We are pleased to launch our newest initiative in support of emerging artists and curators: Summer Sessions, a program through which we are making free space and staffing support available to graduates of local and regional colleges and universities to present their thesis exhibitions in downtown Toronto.
On October 28th, 2015 OCAD University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School for Interdisciplinary Studies presented a public lecture by Dr. Claire Bishop, art historian, critic, author, and professor in the History of Art Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Entitled “Déjà Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernity,” Bishop’s lecture critiques themes of the failure and ruin of modernity and utopia that she believes have persisted in contemporary art since the 1990s.
Just in time for Back to School season, we have on offer some of the last copies of UK-based artist Miriam Elia’s limited edition publication, We Go to the Gallery, a hilarious take on contemporary art in the form of a nostalgic children’s primer.
Please join us Thursday, September 18th from 7–9 pm for the opening of our fall exhibition. Of Other Faces features sound art, video, and photography by Andrea Cohen and Wiska Radkiewicz (Paris, New York), Victoria Fu (Los Angeles), Marta Ryczko (Toronto), and Manuel Saiz (Berlin), five artists whose works employ strategies of mirroring and doubling to investigate the paradoxical nature of our dualistic world. Of Other Faces will be the first exhibition in Canada to feature work by international artists Victoria Fu and Manuel Saiz.
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.
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It’s a bright and sunny day here in Toronto, but we can’t stop looking at Jaime Hogge’s image of a roiling, seething Lake Ontario. One can almost feel the dramatic sweep of brushstrokes over canvas, except that this is a contemporary photograph, not an 18th century oil painting. Hogge, driving by the lakeshore last spring on his way to a shoot, felt compelled to pull over and capture this image during a massive windstorm which ultimately killed one and left 135,000 without power. It is a side of Lake Ontario rarely seen.
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The Ministry of Artistic Affairs hosted its first event of the season last Wednesday evening at the capacious Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Currently on view in the main gallery is new work by the collaborative duo Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, made in the aftermath of their gripping Nuit Blanche performance, The Tie-Break. Conceived as a reenactment of what ESPN once called “the most riveting episode in the sport’s history”, Neuspiel and Pugen set out not only to memorize and execute the legendary fourth set tie-break from the 1980 Wimbledon Finals between Björn Borg and John McEnroe, but to do it over and over again, all night long. As anyone who was there that frigid evening last October can attest, their composure and sheer endurance in the face of blistering winds and a few too many drunken hecklers further electrified the atmosphere of tension and suspense, despite the audience’s assumed knowledge of the match’s outcome.
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Alec Soth meditates on the photographs of Robert Adams in this beautiful, timely post as much about listening as it is about looking.
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Loved these photos by Thomas Jorion, from his Silencio series. Gaping, airless, monumental… like something out of a Kubrick film.
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Fun social project at Dear Photograph, which invites viewers to submit images for display on their website. Some poignant, some silly, all fascinating trips through time.
