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.

AGO Artspeak

If you missed your chance to hear me ramble about art and artists at last month’s AGO Artspeak Series due to the sudden onslaught of grey skies and cold rain, feel free to listen to the free podcast here http://artmatters.ca/wp/2011/04/saturday-artspeak-series-merge-audio/.

Contact 2011: Figure and Ground

As the five rows of black fold out chairs became occupied with familiar and unfamiliar faces, and the space surrounding them gradually filled with lanky tripods supporting cameras from the numerous media sponsors, the breadth of this year’s CONTACT Photography festival started to become excitingly apparent.  In its fifteenth year, the festival has grown to become the largest photography festival in the world.

Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1957, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa

This year it will feature an impressive 6 Primary Exhibitions, 14 Public Installations and 44 Featured Exhibitions, as well as 159 Open Exhibitions displaying the work of more than 1,000 artists in venues across the city. The month-long event is also an opportunity for career development for budding photographers through educational programs including: Magnum Photos Workshop, the week-long shooting intensive held at Ryerson University, the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Portfolio Reviews. Held at the Gladstone Hotel on May 1 and May 2, the reviews offer artists and photographers a chance to meet and critique with established professionals.

Photographers participating in the festival this year also have the chance to win $5,000 through the newly established BMW exhibition Prize, as well as $50,000 through Scotiabank’s Photography Award- also new this year. The three Canadian artists short-listed for this year’s prize include Roy Arden from Vancouver, Lynne Cohen from Montreal, and Toronto’s own Robin Collyer. Aside from the cash prize, the winner will also receive a curated exhibition at next year’s festival and a book deal with Steidl. (For some interesting background information on Steidl, check out How to Make a Book with Steidl, on at the Tiff Bell Lightbox this Friday as a part of Hot Docs).

The theme for this year’s show, Figure and Ground, evolved around discussion of the Marshall McLuhan inspired theme from last year, Pervasive Influence. After one of the most anticipated highlights of this year’s festival was secured, Edward Burtynsky: Oil,  Bonnie Rubenstein (CONTACT Artist Director) and Darcy Killeen (CONTACT Executive Director) began to discuss conceptual similarities between the human devastation on our environment shown so powerfully by Burtynsky, and McLuhan’s revisioning of the Gestalt idea of figure and ground through examination of the car as “figure” and the “ground” as the supporting structures and industries, such as the highways and the auto-industry at large.

Within the Gestalt theory, the “ground” could be said to be taken for granted, it is the unnoticed surrounding space which is influenced by the more active “figure.”  Within this ideology, Burtynsky’s photograph’s of the almost unnoticed (or at least often ignored) mass devastation caused by our unstoppable consumption of petroleum is framed with startling eloquence.

Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, USA, 1999, photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier, Toronto

Stay tuned for regular reviews and recommendations of shows and events within the CONTACT festival for the month of May.