What a great first week with our spring exhibition, The Order of Things | Leif Low-Beer. At the opening, we launched the second in our series of limited edition prints (below), as well as a large-format poster featuring Low-Beer’s sketch for his beautiful wall-based installation at TYPOLOGY (above). Both the print and poster highlight the artist’s interest in combining an astonishing diversity of hand-drawn abstractions into larger compositions that become faces, figures, couples, and crowds.
Join us Thursday, April 24th from 7–9 pm for the opening of our spring exhibition, THE ORDER OF THINGS or, The Second Conference of the International Network of Personal Relationships (INPR), featuring mixed media drawings, collages, assemblages, and sculptural tableaux by Leif Low-Beer (Toronto/Brooklyn). Evincing a keen interest in the mark of the hand, relationships between figures in space, and the active engagement of the viewer, The Order of Things will be Low-Beer’s first solo exhibition in Canada.
With so much to do in advance of the project space opening, this year’s visit to the fair was more like a drive-by. However, even the short tour yielded many surprises and much to follow-up on. Featured here are a few favourite booths and interesting artworks from this year’s fair. For artwork information, hover over the image or see credits listed at bottom. For a closer look, click the images to enlarge. For more information on the gallery or artist, links are provided to their respective websites.
This weekend is your last chance to catch Paul Wackers’ gem of a show at Narwhal Projects in the Junction. Titled Almost Somewhere, Wackers’ lovingly crafted paintings suffuse the orderly arrangements of still lifes and interiors with the disruptive energies of emergent or external forces and frameworks, transporting the viewer to a place between Wacker’s real and imagined worlds. Richly detailed textures and colours describing beloved collections of rocks, pots, and plants are juxtaposed with boldly graphic lines, planes, patterns, and shapes both hard-edged and fuzzed out, creating a playful and mysterious tension between the everyday and the extraordinary. Go see it if you can; Almost Somewhere is great place to get lost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nudashank, an independent, artist-run gallery space in Baltimore, Maryland, is celebrating their third anniversary this week. Founded by Seth Adelsberger and Alex Ebstein in 2009, the gallery is dedicated to showcasing young and emerging artists in group, two-person and solo exhibitions. Over the past three years, Nudashank has shown the work of over 150 artists from Baltimore and beyond, fulfilling a mission to bring new blood into the Baltimore scene, benefitting regional artists and providing a new venue for local, national, and international artwork. The gallery is located on the third floor of the H&H building in downtown Baltimore, which also houses numerous other artist-run galleries and performance spaces.
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We tried mightily to write that pithy, well-researched post for you today, really we did. But with all this glorious sunshine making a mockery of our efforts (and our computer screens), how could we presume to argue with the very forces of nature on this, the first day of spring?
And so, instead of our regularly scheduled post, we bring you these exuberant images from Howard Fonda, an artist whose colourful palettes and experimental/experiential approaches to painting are quite literally reflective of his own philosophically humanist leanings, mostly sunny disposition, and sincere generosity of spirit.
