TYPOLOGY

Blog

  • 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.)

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  • 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.

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  • The joyful woodcuts and collages of Naoko Matsubara

    We’ve been looking at the work of Naoko Matsubara, an artist whose practice spans three continents and nearly 50 years. Focused on a variety of subjects including trees, landscape, the arctic, Kyoto, and Tibet, much of her work is unified by a highly ordered yet playful simplicity in composition, against which gestural markmaking and brightly saturated planes and patterns of colour push and pull the eye.

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  • 44 from the virtual floor of VIP Paper

    John Baldessari, 2623 Third Street, Santa Monica, 2000, suite of four color lithographs with screenprint, overall dimensions 54 x 54 inches, edition of 61, Brooke Alexander Gallery

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    As the world’s first online only art fair, VIP has experienced major growing pains since it’s launch in 2011, with many collectors frustrated by tech glitches and dealers reporting low traffic and sales as a result. While the site’s capacity and interface issues are well known and improving, the question of whether the term “online art fair” is an oxymoron continues to be raised. To our minds, this is largely a semantic issue; regardless of what one wants to call it, VIP simply represents yet another web-based opportunity for those who have the art to show it to those who don’t (see our previous post on other online art-buying venues such as Paddle8 and Phillips de Pury, linked below), and the success or failure of any online platform will most likely depend on practical concerns such as whether the art is shown to best effect (sharp, high-resolution, colour-correct images, intuitive and glitch-free scalability, easy and consistent bookmarking for collecting, comparing, and return visits), whether the artwork information is complete, correct, and actually informative, and whether dealers are ready and willing to operate in a more transparent, service-oriented manner (responding to inquiries in a timely fashion, making pricing and availability information accessible, and instituting reasonable return policies where possible, since art sometimes has a way of not actually looking like it does onscreen) which is appropriate to dealing with the wider, more diverse audience that an online platform presumably draws. Improvements in any of these areas would be a welcome development.

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  • Two quotes for Tuesday (and some artwork by Jordan Kasey)


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    Quote of the day #1:

    In every work of genius we recognize our own
    rejected thoughts; they come back to us with
    a certain alienated majesty.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

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  • Michael Dumontier: the middle of the air (plus Ken Nicol's 1000 Fuck Ups)

    On the advice of artist Ken Nicol, we stopped in to MKG127 to see Michael Dumontier’s current show, the middle of the air. Featuring a series of well-crafted works in various media including acrylic on MDF, foil stamp and coloured pencil on matboard, foil stamp on fabric, and string, nails and a fishing weight, the exhibition is both playful and spare, quiet yet engaging. With an incredibly light hand and wry sense of humour, Dumontier utilizes tromp l’oeil effects to fool the eye and surprise the mind. Like zen koans, the best of the works call into question not only the material processes used in their making, but the nature of reality itself.

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