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:

Down in Miami, Pae White is as charming as ever

You may recall Pae White's show Material Mutters (often misremembered as "Material Matters") at the Power Plant in 2010.  Well, here is her latest work, currently featured at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair:

FIGURE 1:  Pae White, Pop Storm, 2011
Japanese paper, clay, black thread, dimensions [presumably] variable.
Image courtesy of Kaufmann Repetto.

I'm really enjoying the lighthearted humour of Pop Storm!  Let me be frank, Pop Art wasted no time transforming from a campy, accessible rebuttal against Minimalism into a bloated self-congratulatory monster (for whose persistence we have Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami to thank) [Figures 2 & 3]. This tongue-in-cheek installation is fun and friendly.  The puffed clay popcorn kernels are even hanging at mouth height!  Talk about accessible.  Sad to say, this type of contemporary art still incites baffled skepticism in the general public.  To the average person, work such as Pop Storm seems to beg the question, "How is this art?!"

Oakville Galleries, Part 1 Gairloch Gardens: Chris Kline & Janet Cardiff

Saturday marked the first of many visits to the Oakville Galleries.  The Galleries are locally known as Og2, which refers to two locations, one gallery nestled into the downtown library, while the other overlooks Lake Ontario on a gorgeous waterfront estate.

Each location hosts a discreet exhibit, together comprising their winter programming (click here to view their Akimbo).  Both are on par with——if not better than——any public programming in TO right now!

Downtown, Centennial Square
Hyper Spaces*: José Manuel Ballester, An Te Liu & Lynne Marsh (26 Nov, 2011 – March 4, 2012)

* see Part 2!

Waterfront, Gairloch Gardens
Chris Kline – Bright Limit (Nov 26, 2011 – Feb 19, 2012)
& participatory site-specific experiential work by Janet Cardiff

FIGURE 1: Oakville Galleries, Gairloch Gardens location.

It was a perfect day to experience the lakefront location——crisp, cloudy, with strong sunlight breaking erratically over the water… one of those pale days hinting at winter, when a strong flash of colour would take you by surprise.  Apart from a few birds and a small wedding party, the grounds were quiet [Figure 1].  Mark and I were the first visitors to the pristine Chris Kline exhibit.

Oakville Galleries, Part 2 Centennial Square: Hyper SpacesJosé Manuel Ballester, An Te Liu & Lynne Marsh

Space,… the final frontier… 

Oh wait, the room's just kinda dirty.  Hrm…

FIGURE 1: An Te Liu, Matter, 2008 [remounted in 2011]
installation: closed-circuit surveillance camera, light, airborne particulates, two projectors
Installation view, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2008

Full disclosure: the image above looks nothing like what Mark and I experienced in Hyper Spaces, the group exhibit at the Oakville Galleries' library location.  Firstly, video was projected on two adjoining walls, the image generated from dust particles intentionally left in the space.  It looked like a dull——dare I say, "flat"——show at the planetarium.  Secondly, the room was small, with an unbelievably high ceiling.  We took note of a camera set up to film a beam of light a few feet off the floor, and after pausing for a few distracting seconds while our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we found two bean bag chairs and promptly flopped down.  Moments later, we were looking at… well, nothing, essentially. 

I turned to Mark and commented that the irony of this work is that once natural propensity for laziness overcomes the viewer, no dust particles are picked up by air currents and launched comet-like across the "screens". 

Luckily, we were in a playful Adventuring Mood, and decided to take matters into our own hands.  Let the record show that bean-bag chairs incite childish behaviour in gallery goers.

Exhibition Essay: Rooting Communities

Forest: November 4 - December 5, 2010

Julie M. Gallery, Toronto

Entering a forest has a peculiar psychological effect on us since these dense arboreal spaces are both primal and strikingly eternal. Civilizations rely upon them for the most basic of materials, while forests also provide essential spaces that allow individuals to meditate upon the divide between nature and our constructed environment. They invoke a sense of timelessness that simultaneously lends urgency to our daily lives. Notable art critic John Berger weighed in that the temporal qualities of forests, "oblige us to recognize how much is hidden" (143). 

In Canada, we take our temperate climate and densely forested landscape for granted. Our abundant ecological heritage is reflected in the artwork of the Group of Seven and the rich history of arboreal work at the core of Quebecois painting. Choosing to curate an exhibit of Israeli paintings and photographs titled Forest is fascinating in that it caters to our Canadian national aesthetic; however, these landscapes by Maya Bar, Anat Betzer, Dan Birenboim, Yehuda Porbuchrai, and Alina Speshilov are gravid with a hidden history of Israel, Middle Eastern politics, and foreign cultural significance. 

FIGURE 1: Maya Bar, Trees in my Mirror, 2008
C-print, 50 x 70 cm

Exhibition Essay: Miriam Cabessa – Notes, Echoes, Little Secrets

Miriam Cabessa: in her wake
September 22 – November 6, 2011, Julie M. Gallery, Toronto

The drawings and paintings of Miriam Cabessa are focused explorations of direct contact between the artist and surface. Neither the product of a pencil or a brush, this work flies in the face of tradition.  At first glance, it is nearly impossible to decypher the process behind these creations.  Certainly, there is no familiar trace of brushstrokes or hatching——and this is perplexing.

The precision inherent in Cabessa’s work ignites the imagination.  Instead of viewing the work as an autonomous object, the mind automatically tries to unravel the process by which it was created.  And until 2009, when Cabessa revealed her signature technique in a painting performance at Pulse New York art fair, her process remained largely a mystery [Figure 1].

Using oil on linen or masonite, or powdered graphite and turpentine on paper, Cabessa creates a surface wash that is sensitive to her touch in the same way that photographic paper is sensitive to light.  The image is always created by exposing negative spaces: pulling or scraping pigment aside to heighten the contrast of her compositions.  The images she crafts are traces of her movements; essentially they are drawings in light. Critic John Yau writes that, “Cabessa’s composition is a record of a single, sustained and segmented gesture, a discrete performance.”[i] 

FIGURE 1: Miriam Cabessa creating an untitled work at Pulse NY, 2009