Saturday, December 18th: Profits / Prophets Joel Richardson's Suitman ends with an artist talk & screening

'Tis the season to evade stressed out consumers.

And there is an alternative: engage with artists before they hunker down for winter! Seize the opportunity Saturday, December 18 at Oz Studios where you can meet Joel Richardson, creator of Toronto's most (in)famous, scandal-embroiled mural. 

Installation view of Joel Richardson's solo show Suitman.  Photo credit: Nekhat Ahmed

Yes, I mean the creator of the Dupont Street city-commissioned mural, erased during Mayor Ford's ham-fisted initiative to lambaste street art, now fully restenciled & restored.  Joel Richardson's solo show Suitman comes on the heels of work featured at Occupy Wall Street and at the Chelsea Museum, New York.

Between 8 & 10 pm, Joel will speak about the Suitman exhibit, screen a short film, and introduce models used for his stencils.  (No, Harper will obviously not be in attendance.)

At the galleries, Queen West West Nicole Collins & Kate McQuillen

Spare a few moments at Queen and Lansdowne to view General Hardware's latest (and, thus far, greatest) solo show  Nicole Collins: The Reconstruction on view through Jan 21.  Collins works like a force of nature, with great energy, wicked irreverence, and specific rigorous parameters.  What she does with encaustic is pretty damn amazing and recalls the work of Ad Reinhard, Anselm Kiefer, and Alexis Harding.  As my friend Lee puts it, ee cummings-style, "nicole collins' show at general hardware contemporary is incredible and nearly made me weep. go look at it with your eyeballs." 

Though the works in this show vary in scale, three generously proportioned canvases loom large in my memory, but I'll stick to writing about one: a massive spectre in silver and cerulean blue titled Lunar Caustic.  When critic Gary Michael Dault quipped that this is the flagship piece of the exhibit, he hit the proverbial nail on the head.

As yet, Lunar Caustic has no internet presence, and I won't take a camera into a gallery on principle.  A quick disclaimer on the image below*: this detail is a background found on one of Collins' blogs, and the only visual reference to a wall-sized behemoth of a work made of torn and cracked, silver-basted translucent encaustic.  This scarred, patched hide is occasionally pierced by strident patches of blue, a concentrated field of which bathes the top of the canvas.  In it I recognize something of Moby Dick's terrible, enthralling beauty. 
Please.  See it in person.

*Supposed detail of Lunar Caustic, perhaps unfinished.

Jim Campbell kills it at Pari Nadimi, while David Rokeby's piece is just dead

Jim Campbell, Exploded View (Commuters), 2011
1152 LEDs, custom electronics, wire, steel, 72 x 46 x 38".  Photo credit: Derek Weidl

Be sure to visit the Pari Nadimi Gallery, just south of Queen at 254 Niagara St. before December 22nd.  I've been twice and intend to see the show once more tomorrow.  Both times David Rokeby's interactive sound piece has been temporarily turned off — the Achilles Heel of New Media Art is that generally only the artist can fix it should something go awry.  Luckily, the highlight of Toronto's most innovating art/tech show of the year is an installation of hundreds of spherical LEDs by the San Francisco artist, Jim Campbell.  At first glance it seems like the lights are reacting to your presence in their vicinity, but distance disproves this theory.  Instead the lights which are turned off resolve into life-size three-dimensional silhouettes who "walk" though the field of LEDs!

Nothing beats experiencing this New Media piece in the flesh and photos fail to reproduce its effect, so try to see it while it's still up!  Alternately, a second installation of Exploded View (Commuters) has popped up at the The Museum (Kitchener), where Campbell will be leading a public tour of the show on December 11 at 11:30am.  In fact, there is a lot happening at Kitchener Galleries right now!  Check it out: