Blog Archives

Paul Wackers: Almost Somewhere

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This weekend is your last chance to catch Paul Wackers’ gem of a show at Narwhal Projects in the Junction. Titled Almost Somewhere, Wackers’ lovingly crafted paintings suffuse the orderly arrangements of still lifes and interiors with the disruptive energies of emergent or external forces and frameworks, transporting the viewer to a place between Wacker’s real and imagined worlds. Richly detailed textures and colours describing beloved collections of rocks, pots, and plants are juxtaposed with boldly graphic lines, planes, patterns, and shapes both hard-edged and fuzzed out, creating a playful and mysterious tension between the everyday and the extraordinary. Go see it if you can; Almost Somewhere is great place to get lost.

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The erasures of Aliki Braine (plus a Palíndromo postscript)

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Aliki Braine’s altered images speak to obliteration in its many forms. Synonymous with annihilation, eradication, extinction, ruination, and termination, the act of obliterating implies a kind of killing, and at first glance her images, like memento mori, conspire to remind us that all life inevitably ends. (From the Online Etymology Dictionary: memento mori, n. “reminder of death,” 1590s, from Latin, lit. “remember that you must die.”)

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Exhibition: I Thought There Were Limits

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Closing this weekend is a wonderful exhibition by U of T Curatorial Studies graduate, Julia Abraham. I Thought There Were Limits features site-specific work by Karen Henderson, Yam Lau, Gordon Lebredt, Kika Thorne, and Josh Thorpe, all thoughtfully installed in the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.

Bringing together both new and previously conceived works, the exhibition tests the limits of site-specificity as it relates and responds to spatial context and/or conditions. For example, Karen Henderson’s wall-filling photograph of the gallery floor, inverted to eye-bending effect, fulfills art-historical criteria for site-specific work by responding very directly to both a particular place and time. Henderson’s work, with its subtle reflections of lighting patterns from the gallery’s previous show, speaks eloquently to the recent history, materiality, and spatial conditions of the JMB Gallery, and would not — could not — make sense in any other space.

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Joining: Agathe de Bailliencourt

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The month of May belongs to Agathe de Bailliencourt, who will have two solo shows, Eintritt in Toronto and Sheer in New York, plus a site-specific projection onto The New Museum, concurrently on view. Eintritt means “joining” in German (de Bailliencourt is French but currently based in Berlin) and this post joins together images from both of her painting exhibitions as well as selected past projections and site-specific installations. The images are strikingly distinct, yet demonstrate de Bailliencourt’s continuing interest in the expressive mark of the hand (particularly her graffiti-inflected splashes and scrawls), as well as her ongoing engagement with architectural form, space, and especially movement/directionality delineated through the use of decisive gestures, layered textures, and vibrantly contrasting colours.

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The Future Perfect: cinema and obsolescence in contemporary art

Today’s post is a virtual exhibition featuring historic and contemporary film, video, installation, and performance works that utilize film and analogue technologies in a search for the cinematic, even as these materials and methods become obsolete and disappear.

Based in part on a reading of Matilde Nardelli’s essay, Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence, this exhibition addresses the widespread use of outmoded or obsolete technologies in recent art and questions the interpretation that artists are engaging in acts of fetishization, nostalgia or mourning for analogue in the wake of digital technology.

Taken together, these works from the past and recent history of contemporary art resonate visually and conceptually with each other and with the poetic potential for cinema in a digital future.

…VFu

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The Line

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Last fall, we came across this incredible image and queued it up to post. Then Sandy hit, and suddenly this image was both more and less relevant than ever. In the intervening months, as recovery turned to rebuilding along the Eastern Seaboard, we took a hiatus to make final preparations for our launch. This March, as winter transitions to spring, TYPOLOGY crosses one more line in its own journey toward existence, as The Line becomes our first post from our new website.

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Welcome to our new website!

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Hello again, and welcome to Typology.ca!

As many of you know, we’ve been posting original content to our blog, Typologica, for over the past year as we wait patiently for Artscape to complete renovations to our future home. Construction on the Shaw Street School continues, and the ongoing delays are a not unexpected outcome of the remediation, preservation, and modernization that needs to be done to fully rehabilitate this beautiful heritage building. In the meantime, the response to the blog has been truly wonderful and we are grateful for all the interest, support, and encouragement we’ve received thus far.

With the launch of typology.ca, we’re thrilled to bring you lots more information on the project space, guidelines for art and curatorial submissions, and of course, continued posting to Typologica in its new home here on our website.

And, what you see here is just the beginning. As submissions, exhibitions, events, and other projects are developed and finalized, we’ll be updating the site and blog with announcements, artist profiles, a curated artist registry, an online shop, and more!

So please take a look around, subscribe to the blog for updates (if you haven’t already), and consider making a submission for possible inclusion in a future exhibition or event.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at info (at) typology (dot) ca. This website is in beta phase, so please bear with us as we work out the kinks. Feedback is encouraged and appreciated at any time.

As always, we thank you for your continued interest and support and we enter the next phase of project space development!

Construction Update

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Greetings friends and followers!

We hope you are having an enjoyable holiday season so far. Here’s a quick post to update you on what’s been happening at TYPOLOGY. Since our last post, we’ve reached the final stages of completion for phase one of our new website, and will be ready to launch in the new year. We’re excited to soon be bringing you an official introduction to the project space, information on what’s to come, and guidelines for artists and curators who may be interested in participating. Also we’ll be moving our blog, Typologica, to a new home within the website, from which we’ll continue to post updates, reviews, and news as we prepare for our grand opening later in 2013.

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After the storm: Denyse Thomasos

The past week has been a whirlwind in many ways, not least because of the devastation Hurricane Sandy wreaked on the East Coast. Here in Toronto, we saw howling winds, a week of rain, and trees down, but nothing like the floods and power outages to our south. As cleanup began over the weekend in New York and New Jersey, we kept tabs on our friends’ progress down there while confronting a wholly unrelated, yet no less saddening tragedy up here — the death of a person we didn’t even know.

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Art Toronto 2012: Highlights from the Fair

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets: Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers, 2008,
digital pigment print, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

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The Toronto International Art Fair is bigger and better than ever, having eclipsed Art Chicago (which was canceled earlier this year) as Merchandise Mart’s only North American art fair north of the border and not on the coasts. (In case you’re wondering, Merchandise Mart, which also runs The Armory Show, Volta Basel and NY, and Art Platform Los Angeles, was itself recently bought and renamed by Swiss media conglomerate, Informa Plc.)

With over a hundred exhibitors from 23 continents, more than 20,000 visitors expected to attend, and projected sales in excess of $20 million, Art Toronto 2012 set itself apart this year with a rich program of panel discussions and curator’s tours co-developed with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the Power Plant, and the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (MoCCA), a diverse selection of artists and galleries highlighted within the Focus ASIA area and exhibition, the AGO’s ongoing and very visible acquisition program, a capsule exhibition of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition finalists for 2012, and a focus on the fresh perspectives offered by newer galleries in the Next section.

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