces of thin wire. At the base of each wire is a perfectly cut circular platform cut from old drawing boards. Each sample shows evidence of childlike innocence- names and doodles carved into the surface.  The pairing of  the imagery of extreme violence paired with the innocence of childhood is not only an exposure of the multiple layers underneath our superficial perception, but also a consequence of Vincent’s experience as a high-school teacher at Toronto’s notoriously violent Sir Stanford Fleming Academy, where the presence of guns is the norm amidst the student population.

At the back of the gallery is an installation of tiny folded paper planes made from maps ofOntarioand nautical charts ofLakeOntariodated from the year of her mother’s birth. The planes, swooping like a vast twisted ribbon across the wall are inspired by the synchronized flights of starlings which Vincent can remember watching as a child. Recalling folding paper airplanes with her grandmother, the piece reflects the frivolity of discard and our lack of heirlooms in contemporary society. While the dates on the maps reflect the year of her mother’s birth, Vincent admits that she would never destroy pieces of her own family history for the sake of her art. She also affirms that the process of dissecting historical documents was somewhat of a release after her separation from the archivist.

The airplanes arise again within a series of sculptural memoirs preserved under large turn-of-the-century bell jars. It’s unsurprising that these little crafts are such a recurrent motif once the artist reveals that she has lived not only inCanada, but also inEngland,KoreaandFrance. Within these pieces, Vincent has constructed her wee jets from maps of places she has lived, and combined them with miniature bronze replicas of personal effects- her couch, her kitchen table. Usually preferring to work quickly, taking items from a vast personal collection of flea market finds, the bronze was the element that forced Vincent into the 6 month conceptual commitment that became this show. Ironic considering the catalyst was a break-up.

Evidence of this more whimsical style of production is seen in her series of “Smalls,” which feature an array of bizarre little sculptures made from some of her favourite recurring motifs- planes, clouds, bits of ivory (her family is from the Yukon, where apparently there is still an abundant ivory barter trade), tables.

The show, Fight or Flight, continues until this Saturday, November 19^th. More of this artist’s work, a series of paintings based on her preoccupation with collecting and preserving, can be seen at this year’s One of a Kind Show. Erin Vincent is an artist and a sculpture teacher at The Art Centre, Central Technical School inToronto.

Fausta Facciponte

I had the good fortune of running into Fausta Facciponte at her exhibition, “Sleepy Eyes,” which is on now at Stephen Bulger Gallery for one more week. Not entirely coincidental, her appearance was arranged by Alia Toor, who’s been working as the Education Coordinator at the Canadian Art Foundation for the last four years. I was taking a group of my grade 12 students from Central Commerce Collegiate on one of the bi-yearly Canadian Art School Hops. The tours, similar to the public art hops also run by the foundation, are led by curators, artists and other art professionals, taking students to a series of art galleries to engage them in conversation and expose them to contemporary art within our city.

Facciponte’s exhibition was definitely a highlight for both myself and my students on this tour of the galleries along Ossington and Queen West. Her large scale photos are at once eery and inviting, and the subject matter is such that it is easily relatable for anyone. The show is composed of 11 large colour photos of doll faces, all mounted in clear plexiglass to keep them inviting and (mostly) unframed.

The concept arose for Facciponte from examining her daughter’s relationship with her first toys. Thinking about how to compose a “memento mori,” Facciponte began to centre in on the intimate relationship between her daughter and one of her favourite dolls. After developing a successful strategy to create this first image, the artist scoured Ebay, thrift-stores and garage sales to find other dolls for the series.

Shot multiple times in detail then stitched together digitally, the portraits retain an extraordinary clarity which invites the viewer to explore the scratched eyes and flaking paint of the dolls’ faces.  The blurred outer edges of each image imitate our natural visual pattern, bringing these massive shots into a personal frame of reference that magnifies the duplicitous ambiance of the characters.  Admitting that other reviewers had termed the show “Creepy Eyes,” Facciponte is aware of the mildly disturbing flavour of the photos, though it was not her intent. Rather, all of the images are shot using candy coloured back-grounds and clean lighting.

I believe a large part of this show’s success is based upon this uneasy undertone of these intentionally inviting images. As per the original concept, the idea of the “memento mori,” comes across vividly as the viewer unintentionally ponders the past lives of these dolls and the owners which inflicted the signs of loving abuse on their immortal faces. In this childlike environment, we are unwittingly (and quite painlessly) thrust into a perusal of our own mortality.

Fausta Facciponte is based inToronto. Her show, “Sleepy Eyes,” runs until October 29, 2011 at Stephen Bulger gallery.

Scotia Bank’s FLUXe at Nuit Blanche.

I had the chance to preview Scotia Bank’s awe-inspiring installation at the Scotia Bank plaza off Adelaide Street last night. Entitled FLUXe to represent the state of constant change in which we live- and in which this installation operates- this piece is sure to be a crowd pleaser during tomorrow night’s Nuit Blanche.

More than anything, the work is technologically inspiring in an extraordinarily accessible way, while at times being graphically stunning to boot. Using Blackberry tablets, participants can access a control pad which allows them to draw simple shapes, words or random lines onto a plain red screen. In real-time, their drawing is projected onto FLUXe’s huge LED screen. An interlocking series of screens, the 100’ x 33’ screen is currently the largest one in Canada.

Unlike the overly simplistic digitized red-screen image that the participant sees, the image on the massive street LED is realized in one of nine artist created “brush-strokes”- basically a series of repeating graphics following the line drawn on the tablet. Participants draw simultaneously, and often their lines are invisible until a prior “artist’s” markings have faded out to reveal their contribution.

Curated by Steve DiLorenzo of Pixel gallery, his choice of nine artists reflects a graphic and international diversity that makes amplifies his conceptual vision and keeps the piece graphically entertaining. With some of the brushstrokes whirling around in an Avataresque state of 3D,  each accompanied by their matching soundtracks designed by Toronto musician Graham Miller, the piece won’t let down most of tomorrow’s inebriated revelers. I’d try to hit it early however if you’re eager to try your hand, as I imagine the thrill I experienced last night of drawing a few random lines on the tablet will probably come with a good hour of waiting during tomorrow’s festivities. If you do get the chance, I highly recommend trying Zena Holloway’s ethereal three-dimensional underwater photograph brushstroke or Brazilian artist Eduardo Recife’s melange of romantic iconography. (The two brushstrokes are featured intermingling on today’s header image)

Once you’ve finished your masterpiece, you can email a screen capture of your work (see mine below) to yourself to share with your friends. The capture will also be automatically uploaded to the FLUXe Facebook page which if you choose to ‘like’,  Scotia Bank will donate a $1 to Arts for Children and Youth up to a maximum of $15,000.

Lauren Hall

If you’re in the Kitchener area, check out Lauren Hall‘s work on display at the Kitchener City Hall as a part of their biennial Contemporary Art Forum (CAFKA). For more on Hall, take a look at my recent article in Magenta Magazine.

Winnie Truong, The Fringes

The last year and a half since she graduated from OCAD have been a whirlwind of activity for young Toronto artist Winnie Truong. The winner of the BMO 1^st! artist prize for Ontario in 2010, and the recipient of the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Award has kept the artist well acquainted to attention even at this early stage in her career.

I caught up with Truong at El Almacon, steps away from her current solo show, The Fringes, at Erin Stump Projects (ESP) last week to discuss her art. I arrived slightly early to wolf down an empanada so as not to be disturbed mid- interview by the little body-snatcher I’m currently hosting.

Unlike her work, there is something refreshingly understated about this artist. Despite wearing nearly all black, her face has the fresh scrubbed cleanliness that comes with a full night’s sleep and the years spent under 25. The interview may have been shortest I have ever done with an artist, in many ways Truong lets her art speak for itself. That said there was nothing terse about her answers. She presents herself as open, amicable and gracious.

Her artistic direction came near the end of her Fine Arts degree at OCAD. Before pursuing the drawn image, Truong was focusing on perfecting a rigorous classical painting repertoire, fueled by academic art historical research and her explorations into cultural identity. Attempting to work within the unspoken hierarchy of artistic media, Truong made the necessary switch from acrylics to oils during her fourth year. Unsurprisingly after this transition, the change in technique left her feeling restricted.

Things changed after a drawing class with artist and OCAD instructor, Luke Painter. Painter inspired Truong to “free up” her artistic style. Abandoning the artistic hierarchy altogether, Truong began focusing on drawing.

This medium transition allowed her to shift her conceptual focus as well. Newly inspired by science fiction oddities  rather than the examination of her own culture, she started to explore the idea of the mutant or the outsider. In the earlier work on her website, the mutations within her figures include not just her “trademark” errant hairgrowth, but also shiney revolting red boils and misplaced teeth.

The “visceral discomfort” caused by her images is her primary conceptual motivation. Upon seeing her work, I easily jumped to the conclusion that the hair spoke of unrealistic expectations of female beauty. While she is definitely exploring our reactions and concepts of beauty, Truong’s primary reason for focusing on hair it seems, is simply the beauty with which it fits her medium.  She is quite adamant about wanting her work to remain completely apolitical, and have its worth reside in the emotional disquiet of the viewer- hence only one bearded lady present in her entire body of work.

Working strand by strand, Truong imagines herself a wire artist sculpting abundant locks on her figures and twisting threads of colour across their bodies to create impeccable contours to describe the skin and features of the subjects.  Denying extensive study of colour theory during her research as a painter, she insists that her conglomerate use of colour is instinctive and developed through the natural trial and error of dedicated artistic practice.

Apparently, Truong has been accused of using her friends as subjects, as the figures all evoke such strong personalities through their abnormal extensions.   Instead, the artist’s muse was once the models in fashion and hair magazines, though now her repertoire of facial features allows her to draw more from her imagination than from source material.

Winnie Truong’s exhibition, the Fringes,  is on until October 2 at ESP,1086 1/2 Queen Street West. Watch for her work in Lot42 of this year’s Casey House Art With Heart Auction, as well as Youthline’s Line Art 2010 Auction. Truong is represented by Erin Stump Projects inToronto, and Katherine Mulharin, New York.

Bogdan Luca at Le Gallery

I visited Bogdan Luca last week at his studio on Ossington above Awol Gallery. He was busily preparing for his solo show The Roving Iconist, which opened Friday night at Le Gallery. Dressed in paint splattered blue mechanic coveralls, Luca led me through the work in his tiny white box-studio. With paintings stapled to the cracking walls sometimes three canvasses deep, the air was thick with the smell of oil and solvents. It wasn’t until my own comforted feeling of nostalgia wore off that I noticed how dizzy I was.

Having started off dedicated to painting purely figural studies, Luca’s work is now focused not only on playing with the relationship between figure and ground, but also and even more importantly, in resolving the viewer’s  relationships to images within our heavily image saturated world.  Like many artists  Luca is chronically archiving multi-sourced visual footage to use as the fragments which will inevitably compose any given final work.

Starting with the background as the conceptual framework for this present body of work, Luca looks at the connective structures within the physical network of the previous revolution. Tunnels, bridges and ramps become easy metaphors to examine our own contemporary concepts of progress and movement in a digital world. The juxtapositions of unrelated imagery atop of these connection metaphors parallel the travel of information and commerce within the ether of cyberspace.

It’s unapparent in many cases as to where the imagery originally hails from though individual light sources on the various figures give clues as to their independence. Unified by a dark candy coloured palette of blue, cherry, violet and apple-green, the images are unapologetically stitched together, sometimes amid purposely left white expanses to create disquieting visual-non-sequiturs.  Though each is heavily weighted in symbolism, the artist welcomes viewer interpretation of his unique scenarios. The unlikely pairings of the various unexplained figures seem to be Luca’s attempt to make narrative sense of the mass of disparate yet poignant imagery within his archives. By compiling these images into an expressive body with the potential to instigate emotions in others, Luca challenges the passivity of the image and creates the argument of image as experience.

In our media saturated world, it’s unsurprising that a visual artist would seek to validate the value of their experience of the seen world- real or virtual. I’ve heard similar conceptual arguments before-Toronto artist Brendan Flanagan comes to mind. In a world where information is the greatest commodity, how could we argue that one couldn’t gain meaningful experience virtually? Can it be argued then, that an artist who is painting entirely from images culled from outside sources is indeed still painting from their own experience?

As I listened to Luca explain his conceptual musings, I couldn’t help but begin to focus on his thick European accent. Having arrived from Romania with his family over 17 years ago, it’s unfair to call this young artist anything but Canadian. When he begins to talk about his various representations of iconoclasm however, I can’t help but think about the importance of the human experiential lens through which we translate our visual experiences.

In one of his works an iconoclast sprays a white background amidst his  surroundings. In another, a pair of them erect a blank wall to block the gallery of image history that lay behind. As the artist recalls regimes of the past trying to wipe out the history of various peoples through the destruction of images, I feel that Luca’s own cultural heritage is an undeniable, if subconscious, influence on his work. With that, I wonder if the concept of image as experience even warrants dispute. As Luca struggles to narrate his experiences of these emotionally jarring images through a possibly subconscious unpacking of his own early history, I wonder how it could ever be possible to separate the experience of an image from the gallery of human experience.

Bogdan Luca’s, The Roving Iconist is showing at Le Gallery until July 17, 2011.

Dynamic Landscape

“…it’s hard times for polar bears…”

-Scarlett Hooft Graafland

Marshall McLuhan’s interpretation of the Gestalt concept of figure and ground is shown through four vividly distinct and culturally diverse examples in the CONTACT Primary Exhibition: Dynamic Landscape, which opens tomorrow, April 29, in the main space of the gallery. As I mentioned in my last article, the theme for this year’s CONTACT festival was inspired by comparing the insidious visions of environmental devastation in Burtynsky’s Oil, to McLuhan’s vision of the “figure” as the car, and the “ground” as the abundant yet often forgotten accessories to car culture.

While the “grounds” in the pieces in Dynamic Landscape all differ geographical and contextually, they are all intrinsically defined by their human inhabitants- visible or not. Curated by CONTACT Artistic Director Bonnie Rubenstein, the show is comprised of four international artists: Olga Chagaoutdinova, Scarlette Hooft Graafland, Viviane Sassen, and Dayanita Singh.

Olga Chagaoutdinova, Living Corner, Cuban Pictures, 2009, Courtesy of the Artist, Galerie Trois Points, Montreal, and Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa

Olga Chagaoutdinova gives us richly coloured, over-inhabited interiors in the contrasting climates of Cuba and Russia. The moods of the Cuban interiors are familiar to anyone accustomed Polidori’s Havana series. Peeling paint, repurposed materials and missing tiles are repeating motifs in these sometimes near-decrepit living spaces. Even tiny spaces are filled with plants that call to the heat of open-doors. The warm blues and greens from the Cuban interiors are repeated in the decorative motifs of natural landscapes within the Russian spaces. In Chair at the Beach in the Bedroom, a traditionally upholstered chair sits in front of a photographic wall mural of a tropical beach scene.

Olga Chagaoutdinova, Chair at the beach in the bedroom, Russian Picture, 2006, Courtesy of the Artist, Galerie Trois Points, Montreal, and Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa

Viviane Sassen takes us across the globe into an unfamiliar vision of Africa. Parceled glimpses of deep earthy browns are contrasted by ultra-synthetic technicolours and starched whites. Gestural dramatizations evoking pieta flood the figures in her photos with emotion, which would have otherwise been starved due to their hidden faces.

Viviane Sassen, Belladonna, 2010, Courtesy of Motive Gallery, Amsterdam and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Dayanita Singh’s series Dream Villa, takes us to a village in India. While the skies are dark, aggressive pools of artificial light pierce the warmth of the night-time imagery with cold reflecting hues. The stark lights seem an alien presence that conjure feelings of disquietude.

Dayanita Singh, Dream Villa 25, 2007, 2008, Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland portrays images of our own true North. An avid traveler, Hooft Graafland was attracted to the idea of visiting the Canadian north from slides shown in class by a high-school teacher who had spent time working there. On her own journey, she spent four months in Igloolik, Nunavut living with local families to immerse her understanding beyond that of the outsider who understands that the people and their lands are in danger. The themes of environmental degradation and cultural extinction appear in stunning portrayals of the northern landscape. At times, Hooft Graafland steers away from the over-politicization of her work by adding absurdist elements of humour.

Sitting amidst the stark blue and white landscape, the artist is draped with the hide of a polar bear. Reminiscent of Marcus Coates shamanic escapades dressed in deer-hide, the message behind the image is impossible to ignore, but the humour adds a palatable lightness.

Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Lemonade Igloo, 2007, Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

In Lemonade Igloo, a lone figure leans agains a rusty toned Igloo. The artist explains that she wanted to construct an Igloo out of a commercially popular drink to underline the generation divide and the gradual loss of cultural traditions. The deep reddish hue of the Igloo seemed appropriately reminiscent of blood, especially as it is hung on the same wall as a gruesome portrait of a palm tree composed of entrails.

Dynamic Landscape is one of the six Primary Exhibitions for this year’s CONTACT festival. It’s always a good party at MOCCA, so don’t miss the opening tomorrow between 7-10. The show runs until June 5 alongside Fred Herzog’s photos of Vancouver in the 1950’s-1960’s, organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Scarlett Hooft Graafland will be speaking about her work this Sunday, May 1, between 12-1 at MOCCA, followed by insights into her photographic and video works offered by Olga Chagaoutdinova between 1-2 pm.