TYPOLOGY is pleased to present On The Surface | Susana Reisman, featuring the Toronto-based artist’s latest findings from her multi-year investigation into the nature of wood. Encompassing aspects of both drawing and painting even as it foregrounds relationships between sculpture and photography, the exhibition includes a selection of large-scale colour photographs and several freestanding wood sculptures.
(Note to our mailing list subscribers: sorry about that bait and switch from yesterday — but we hope you enjoyed the posts by our resident curator, Oana Tanase, and intern, Katelyn Gallucci. We’re now sending you the info on our upcoming screenings from CHINA NOW: Independent Visions, for reals! Read on for details, and if you’re as excited as we are, contact us at rsvp@typology.ca to get your own personal discount code for 10% off advance tickets — a bit of special treatment for our long suffering subscribers. :)
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TYPOLOGY is proud to announce our support for CHINA NOW: Independent Visions, in the form of two exciting film screenings we’ll host in Small World Music Centre’s theatre space at Artscape Youngplace this spring.
Organized by Toronto-based curator and critic Shelly Kraicer, LA-based producer Karin Chien, and Chicago-based filmmaker JP Sniadecki, CHINA NOW is the touring arm of Cinema on the Edge, a program of 29 experimental films representing the best of Chinese independent film festivals from 2012-14. Launched to wide acclaim in New York last summer, Cinema on the Edge will debut in Toronto this March with a monthlong program of eight documentaries hosted by TIFF Cinematheque, under the series title The Crisis of the Real: New Chinese Independent Documentaries.
Following fast on their heels, TYPOLOGY will present our own selection from the original series: three groundbreaking animations and one experimental feature which comprise an eye- and ear-opening program of independent contemporary cinema from across China. Featuring filmmakers from Shenyang in the north to Guangzhou in the south, and Tibet in the west to Taiwan in the east, this selection bespeaks volumes on the vastness of space, time scales, and cultural difference experienced by these artists, who must find their voices in a country where censorship remains the order of the day.
TYPOLOGY is pleased to announce the launch of Conversations, a new series exploring research-based arts by Curator-in-Residence, Oana Tanase. Her first interview features Brooklyn-based artist, Rob Carter.
Rob Carter was born in Worcester, UK and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and later received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York. He has shown his work internationally, with solo exhibitions at Art In General in New York, Galerie Stefan Röpke in Cologne, Station Independent Projects in New York, Galeria Arnés y Ropke in Madrid and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome. He has also exhibited at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, The Field Museum in Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
above: Janine Miedzik, Blaze (detail), site-specific installation in the south stairwell at Artscape Youngplace
FLIGHTS & LANDINGS is a Canadian Art magazine Must-See Show!
With three amazing site-specific installations in the large stairwells at Artscape Youngplace, plus a selection of smaller works by artists Tamara Gayer, Christine Gedeon, and Janine Miedzik in the third-floor project space (#302), FLIGHTS & LANDINGS has something for everyone. Visitors have been sharing their pictures all over the interwebs and we’ll be posting more pics soon — but truly, these works are meant to be experienced in person. The project space portion is open for just a few more weekends (stairwells to remain on view beyond exhibition close on April 19th). Don’t miss it!
TYPOLOGY is pleased to present FLIGHTS & LANDINGS, a two-part exhibition of work by three multidisciplinary artists from three different cities: Brooklyn-based Tamara Gayer, Berlin-based Christine Gedeon, and Toronto-based Janine Miedzik. Known for their visually engaging, site-responsive approaches to installation, each artist will debut a large-scale project in one of the stairwell galleries at Artscape Youngplace (the Flights), complemented by a selection of smaller artworks representing object-oriented aspects of their practices in the project space (the Landings).
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.
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.
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.
As Occupy Wall Street celebrates its one-year anniversary, art and design communities around the world continue to parse the movement’s implications and effects through themed exhibitions, festivals, and ideas. Earlier this year, on the heels of the stridently political 7th Berlin Biennale, Kassel’s Documenta 13 announced its own intent to question “the persistent belief in economic growth”. Stateside, the New Museum dubbed their triennial The Ungovernables (selected images below), focusing on “both anarchic and organized resistance: protest, chaos, and imagination as a refusal of the extended period of economic, ideological, sectarian, and political conflict that marks the generation’s inheritance”. And here in Canada the Contact Photography Festival, centered on the theme Public, positioned itself as an exploration of “photography’s role in the public performance of identity as an important means to respond to, intervene within, and document political actions” (see our review here).
Spring is in full swing and Occupy has exploded back on the scene with impressive May Day demonstrations. As a movement which unites an incredible array of (sometimes conflicting, but that’s part of the beauty) agendas under the inclusive umbrella of the 99%, it has been uniquely effective in staying on message: Occupy isn’t going anywhere. Or perhaps: it is going to be everywhere.
What’s always been striking about the movement (as we noted in our previous post on Occupy’s aesthetic beginnings, linked below) is its focused attention on creating visually powerful moments that appeal to the heart and linger in the mind. From the start it has adopted a sophisticated, multifaceted approach to protest that is informed by contemporary art, design, and social media as much as it is by socio-economic theory and political action. While we can’t pretend to be able to cover all of the visual, performative, and often subversive mass media tactics that Occupy has deployed over the past weeks and months, we can offer a selection of some of the more intriguing arts-related articles and images that have surfaced in our news feeds over recent days. To a limited extent, we’ll try to update this post with fresh links and images as they emerge during what we’ll call OWS Chapter Two.