TYPOLOGY

Category: installation

  • Closing Soon, Opening Soon

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    The next couple weeks will see the closing of two great exhibitions in the Toronto area; go see them soon if you can. Land|Slide: Possible Futures (closing October 14) is an ambitious curatorial project which transforms the historical buildings of the Markham Museum into an engaging and interactive contemporary art park. While beautiful by day, we’d recommend an early evening visit to experience some of the more subtle installations’ full effects. Favourites include Deirdre Logue’s multisensory, multichannel video installation, Euphoria’s Hiccups, which activates the walls, floor, and countertops of the Honey House, and Frank Havermans’ Untitled high-tension intervention which parasitizes the Strickler Barn to unsettling effect (both pictured below). Above, Martindale, Myers, and MacKinnon’s “refined and enriched” intervention within the Burkholder carriage house is a thought-provoking commentary on high art consumption.

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  • Every sense of the word: Postscript at the Power Plant

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    Closing after this long weekend is the Power Plant’s sprawling summer exhibition, Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Curated by Andrea Andersson and Nora Burnett Abrams, this multi-sensory feast for the eyes, ears, and mind is a testament to the variety and richness of artistic and poetic approaches to language undertaken by conceptual artists and writers since the 1960s.

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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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  • 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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  • IMHO: Are not Hirst’s spots merely Rorschach inkblots made by robots?

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    Perhaps it’s who we follow, but our news feed over much of the past week seems to have been Occupied by all things Damien. (Okay there were some bits on SOPA and the Bushwick gallery scene in there as well, but you get the point.) Aside from the sheer bonanza of articles employing spot-related puns in their titles, Gagosian’s worldwide exhibition of Hirst’s paintings has yielded such a polarized response from artists and critics that each new review seems to be a reaction not only to the paintings themselves, but also to the many reviews that have come before. It has made for some unexpectedly fascinating psychological reading, despite our best efforts at studiously avoiding the whole throwdown.

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  • Please touch the art: Derek Sullivan at The Power Plant and Jane LowBeer at Loop Gallery


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    Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking especially hard about art. So hard, in fact, that recent encounters with art that foregrounds the physical experience have been a hugely welcome relief from all that heady cogitation.

    The first such encounter got us out of our chairs and walking up stairs as part of Derek Sullivan’s recent Power Plant show, Albatross Omnibus. Comprising three industrial-sized stepladders and 52 print-on-demand artist books suspended from the ceiling, Albatross Omnibus conceptually echoes Yoko Ono’s well-known 1966 installation, Ceiling Painting (YES Painting), whereby viewer initiative and participation is required to experience and complete the performance of the exhibition. However while Albatross has similarly playful, meditative, and uplifting moments, Sullivan’s books collectively embody a much more idiosyncratic and energetic profusion of words, images and ideas rather than a singular (albeit profound) experience. This is not to say that Sullivan’s work is superficial; in fact the many humourous concrete texts and visual koans which make up the body of Albatross belie a deeper love and engagement with the history of reading, print, and the book itself. Steering a ladder through space, ascending the steps, and stretching up to page through each slim volume in turn, one enacts a physical experience of the pre-digital library, wherein books occupy positions, not always easy to reach, in a specific place and time. At a moment when books are rapidly beginning to disappear into the cloud, we are reminded not only of the sheer pleasure of touching and turning a page, but also of the importance of preserving and protecting the printed format as one of the still-unsurpassed achievements of human social, political and cultural expression.

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  • Art by number: Ken Nicol (and Mel Bochner, and Mary Temple, and Roman Opalka)


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    On the tweeted advice of Leah Sandals, we stopped by MKG127 gallery for the last day of Ken Nicol’s show. Aside from an irrational desire for Cy Twombly books and a penchant for Bic four-colour pens, we personally share with Nicol a complete and not unwelcome inability to multitask. Perhaps this explains our delight in his show, titled Hundreds of Things, Volume 1, for which he executes extremely well-crafted permutations of the number 100 in a wide range of seemingly mundane, normally discarded materials. From his gallery’s website:

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  • Super string: spectacular site-specific installations by Sébastien Preschoux


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    Because we will always love string art, laser beams, spider webs, and Fred Sandback.

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  • The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle


    continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 1: Thomas Hirschhorn
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    Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video projection and installation, Phantom Truck + Always After, occupy the second main floor space at The Power Plant. Diametrically opposed to the overwhelming visual stimulation of Das Auge (see previous post linked below), Manglano-Ovalle’s work is no less political and confrontational. Through understated, enigmatic sound, video, and installation work, Manglano-Ovalle explores the metaphorical potential of the concept of “climate” as it relates to both meteorological and socio-cultural and political events that characterize our time. For the relaunch, The Power Plant has chosen two key works from Manglano-Ovalle’s oeuvre which focus on the aftermath of destruction. Always After (The Glass House) is a wall-sized projection documenting the sweeping up of shattered glass after Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, former home to the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, was ceremoniously destroyed to make way for renovation in 2005. Extreme close-ups of cracked, crystalline forms being slowly pushed and mounded by the broom are a meditation on the necessity and ritual of restoring order after a destructive event. An atmospheric soundtrack comprising dischordant notes and rumbling sounds interspersed with long intervals of near-silence gives the projection an unsettling, threatening tone, as if a storm has just passed or is brewing. The obliteration of the work of a modernist icon represents a critical shift with resultant underlying instability in the socio-cultural climate of our time.

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