Author: artoronto

Douglas Coupland, C Thomson, Pine Experiment

January 26 – April 7, 2012
Opening: Thursday, January 26, 6-8 p.m.
DANIEL FARIA GALLERY
188 St Helens Avenue
Toronto ON M6H 4A1
T: 416.538.1880
www.danielfariagallery.com
Hours: Tues-Fri 11-6,  Sat 10-6 p.m.

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present “ Welcome to the Twenty-First Century”, an exhibition of new work by Douglas Coupland.

“I want to explore how it feels to be inside the 21st  century brain as opposed to the 20th  century brain,” says Coupland of his new show, one that examines how art and technology can decode the spirit of our age. Coupland’s fusion of paint with contemporary codes, vector graphics and text-based slogans challenge us to investigate how technology has advanced our lives while leaving us feeling empty. Simultaneously poignant and irreverent, Coupland’s work in this show meditates on the human condition and the natural world on many levels.

The work analyses sensations created by information technology that are nearly universal in the western mind. At the same time it discusses our yearnings that are eternal to all of humanity, couched in the form of imprecations and pieties addressed to people living at this century’s beginning.

In the past two years, QR barcodes have become a seductive way of obtaining information instantly with a single touch of our Smartphones, and completely eliminating the task of searching the Internet for more information about a product or service. As a commentary on this new technological phenomenon,

Coupland presents us with large scale elegantly painted QR barcodes that function when scanned by a mobile device. While the viewer may anticipate a direct link to a website, statements about life and death created by Coupland emerge instead.

“I began writing messages I would send to a person who died just before I was born, or to a person who will be born right after I die. How do you compress thoughts about life on earth into 250 ASCII characters? Ultimately they morphed into poems and pieties. They draw our attention to the past, the present and the future we may face.”

Known for his cheeky yet eloquent diction, the text promises both humor and melancholy, presenting the possibility to slowdown even as the viewer is being transported to virtual life. Each of Coupland’s paintings, sculptures and graphics proudly invite viewers to launch themselves into the 21st  Century, for better or worse.

Douglas Coupland lives and works in Vancouver. He is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, as well as the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan and the Instituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy. Coupland’s work has been exhibited in numerous group shows internationally, most recently at the ART LABOR gallery in Shanghai, China as part of By Sea, Land and Air, We Prosper: New Art From Vancouver, Canada.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo: Spiritual Presence

January 28 – April 22, 2012
THE McMICHAEL CANADIAN ART COLLECTION
10365 Islington Avenue,
Kleinburg, ON L0J 1C0
T:905.893.1121
www.mcmichael.com

ORGANIZED BY THE McMICHAEL CANADIAN ART COLLECTION

Curated by McMichael Chief Curator Katerina Atanassova.

This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to connect the gallery’s interior spaces with our newly invigorated outdoor spaces and forested landscape, for the very first time.

Featuring works from well-known artists including 60 pictures of Vincenzo Pietropaolo, encompassing bodies of work from various years: Olive trees of Calabria, Toronto Tree Portraits, Urban Trees from around the world and several photographs of Kim Dorland. You will discover the mysterious qualities of trees as we consider their life cycle, their beauty, and their importance for our human existence.

January 26 – 29, 2012
METRO TORONTO CONVENTION CENTRE
255 Front Street West
Toronto, ON, M5V 2W6
T: 416.585.8000
E: info@mtccc.com
www.mtccc.com/

The multi-faceted entrance installation, StripTease, designed by RAW Design, features the latest projection and an ingenious, two-sided Christie® MicroTiles® configuration with interactive capabilities provided by GestureTek®and Acid Technologies, for creating a blend of high touch and high tech.

As an integral part of the StripTease entrance display at the Interior Design Show (IDS), the two-sided Christie MicroTiles design evokes a city skyline with 50 Christie MicroTiles and two external control units (ECUs) that drive the interactive content, camera-enabled, gesture-recognition technology from GestureTek, with content developed by Acid Integrations.

The projection element consists of 1,300 individual strips of felt that create the 52-foot-by-19-foot “screen” with front-projection using two Christie Roadster S+22K-J 3-chip DLP® digital projectors capable of delivering brightness levels of 20,000 ANSI lumens.  Show visitors will experience a live video camera feed of themselves interacting with the content on the Christie MicroTiles. Conceived by Canadian architectural firm RAW Design, it is the first installation of its kind at IDS that integrates visually dynamic content with interactively playful technologies.

In StripTease, Raw Design, with Christie  and other partners, have created a visually compelling installation that fully delivers the ‘wow’ factor and effectively sets the tone for the astounding range of innovative displays to be found inside.”

About RAW
Spearheaded by architect Roland Rom Colthoff, RAW is one of Toronto’s fastest growing architecture studios. Pushing boundaries in Toronto’s condo boom, RAW is known for bringing edgy contemporary design to some of Toronto’s oldest avenues. From building in laneways to challenging infill sites, RAW’s work is significantly impacting Toronto’s emerging streetscapes and the way we engage with it.

 About Christie
Christie Digital Systems Canada Inc. is a global visual technologies company and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ushio, Inc., Japan, (JP:6925). From retail displays to Hollywood, mission critical command centers to classrooms and training simulators, Christie display solutions and projectors capture the attention of audiences around the world with dynamic and stunning images.

Matthew Varey, Focus Time, 2011. Oil on panel, 20 x 20″

February 1 – March 3, 2012
Opening: Thursday, February 9, 6:00–9:00 p.m.
TELEPHOON BOOTH GALLERY
3148 Dundas Street West
Toronto, ON, M6P 2A1
T: 647.270.7983
E: sharlene@telephoneboothgallery.ca
www.telephoneboothgallery.ca/
Hours: Tues by appointment, Wed–Fri 11:00–6:00 p.m., Sat 10:00-6:00 p.m

Colour is the dominant force within Matthew Varey’s recent abstract Bunkerpaintings. The works are influenced by the evolution of military fortifications, the advent of modern condominium towers, European travel, and family history. Varey’s use of colour and texture create a strong visual tension between the dynamic and static, exterior and interior, form and function. To that end, several bunkers appear to be dismantled, others overbuilt with numerous teetering roofs and surfaces. These “fortifications” begin to vibrate, float or dissolve into the whiteness. The brushwork serves to free the colour from the structure, suspending interpretation of what the structures are, or their use, allowing for a fresh experience and examination. The original function of the bunkers ceases to exist as the structures become a living part of Varey’s colour field environments.

In considering the bunkers in his essayFun Bunkers, Tamas Dobozy states “there is, finally, no real point of entry (despite the open door), because there is nowhere to enter into, no one reading of the purpose of these sculptures or buildings, except for the advent of interpretation itself.”

For Varey, the bunker is the safest possible environment. “I have tracked down bunkers in many countries in Europe, including Greece where I lived for a time, and have always had the same reaction when I am inside. Beyond the obvious connections to safety, there is a link for me to home in its purest conceptual sense, and so I see the progression to condominium as quite natural. There is stillness and coolness and a silence that is absolute peace, despite the war related connotations…

The walls are crucial to the understanding- the walls of a home – what is inside, what is outside, the shape, the impregnability or the ‘pregnability’, the density and quality or lack of quality. It is all about the walls.”

Also featuring works by Jesse Bromm.

Jesse Bromm, Landscape I, detail. Blown glass, mixed media, found objects, h. 27cm x .w. 16cm

Matthew Varey was born in Hamilton in 1968 and graduated from McMaster University’s Visual Art program in 1992. Varey had his first international solo exhibition in Europe in 1995 and has since exhibited at the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa in Venice, Art Cologne, Art Miami and the Toronto International Art Fair, as well as galleries in Greece and across Canada. His work is held in corporate and private collections in the United States, Korea, England, Spain, Greece, Germany and Canada. Varey lives and works in Toronto.

Jesse Bromm graduated from Sheridan College – Crafts and Design: Glass Program in 2010. Bromm’s work reflects his inner discomfort and perception of the outside world. He creates miniature dioramas of human behaviour that address these concerns. Figures are tangible and relatable, but the found objects are hidden; mediated by the glass’s quality to distort. The glass becomes a metaphor for our altered perception of reality. Bromm has exhibited across Canada and in the United States. He was accepted into Harbourfront Centre’s artist-in-residency programme and awarded a scholarship in 2011.

(fluorescent lights, plywood, plastic, cotton, black chalk)

Tuesday,  January 31, 2012, 7:30 – 9:30 p.m.
Doors open at 7:00 pm
Admission $8 / $5 students at the door
The Drake Hotel, Underground
1150 Queen Street West
T:416.531.5042
http://www.jaysonmusson.com
http://vimeo.com/hennessyyoungman
http://www.youtube.com/user/HennesyYoungman

Artist talk and screening with Jayson Musson

New York-based artist Jayson Musson (aka Hennessy Youngman) will talk about why he started his wildly popular video series Art Thoughtz, debut a new episode, and hold a Q&A with the audience.

Co-presented by

Mercer Union PLATFORM is a public program of off-site events, performances, music series, lectures, and international projects that do not fit within the confines of the gallery space. Mercer Union acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council’s Arts Investment Fund for its 2011-2012 PLATFORM Program.

C Magazine CSCHOOL is an initiative aimed at extending C Magazine’s mandate to advance education in contemporary visual art and culture. C School offers study guides and research material in conjunction with each issue theme, as well as an educational copies program where educators can order C Magazine for use in the classroom free of charge. C School also presents public programming and events related to each issue’s theme, taking C Magazine into the classroom and beyond.

Venue sponsor: The Drake Hotel

Pierre Leguillon Features Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective, 1960-1971. Collection Kadist Art Foundation. Foto: Prallan Allsten© Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet

January 20  – March 10, 2012
Opening Reception: 20 January 2012, 7 p.m.
MERCER UNION,
A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON, M6H 1N9
T: 416.536.1519
E-mail: sarah@mercerunion.org
www.mercerunion.org
Hours: Tues–Sat 11–6

Pierre Leguillon features
Diane Arbus: a printed retrospective, 1960-1971

The exhibition brings together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-Saxon press in the 1960s. Leguillon’s exhibition will present the original pages of the magazines, which correspond to the first appearance of these photographs in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Nova, and The Sunday Times Magazine. While some of these photographs have become icons of contemporary America, others are yet to be discovered. The variety of subjects dealt with offers a wide perspective on Diane Arbus’ talent, ranging from anonymous subjects to celebrity portraits of Norman Mailer, Jorge Luis Borges, Mia Farrow, Marcello Mastroianni, Madame Martin Luther King, children’s fashion, to several photographic essays in which the images are credited or commented by the photographer herself (“The Vertical Journey,” “The Full Circle,” “Auguries of Innocence.” The unprecedented connections realized in Pierre Leguillon’s display underline the currency of photography in contemporary art.

Pierre Leguillonlives and works in Paris, and currently has a solo museum exhibition at Mamco, Geneva. His widely acclaimed recent project, Pierre Leguillon features Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective, 1960-1971, has been previously presented by the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; the Moderna Museet, Malmo; the Centre Regional de la Photographie, Douchy-les Mines and at De Hallen, Haarlem. Selected recent solo exhibitions, projects, presentations and performances have been held at Motive Gallery, Amsterdam; Musée du Lourve, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; CAPC, Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Song Song, Vienna; Air de Paris, Paris; Artists Space, New York; Temple Gallery, Philadelphia; CNEAI, Chatou; Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; Secession, Vienna and elsewhere.

The exhibition has been generously supported by the Consulate General of France in Toronto and the United States Consulate General in Toronto.

January 20  – March 10, 2012
Opening Reception: 20 January 2012, 7 p.m.
MERCER UNION,
A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON, M6H 1N9
T: 416.536.1519
E-mail: sarah@mercerunion.org
www.mercerunion.org
Hours: Tues–Sat 11–6

Originality and the Avant Garde
(On Art and Repetition)

The title of the show is not wholly unique. It borrows from the title of a 1981 Rosalind Krauss text, which questions the avant garde’s attachment tonotions of authenticity and its denial of its own foundation in processes of repetition. The terms of the production and reception of art have shifted since the writing of that text, through both the foregrounding of appropriation as a critical art practice and the rise of sampling at all levels of cultural production. Appropriation and repetition have become central to the way art and ideas circulate, and yet the cult of originality as described by Krauss still overwhelmingly defines our valuation of the contemporary in art. Through a series of doublings and transpositions, the exhibition investigates the potential of repetition as a model for generating meaning. Photographs, film, reflection, projection, the space of the studio and the space of the gallery are superimposed one upon the other in a proliferation of analogues that take for subject their own state of interconnection.

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist whose practice includes film, photography, sculpture, installation and sound. Her work deals with exhausted ideas and images, and the conventions of display as they exist in relation to art and the space of the gallery. She earned a BFA from Ryerson’s School of Image Arts, in Toronto and an MFA from Le Fresnoy, in Tourcoing, France. She has shown work and screened films internationally. Currently, she teaches in the photography department at Ryerson University.

January 26,  – March 3, 2012
Opening: Saturday, January 28, 4 – 8 p.m.
ROBERT KANANAJ GALLERY
1267 Bloor St. West
Toronto, ON, M6H 1N7
T: 416.289.8855
E: info@robertkananajgallery.com
www.robertkananajgallery.com
Hours: Tues–Sat 11–6 p.m.

Mikel completed studies in monumental painting and drawing at the Academy of Arts in Tirana, capital of Albania on 1986, after an intensive art program in traditional art.

From 1986 to 1998 Mikel shared his knowledge and love of art with students as teacher at the Art School of Tirana. After trips to Italy and France, his work turned more explicitly abstract. In 1997 received a PhD in Arts. His work is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Albania.

Mikel, who immigrated to Canada in 2000, resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is an honor for us, at Robert Kananaj Gallery, to exhibit and represent Mikel’s work.

Alice Zilberberg, Forest of Gaia

January 25 – February 5,  2012
Opening: Thursday, January 26,  7 p.m.
GALLERY 1313 
1313 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, M6K 1K8
T: 416.536.6778
E: director@g1313.org
www.gallery13131.org
Hours: Wed–Sun 1–6 p. m.

Gallery 1313 is pleased to present the ECO ART EXHIBIT,  a group-curated exhibition of photography, painting and mixed media works. The exhibition has been a regular event at the gallery for a number of years.

Curated by Phil Anderson.

The exhibit explores a number of environmental concerns such as air quality, urban sprawl, water quality and nature preservation. Artists have long filled the role of social activists, expressing their concerns about issues important to them. In this exhibition they also mirror the concerns of  today. The artists are from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick  and British Columbia. Works include sculpture, sound works, painting, photography, drawing and mixed media.

Participating artists:

Michael Stecky

Tara Krebs

Victor Gad

Jake Pauls

Elaine Waddell

Daniel Adhorn

Oliver Pauk

Singithi Kandage

Adam Break

Olga Oreshyna

Ruth Hartman

Hillary Hatzipetrakos

Ian Alter

Andrew Rutherdale

IIA Kellermann

Christos Damianos

Sophia Solaris

Amelie Brindamour

Charles Harkbarth

Ghanesh Das

Sarah Boothroyd

Robert Morouney

Pauline Thompson

Audrey Smith

Cassandra Marie  Wittman

Becca Wallace

Sidra Syed

Greg Payce, Pantheon Verisimilus, detail, 2007.

February 2 – May 6, 2012
GARDINER MUSEUM
110 Queen’s Park
Toronto, ON, M5S 2C7
T: 416.586.8080
E: mail@gardinermuseum.com
www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/
Hours: Mon–Thurs 10:00–6:00 p.m., Fri 10:00–9.00 p.m., Sat–Sun 10:00–5 p.m.

Greg Payce is recognized internationally for his unique ceramic works combining vase forms with precisely articulated profiles. When properly aligned, illusionary images, most often of human figures, appear in the negative spaces between the vases.

Starting in 2007, the artist began to create large-scale lenticular photographs of major pieces, opening new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the original works. Lenticular photographs incorporate digitally remastered images and lenses to create startling three-dimensional illusions. He also began to work with video projected onto moving works, creating mesmerizing sequences that relate decorative motifs found around the globe to contemporary ceramics practice.

In this exhibition, important early works indicating the artist’s growing fascination with image, decoration, history and technology will be displayed in the Focus Gallery amidst the museum’s rich collection of historical ceramics. Major new works from the last five years will be exhibited in the George R. Gardiner Gallery, including original ceramic artworks, lenticular photographs created from these artworks and large-scale video projections. Visitors will experience the work in a variety of arrangements, formats and scales.

This exhibition showcases one of Canada’s most innovative and productive ceramic artists, demonstrating his ongoing commitment to expanding the expressive and conceptual range of ceramic art.

Exhibition curator: Amy Gogarty

About Greg Payce

Greg Payce has been making ceramics for over 40 years. He has exhibited his work in twenty solo and over one hundred and thirty group exhibitions in Canada and abroad. His work is included in numerous public and private collections. 

In 2004, Payce began to collaborate with composers and photographers to produce videos that animate the negative spaces between his ceramic forms. He also began working with lenticular photographic technology to produce large-scale reinterpretations of his ceramic works. 

Payce lives and works in Calgary, Alberta, where he has been a faculty member in Ceramics at the Alberta College of Art and Design since 1988.

About Amy Gogarty

Amy Gogarty has participated in numerous national and international academic panels and published over 80 reviews, catalogue and critical essays on issues arising in craft disciplines. She serves on the boards of the North-West Ceramics Foundation and Potters Guild of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Tasman Richardson, Memorial, 2011. Courtesy of the artist © Tasman Richardson.

February 4 – April 1, 2012
Opening: Saturday, February 4, 2:00–5:00 p.m.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART
Main Space
952 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, M6J 1G8
T: 416.395.0067
E: info@mocca.ca
www.mocca.ca/
Hours: Tues–Sun 11:00–6:00 p.m.

Necropolis is an immersive video and new media installation. It will realize the translation of over a decade of ethereal video experiments and theorizations into a real world, tactile audience experience. Necropolis will consist of six new works contained within context-specific spaces housed inside a single super-structure.

Curated by Rhonda Corvese.