TYPOLOGY

Blog

  • The Future Perfect: cinema and obsolescence in contemporary art

    The Future Perfect: cinema and obsolescence in contemporary art

    Today’s post is a virtual exhibition featuring historic and contemporary film, video, installation, and performance works that utilize film and analogue technologies in a search for the cinematic, even as these materials and methods become obsolete and disappear.

    Based in part on a reading of Matilde Nardelli’s essay, Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence, this exhibition addresses the widespread use of outmoded or obsolete technologies in recent art and questions the interpretation that artists are engaging in acts of fetishization, nostalgia or mourning for analogue in the wake of digital technology.

    Taken together, these works from the past and recent history of contemporary art resonate visually and conceptually with each other and with the poetic potential for cinema in a digital future.

    …VFu

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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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  • Welcome to our new website!

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    Hello again, and welcome to Typology.ca!

    As many of you know, we’ve been posting original content to our blog, Typologica, for over the past year as we wait patiently for Artscape to complete renovations to our future home. Construction on the Shaw Street School continues, and the ongoing delays are a not unexpected outcome of the remediation, preservation, and modernization that needs to be done to fully rehabilitate this beautiful heritage building. In the meantime, the response to the blog has been truly wonderful and we are grateful for all the interest, support, and encouragement we’ve received thus far.

    With the launch of typology.ca, we’re thrilled to bring you lots more information on the project space, guidelines for art and curatorial submissions, and of course, continued posting to Typologica in its new home here on our website.

    And, what you see here is just the beginning. As submissions, exhibitions, events, and other projects are developed and finalized, we’ll be updating the site and blog with announcements, artist profiles, a curated artist registry, an online shop, and more!

    So please take a look around, subscribe to the blog for updates (if you haven’t already), and consider making a submission for possible inclusion in a future exhibition or event.

    If you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at info (at) typology (dot) ca. This website is in beta phase, so please bear with us as we work out the kinks. Feedback is encouraged and appreciated at any time.

    As always, we thank you for your continued interest and support and we enter the next phase of project space development!

  • Construction Update

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    Greetings friends and followers!

    We hope you are having an enjoyable holiday season so far. Here’s a quick post to update you on what’s been happening at TYPOLOGY. Since our last post, we’ve reached the final stages of completion for phase one of our new website, and will be ready to launch in the new year. We’re excited to soon be bringing you an official introduction to the project space, information on what’s to come, and guidelines for artists and curators who may be interested in participating. Also we’ll be moving our blog, Typologica, to a new home within the website, from which we’ll continue to post updates, reviews, and news as we prepare for our grand opening later in 2013.

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  • After the storm: Denyse Thomasos

    The past week has been a whirlwind in many ways, not least because of the devastation Hurricane Sandy wreaked on the East Coast. Here in Toronto, we saw howling winds, a week of rain, and trees down, but nothing like the floods and power outages to our south. As cleanup began over the weekend in New York and New Jersey, we kept tabs on our friends’ progress down there while confronting a wholly unrelated, yet no less saddening tragedy up here — the death of a person we didn’t even know.

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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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  • 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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