TYPOLOGY

Author: Shani K Parsons

  • In the air: Exhibits, books, and yes, binders full of women


    Staff at the Mechanics Institute, Toronto, 1895, from Toronto Reference Library Archives

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that the internet’s been ablaze with binder references since Mitt Romney’s infamous gaffe during the 2nd presidential debate just over a week ago. Not only have the inevitable Tumblr and Twitter accounts blown up with remarkable speed and fury, Amazon saw an explosion of satirical binder reviews submitted in the debate’s wake, raising this form of crowdsourced art to a whole new level of political engagement.

    Here in Toronto, we were surprised and not just a bit delighted to see the Toronto Reference Library jump into the game with their timely blog post, “Binders full of women: Etchings at the Toronto Reference Library“. Featuring an extensive engravings collection of 18th and 19th century actors, dancers, and japanese kabuki prints, as well as hundreds of thousands of historical fashion, graphic design, and advertising images organized by decade, we’d argue that the TRL’s binders inspire a bit more confidence than Romney’s — and at the very least are probably quite a bit thicker.

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  • Too much photography: The passions of Martin Parr


    Martin Parr, Kleine Scheidegg, 1994

    Martin Parr gave a great talk at the AGO last night — by turns witty, irreverent (why do photobook intro texts “always seem to mention Robert Frank, or Walker Evans, or Atget? It’s boring as fuck!”), serious, and sincere. For over 40 years, Parr has been obsessively documenting humanity’s obsessions, turning his camera on formerly overlooked aspects of modern life including consumer culture, the middle class, tourism, bad weather, the British, the bureaucratic, and the boring. In the process, he has forever changed how we look at and use photography — both to examine and understand ourselves as much as the other — generating through thousands of images an exhaustive yet strangely intimate anthropology of the absurd.

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  • In the air: Postscript to open and other news

    Opening tomorrow at MCA Denver is Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, a wide-ranging exhibition that features the work of over fifty artists and writers including Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Christian Bök, Marcel Broodthaers, Ryan Gander, Michelle Gay, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Gareth Long, Michael Maranda, Seth Price, Kay Rosen, Dexter Sinister, Andy Warhol. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper which explore the artistic possibilities of language.

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  • Corner: John Armstrong and Paul Collins at General Hardware Contemporary

    The image arrives as so many do these days, in our News Feed, onscreen. Superimposed upon nondescript boxes, thick lines in contrasting colours cross over each other, canceling the underlying image in a graphically powerful act of negation — it grabs our attention immediately. At first glance, it could be the document of a tricky installation; lines or forms projected or assembled in dimensional space, then photographed from a precise vantage point so as to resolve the fragmented reality into a convincingly flat, yet altogether illusory image. But doubt creeps in upon closer inspection, as the interplay between surface, depth, and detail begins to open the image to all manner of interpretation: are we in fact looking at a photograph of an installation, a painting of a photograph, a photograph of a painting?

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  • Common Ground: Architecture gets political in Venice and New York

    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).

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  • Dreamland: a fitting farewell to summer

    And… we’re back!

    It’s officially September, and perhaps you’ve spent the last week getting back to business in a most eager and industrious way, relishing the smooth efficiency and predictability that the end of summer brings after months of working around everyone’s crazy vacations (lucky you). Or, perhaps the transition has been a bit (ahem) bumpier, and you find yourself trading productivity for daydreams, reliving your experiences getting off the grid, in the air to somewhere, or conversely, back to the land.

    Either way, the Textile Museum’s current exhibition, Dreamland, is a worthwhile diversion and touchstone for your early Fall art viewing, a good way to ground yourself at summer’s end, so to speak. On view through September 30th, the show ranges widely in it’s interdisciplinary approach to textiles and the Canadian landscape. Featuring both fine and folk artworks that share an expressive and intimate relationship to a particular time and place, Dreamland’s curators juxtapose the traditional and historical (hooked rugs, handkerchiefs) with the contemporary and high-tech (video, installation), challenging the viewer to make connections between them.

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  • One from the road: Mona Lisa Overdrive

    This past week saw Leonardo da Vinci in the news again, this time popping up in the dusty farmhouse of some unbelievably lucky Scots. Poking around our own version of a dusty farmhouse while on vacation this summer, we were not so lucky. However we did manage to dust off another sort of Leonardo-based fascination, buried in a barely cracked edition of Time-Life’s populist Library of Art book series from 1971 (click image to enlarge).

    Published in a lavishly illustrated volume titled The World of Leonardo (and authored with help from H.W. Janson of Art History 101 fame), this strangely engaging spread depicts eight early copies of da Vinci’s masterpiece, variously attributed and painted between the early 1500s and the 17th century.

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  • The air up there: Kimmirut Weather and Constructed Land

    Summer travels always put us in mind of the weather and its extremes. Between sunny skies, stifling heat, and sudden storms, we become exquisitely aware of the weather, and how it may impact our precious few days of vacation. We check the five-day forecast, we debate packing the rainwear, and once we’ve left, we keep tabs on the weather back home, glad to be free from the heat of the city, or sad that we are missing out on some of the best metropolitan weather in weeks.

    Perhaps with this in mind, Interaccess opened their summer season with an exhibition based in the documentation of weather from the far northern territory of Nunavut. We were lucky enough to have seen Constructed Land earlier in the month and had planned to write a review of it before leaving; that didn’t happen. Now we’re back, the exhibition is closed, and we’re offering up a brief après-view instead.

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  • Every 14 days a language dies: National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project

    Last fall we posted a brief review of The Last Silent Movie, Susan Hiller’s extraordinary audio artwork comprising some 24 extinct or endangered languages from across the planet. Featuring words, stories, entreaties and lullabies in Potawatomi, Klallam, and Ngarrindjeri among others, Hiller’s work effects a sense of wonder at the sheer diversity of human tongues, as well as the sobering realization that for many of these unseen speakers, their language, along with much of their wisdom, history and culture, will likely die with them.

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  • Summer Nights and more by Robert Adams

    As we prepare for our summer travels (during which time posts to this blog will be on the short, sweet, or somewhat sporadic side), we leave you with this wonderful exhibition website featuring the atmospheric photographs of Robert Adams:

    Robert Adams: The Place We Live, Yale University Art Gallery

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