TYPOLOGY

Category: photography

  • 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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  • The erasures of Aliki Braine (plus a Palíndromo postscript)

    13TheHuntPanorama3web

    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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  • 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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  • 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

    …
    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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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