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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Guest Top Ten
Do you have your own 2003 top ten art list to post? email it to me at smblog@sympatico.ca and I'll post it here. Or click on the comment link below and post it yourself.
Anthony Easton's Top Ten
Anthony says: "Living in the hinterlands, most of this top ten is found via the web and magazines, and my trips to Seattle and Vancouver in May."
- Johnny Cash-Bauhaus Coffee Shop- Seattle
A show of half pop, half folk work inspired by Johnny Cash (foot by foot paintings of stars, targets, guns and dollar bills) it could have been cute, or hipster obvious or just a little over cooked, but 6 months before his death, it seemed a prescient, tender memorial. There were at least two dozen of these, hung on every spare wall, hung in twos or threes or even alone, in red, blue, white or silver--like all that was good and pure about America forced into these tiny canvasses. Even if it was not really about Mr Cash, it would have been amazing.
- The Anniversary Party-1.6 gallery-Vancouver
A group show from new graduates at Simon Fraser University, some of it was clichéd (a gas station like a beacon in the dark night) but most of it was really wonderful in how it looked and what it said. There was the large C-Print of an Andy Warhol billboard looking over Sunset boulevard like a bemused God, and then there was the tiny Susan Bozic black and white of three hollywood signs, rotting from decay, that was technically gorgeous, and hidden in a back room.
- Bernadette Phan-Equinox-Bau Xi-Vancouver.
Organic forms over power canvases, some as small as my palm, some 6 feet tall. A wonderful flowering over, could have been decorative, but the colours were too challenging, and it could have been twee, but the gestural rawness of the mark making betrayed that, it could have been ab-ex but she was having too much fun. The best thing about it was the delicate tension between these three elements.
- Vicky Christou-Untitled- Tracy Lawrence-Vancouver.
White tick marks on a wood board, to show how much time art takes, and how performance is as important as the finished work; graphite grey blobs on canvas, which are the best textured pieces I have seen in years, and other white on white works, which remind me of how varied such limited practices could be.
- Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay - I am A Boy Band-Edmonton Art Gallery-Edmonton
The concept here is insanely simple, a man dressed as a boy band sings a 16th century English madigral. But its funny, erotic, deeply aware of precedent and part of an avant garde sound show in the last bastion of modernism.
- Chris Gergly-The Apartment Series-
More C Prints from Vancouver, which seems to be the favourite medium of that city, these apartment buildings were for swinging singles, married couples on the prowl, newly liberated gay men and young kids doing vague and artistic things for money. To cross the threshold into field stone, broad carpets, slick wood, gold letters and steel elevators was to own the world for a while. There is an immutable sadness in the lack of care that marks them and by extension this paradise on the Coast.
- Richard Prince-Nurse Paintings-Art Forum, Sadie Coles HQ London.
The pieces in reproduction have an intimate destruction, printed they seem to recycle themselves, from marred pulp to high art, thanks to post consumer paper. In life though I imagine the work to be much different, they are huge, 6 feet by 4 feet, 5 feet by 3 feet, 6. 5 feet by 5 feet. They are the size of men who live them. They would intimidate those who are smaller. (Center for Nursing Advocacy responds to the show here.-ed)
- Palaeolithic Sculpture found in Southern Germany
It's 30,000 years old, and so it's a little perverse to have them on a top ten list for this year, but we did not know they existed until very recently. Delicate ivory carvings of women, men, animals, and most excitingly the first depiction of anthropomorphism. The work makes me wonder if we can call them totems, if the work had a ritual function outside it's obvious aestheic care, and whether these questions matter now.
- Grayson Perry, Tate, London
My first reaction to him winning the Turner was Yeah-pottery! I deeply care about this kind of work, and thought that it was a triumph of craft over art, but then I thought a bit and realized the politics of Emin, Lucas, Hirst and the Chapmans is the same politics as Perry, and he won for his gender bending alter ego Claire. But they are really excellent pots, and he is one of the better embroiders recently.
- Ryan McGinley, work for Vice, New York and Montreal.
He is easy and loose and fun, handsome boys fucking and laughing and playing about, rock stars in hotel rooms, the details that others miss-like the shade of green in a hoodie or the curve of haunch, or a sock being pulled off a foot, or the beauty in door frames, slag heaps, details of urbanity that only a citizen of the urban space would grok.
