TYPOLOGY

Blog

  • Common Ground: Architecture gets political in Venice and New York

    As Occupy Wall Street celebrates its one-year anniversary, art and design communities around the world continue to parse the movement’s implications and effects through themed exhibitions, festivals, and ideas. Earlier this year, on the heels of the stridently political 7th Berlin Biennale, Kassel’s Documenta 13 announced its own intent to question “the persistent belief in economic growth”. Stateside, the New Museum dubbed their triennial The Ungovernables (selected images below), focusing on “both anarchic and organized resistance: protest, chaos, and imagination as a refusal of the extended period of economic, ideological, sectarian, and political conflict that marks the generation’s inheritance”. And here in Canada the Contact Photography Festival, centered on the theme Public, positioned itself as an exploration of “photography’s role in the public performance of identity as an important means to respond to, intervene within, and document political actions” (see our review here).

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  • Dreamland: a fitting farewell to summer

    And… we’re back!

    It’s officially September, and perhaps you’ve spent the last week getting back to business in a most eager and industrious way, relishing the smooth efficiency and predictability that the end of summer brings after months of working around everyone’s crazy vacations (lucky you). Or, perhaps the transition has been a bit (ahem) bumpier, and you find yourself trading productivity for daydreams, reliving your experiences getting off the grid, in the air to somewhere, or conversely, back to the land.

    Either way, the Textile Museum’s current exhibition, Dreamland, is a worthwhile diversion and touchstone for your early Fall art viewing, a good way to ground yourself at summer’s end, so to speak. On view through September 30th, the show ranges widely in it’s interdisciplinary approach to textiles and the Canadian landscape. Featuring both fine and folk artworks that share an expressive and intimate relationship to a particular time and place, Dreamland’s curators juxtapose the traditional and historical (hooked rugs, handkerchiefs) with the contemporary and high-tech (video, installation), challenging the viewer to make connections between them.

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  • One from the road: Mona Lisa Overdrive

    This past week saw Leonardo da Vinci in the news again, this time popping up in the dusty farmhouse of some unbelievably lucky Scots. Poking around our own version of a dusty farmhouse while on vacation this summer, we were not so lucky. However we did manage to dust off another sort of Leonardo-based fascination, buried in a barely cracked edition of Time-Life’s populist Library of Art book series from 1971 (click image to enlarge).

    Published in a lavishly illustrated volume titled The World of Leonardo (and authored with help from H.W. Janson of Art History 101 fame), this strangely engaging spread depicts eight early copies of da Vinci’s masterpiece, variously attributed and painted between the early 1500s and the 17th century.

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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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  • Pattern, Precision, and Unpredictability: Kristiina Lahde


    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.

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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.

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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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