Attention, all book lovers! On the last Wednesday of every month, the EP Taylor Library & Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario hosts Library & Archives Unshelved, a series of drop-in events which gives visitors a first-hand glimpse of highlights in their extensive collection.
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.
…
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.
…
Stunning large-scale oil paintings in which fruit assumes a mystical quality. Citrus has never looked better.
…
Hello and thanks for visiting. We originally wrote this post at the beginning of December 2011, and as new information and events continued to unfold in the following weeks, we updated this page with fresh links and images. Now, as Occupy emerges from the winter months having given birth to an entirely new movement in contemporary visual culture, we feel it is appropriate to archive this post as a chronicle of Occupy’s visual beginnings, and allow the movement time and space to further evolve with respect to protest aesthetics in the arts and design, music and performance, giant puppets, flashmobs, bat signals, and whatever other forms it will eventually take. Thanks for the feedback and interest, and let’s all stay tuned.
…
Jannick Deslauriers’ recent exhibition at Show & Tell Gallery is a study in contrasts. Utilizing the lightest of materials–crinoline, tulle, lace, and organza, she constructs life-sized sculptures of physically and/or politically weighty objects such as a pair of hand grenades, a sewing machine, a typewriter, a tank. Suspended from above, the objects exert a spectral presence on the space, appearing as literal materializations of creative or destructive human impulses. Seen through this lens, an unassuming brick, rendered in terracotta-coloured crinoline and black thread, becomes a symbol of both our collective capacity to build society, and–when taken in hand and thrown through the scapegoat-of-the-moment’s window–to destroy it in turn.
…
Saw this today – beautiful little paintings for the magpie in all of us. Visit the link below to see more paintings (although they are far better viewed in person) and information on the artist.
