Beyond Measure, exhibition view, MKG127
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For her recent solo show at MKG127, Kristiina Lahde tests the limitations and possibilities of measurement, pattern, and chance in her work. In cutting and reconfiguring measuring tapes and rulers, she playfully repurposes these practical tools toward more conceptual ends. Her similarly well-crafted paper pieces reveal the surprisingly ordered outcomes that result from random initial conditions. Whether working in collage, sculpture or drawing, Lahde imbues her work with the visual wit and perceptual pleasure of an oscillating Escher, but without the encumbering kitsch. Tightly controlled in its execution, her work ranges freely between spatial qualities of flatness and depth, positive and negative, and straightness and curvature, even as it explores tensions between form and function, order and randomness, and visual/conceptual languages.
Author: Shani K Parsons
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Pattern, Precision, and Unpredictability: Kristiina Lahde
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Paintings with Names: Michael Voss at Birch Libralato
The eight works in Michael Voss’ well-edited exhibition, Paintings with Names, appear small, unassuming, even – dare we say it? – sweet. But their playful informality and seeming modesty of ambition belie a singular engagement with the very essence and act of both painting and naming. Since 2000, well before Raphael Rubenstein proposed the term “provisional” to describe a recent wave of abstraction with a “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished, or self-canceling” quality (Art in America, 2009), Voss has pursued an intuitive, exploratory, even arbitrary approach which is tempered by his slow, questioning, and contemplative habit of working on several paintings at once. The result is a family of abstract images which relate compellingly to each other, even as they claim real and imagined territories all their own.
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Channeling the ocean: David Bowen’s Tele-Present Water
click image to watch video on the artist’s website
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Because we do have a thing for fluid dynamics—and robots—we’re sharing this link to David Bowen’s manifestly mechanical yet viscerally evocative installation, Tele-Present Water (WRO2011). Utilizing real-time data transmitted from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration buoy in the Pacific Ocean, Bowen’s sculpture translates wave frequency and intensity into the eerily transcendant, flowing motion you see here. -
Philippe Chancel, Jon Rafman, and Michael Wolf at MOCCA: Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces
Last weekend was your last chance to see the fascinating Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces show at MOCCA, and for those who were on the fence, we wrote a quick capsule review. Today’s update of our review features additional images, links, edits, and credits for those who couldn’t make the show.
Philippe Chancel’s 2006 series of photographs documenting North Korea’s national games ceremonies was worth seeing alone. Although it is possible to get a sense of the massive scale, brilliant colours, and sheer spectacle of the annual event from online images, one must see them in person for full effect, if only to realize that behind each of those changing background images are thousands of North Koreans holding up coloured cards in sequence (human pixels!). As bizarre and excessive as the images may seem to our more or less Western, democratic eyes, all manner of interesting visual associations may be made, from the overtly political (propaganda posters, social realism) to the crassly commercial (graphics worthy of an Asian candy package), to the kitschily pop-cultural (both Esther Williams’ synchronized swimming extravaganzas from the 1940s and a strangely silly ritual from the dystopian 1970s science fiction film, Logan’s Run, come to mind); and this is a good thing in our eyes.
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Places are strange: Lynne Cohen at the Design Exchange
Last weekend we saw Nothing is Hidden, an exhibition of photographs by Lynne Cohen, who is the 2011 recipient of the first annual Scotiabank Photography Award. Since the 1970s, Cohen has created a remarkably cohesive body of work exploring the strange, often funny, and sometimes disturbing emotional and socio-political terrain that lies just beneath the naugahyde surface of many semi-public and institutional interiors. Entirely photographed from mid-distance with minimal intervention, Cohen’s seemingly banal observation rooms, meeting halls, classrooms, sports clubs, and military facilities (these being just five examples of the 20–30 categories she has chosen to explore) evoke an intangible and unsettling sense of presence even as they document a physical state of emptiness and conspicuous absence.
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Celebrating 70 posts with a project space update and some images from Art School (Dismissed)
It’s been some time since our last post on the project space, so we thought we’d celebrate our 70th (!) with an update on recent developments. As some of you may know, this blog has been TYPOLOGY’s virtual home while our website and physical space are under construction. Both have seen delays for various reasons, but we promise that things are continuing to move forward…
For those who don’t yet know, TYPOLOGY is a not-for-profit project space which will be housed within a historic school building currently undergoing renovation by Artscape, a local organization with an international reputation for city-building through the arts. Award-winning and multi-faceted projects at Wychwood Barns, the Distillery, and Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island have proven Artscape’s model of repurposing underutilized buildings for the benefit of the arts and the greater community.
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Looking forward, looking back: 12 years of the Serpentine summer pavilion (a typology)
This year’s recently unveiled Serpentine pavilion design by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron is a wonderfully poetic exploration into the history and context of the pavilion project itself. Since 2000, when the Serpentine Gallery initiated its celebrated annual commission, the summer pavilion has become an internationally-known site for experimentation by some of the world’s most well-respected artists and architects, including Zaha Hadid, Olafur Eliasson, SANAA, and most recently, Peter Zumthor.
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Water, Fire, Earth and Air: Isabelle Hayeur, Pascal Grandmaison, and Martin Bordeau at Arsenal Toronto
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Intrigued by news of a yet another exhibition space opening near Bloor and Lansdowne, we headed up to Arsenal Toronto, a massive new gallery located on a dusty dead-end street across from an industrial strength scrapyard. The building, a nondescript metal box, bears no sign of what’s inside, except for a casually taped “45” on one door, accompanied by a helpful arrow and the words “Division Gallery” (not, as one might expect, the words “Arsenal” or “Toronto”). Galerie Division and René Blouin, partners in the much larger Arsenal Montreal space for which the Toronto branch is an outpost, are commercial dealers representing the likes of national and international artists including Allison Schulnik (Los Angeles) and Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber (Winnepeg), as well as established Montreal-based artists such as Pascal Grandmaison and Manon De Pauw. (As noted in the Toronto.com article on Arsenal Toronto, the latter two artists are also locally represented by Diaz Contemporary and Jessica Bradley Projects, respectively; it would be interesting to know what the communication has been between the dealers regarding potential future sales.) -
May Day: Occupy the art movement (chapter two)
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.
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WTF is a Wayzgoose? (and WNYBAC, for that matter?)
This weekend, get thee to Grimbsy for their 34th annual Wayzgoose, a festive fair and celebration of all things book arts-related. While the origin of the word wayzgoose is still up for speculation, there is no doubt that this tradition of annual printers’ parties dates back to at least the late 1600s, when Joseph Moxon, author of Mechanick Exercises (1683-1684), wrote: “It is customary for the Journey-men every year to make new paper windows…because that day they make them the Master Printer gives them a Way-goose, that is, he makes them a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own house, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Nice.
