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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Scott Carruthers
Scott Carruthers, untitled 2006
Scott Carruthers,Out of Time Or Out Of Space? 2006
Ed Pien
Two Worlds Suite: Gorging water 1999 ink and flashe on paper
Two Worlds Suite: Let the battle begin 1999 ink and flashe on paper
Two Worlds Suite: We've caught one 1999 ink and flashe on paper
Night Gathering 2005, 5 x 2.6m ink on cut Japanese paper
Marc Ngui
Groovy new digital work by Marc Ngui, 2006
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Rob Cruickshank's Top Ten 2006
I didn't go out and see any art. I didn't make any art. I sat around drinking coffee and watching youtube. Here are the top 10 art videos on youtube:
#1 Cirque de Calder, parts 1,2, 3, 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMnoi1-vAKU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW4JeQv3aME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1H4__j1qlk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX9EnfbElao
#2 Arthur Ganson, Cory's Yellow Chair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKEIRGLYRcs
#3 Moving Canvas- Frédéric Eyl, Gunnar Green and Richard The
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqLj4fKDwVY
#4 Marcel Duchamp, Anemic Cinema
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZIHA4hLk2k
#5 Theo Jansen, Strandbeest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=par9zbTSN58
#6 Garnet Hertz, Cockroach Robot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZD59Ic9T8
#7 The Incredible Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nmspVOz_Y
#8 Rainbow Dance, Len Lye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2vA_cHIXpc
#9 LED Throwies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNg-q8W036U
#10 Mechanical Tiger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMaS4pB9rw
All-Santa Xmas Crèche by RM Vaughan.
Snapshot courtesy of L.M.
Andrew Harwood's Top Fifteen 2006
1) Kent Monkman's, Salon Indien, installation at TIAF, sponsored by MOCCA, Kent stop it ~ your killing me ~ it was perfect!! I smell Ven-ass Biennale!!
2) Unholy Alliance: art + fashion meet again, curated by David Liss at MOCCA
3) Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne, curated by Bennet Simpson, The Power Plant, The most relaxed show I have ever seen at the PP.
4) Kim Adams: Bugs and Dragons, AGO/Little Miss Sunshine
5) Allyson Mitchell, Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalist Society, her farewell to the Gladstone room at TAAFI/ Drag Strip, Vaginal Creme Davis & Gartina @ TAAFI
6) Bruce La Bruce's Wedding to Antonio at Toronto City Hall, I am a crusty bitch & cried me eyes out!!
7) Fatwurms, Honky Town, Paul Petro Contemporary Art
8) Stephen Andrews, Lives of the Saints, Paul Petro
9) Lorna Mills Steve Irwin Memeorial Pumpkin, at RM Vaughan's Halloween Party
10) Toronto Island, Hanlans Point, Nude Beach, June, July, August 2006/ Venice Beach, Los Angeles w Allyson Mitchell and Keith Manship September 2006
11) Sandra Rechico's Art + Gossip, Anywhere any time!!
12) David Liss's Hair, Anywhere any time!!
13) Strip-O-Rama, Gallery TPW Fundraiser at The Gladstone Hotel, Props to Enza Supermodel!!
14) Patrick DeCoste's simultaneous nervous breakdown, come back and great painting show @ Spin Gallery and many, many other locations!! 50% real - 50% PR scary and beautiful!!
15) Finnbogi Pétursson, Sphere, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, OMG! Ravey and atmospheric all at once/Jubal Brown's all night Halloween party at the Brickworks - it was the best and worst party I have ever gone to - party kids were trading smokes for plastic grapes from my head-dress - it was pretty Mad Max once the water ran out at 6 am!! Don't do poppers & pot in fall-themed drag in unlit abandoned buildings ever!! Pic attached (below).
Tino's top 10 (In no particular order)
Art hits the Street in 2006: While most art stays indoors I think we need to celebrate public art equally. This year was an especially fascinating and inspiring year for public art.
1. Best Street Art
Toronto's StreetArt Crews and Guerrilla artists (Stencils & PasteUps) Join the Street Art Scanvenger Hunt.Toronto Stencil Art Archive (Highlight)2. Best Community Art Project
Toronto PasteUps Art Archive (Highlight)
Another link with more excellent Toronto Street ART work documented ... http://flickr.com/groups/torontograffiti/
Inspiring and likely the most photographed art object in Toronto last year was the Kensington Community Car Project (since then it has been removed) http://photo.tino.ca/junkflower/
3. Best Public Space Performance Art
Who had the most fun doing public performance art in 2006? NewMindSpace
4. Best Public Community Event meets performance Art
Toronto PUblic Space Committee's Human River (TPSC)
We are the river - The river is us
5. Last year for Splice This!
Nine years of astounding film and passion and art... http://www.splicethis.com/photowall.php
6. Crosswalk - Paulette Phillips
Lovely video art of people crossing a downtown street while constantly looking into the camera. (Currently at the Power Plant as part of the exhibition We Can Do This Now) http://www.thepowerplant.org/current.html
7. Luis Jacob & Amos Lattier
Public Art so good it made City Hall squirm in their seats ... Pigeon Condo "If you had wings, you'd be home by now" http://pigeoncondo.com/
8. Michael Brown's 'Harbourfront Graffiti Transformation Projects'
Empty walls say nothing. Michael and his crew do something about it with consistently beautiful and deeply meaningful results. http://www.miguelmarron.com/communityart.htm
9. Bicycle Polo - Royal Society of Adventurerology
Activism meets performance art meets campy fun in downtown park. The revolution will not be motorized. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSdpqcBqcyE
10. The Clever Street Art Award
Recently, The Star, a newspaper in Toronto did a fashion layout using some of Poster Child's posters as a background. To let them know that he was watching, he put the model up on the same wall as a stencil in the same scale as the photograph. http://www.woostercollective.com/2006/10/stencil_to_newspaper_to_stencil.html
Michelle Allard
Michelle Allard Flourish (recently exhibted at Mercer Union)
Michelle Allard Greenscape (recently exhibited at eyelevel gallery)
Michelle Allard In Transit (currently on display at Diaz Contemporary)
Gordon Hicks
Gordon Hicks Organelles 1999 steel, rubber, custom electronics
(each ‘organelle’ is approx 10 in. across)
Gordon Hicks Organellessteel, rubber, custom electronics
(each ‘organelle’ is approx 10 in. across)
Gordon Hicks SCHEMA (detail) 2002 worked steel, coloured pencil on prepared wall
(8 ft. x 23 ft.)
Gordon Hicks Large Field 2005 acrylic sheet, aluminum paint, fluorescent
light fixtures (7 panels, 30 x 30 in. each)
Gordon Hicks Untitled (loop_01) (video stills, installation view) 2005
projected DVD image (2 ft. diameter) quicktime loop
Sandra Alland's Top Ten Art List for 2006
1. hands down, it's Tanya Tagaq throat-singing (and dancing) at Lula Lounge with her trip-hop-inspired DJ!!!!!!! you were a fool to miss it (http://www.tanyatagaq.com)www.blissfultimes.ca
2. The Lactation Station, performance art (breast-milk taste-test performance art!) by Jess Dobkin in FADO's Five Holes: Matters of Taste (http://www.jessdobkin.com/)
3. Thousand Mile Voice, an experimental, independent multi-genre music and poetry CD by Gein Wong (http://myspace.com/geinwong)
4. Esther & Rivkah's Latke Party at Katharine Mulherin's Sideshow (okay I'm cheating it's tomorrow but how can it not be top ten material?)
5. Gorey Story by The Thistle Project (interdisciplinary performance based on Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies, at Artists Play Studio, www.thistleproject.ca)
6. the crazy music-performance collaboration between Sook Yin Lee (www.myspace.com/sookyinlee), John Kameel Farah (www.johnfarah.com/) & others at Xpace in Kensington for I Want To Go To Africa and Other Tales of High Adventure (this actually took place in the last two weeks of '05, but let's pretend okay?)
7. the DVD of Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July) and Miranda July's short story in McSweeney's #21 (frankly, anything Miranda July does http://mirandajuly.com/) 8. Tracy Wright & Caroline Gillis in Daniel MacIvor's A Beautiful View (theatre)
9. d'bi.young's wacked poetry-dub-reggae-punk high-energy performance with Dubbin' Gangsta Allstars at her book launch (Art on Black) at Lula Lounge (http://www.dbiyoung.net)
10. Get Your Lit Out, Pride reading organized by Debra Anderson at Art Metropole (www.debraanderson.ca)
Anthony Easton's Top Ten Visual Arts Events, 2006
1. Drawings. Powerplant Gallery, Toronto. June 24 to September 4, Annie Pootoogook
She uses history, and family politics, to extend and compress what was taught by her colonizers. The third generation working in Kingnait, she not only depicts the daily exterior world of her life, but the interior world as well. All of that said, the drawings here have an amazing formal skill. The colours are perfect, the line work is revelatory, and the wit has a tender edge. Best work there, the large, brightly coloured drawing of people shopping for frozen foods, in the local supermarket, in the foreground a woman in a traditional parka. The worst thing, about the works was the racist bullshit that emerges when women of colour emerge as cultural warriors, suggesting that she won rewards, not for her consummate skill, but because of her ethnicity or gender.
2. Campaign Ads, Election Cycle, North Carolina. Vern Robinson
The Baroque end of Rovian dirty tricks, filled with the best of overwrought writing, obvious musical cues, and the usual racism./misogyny/homophobia. Highlights include mariachi bands when the word Mexican is used and calling himself the black Jesse Helms. Link here: http://www.vernonrobinson.com/illegalimmigration.shtml
3. Anon. Photos of Fires, the Firehouse museum, Port Rupert, BC
A cramped building, adjacent to the firehouse, like an obsessive garage collection of junk, filled with the usual ephemera of small town museums, but 10 photos on the walls proved to be among the best serial installations I've seen. The photos were drugstore prints, in wal-mart frames, of one fire, per decade of the 20th century. The same buildings, the same flames licking out of the same upper floors, the midst of disaster. The photos are examples of necessary but unpleasant work, and the line, with so little variation, suggest the slow push and pull of small town life. They have improved the waterfront, built a large museum of first nation work, and have monuments to Canadians, Sailors, and the Japanese. But nothing matching the tension found in these works.
4. Bootlegs, Katharine Mulherin, Toronto, Ontario, Eric Doeringer
Watching these on the walls of Mulherin is like watching a puppy being house broken. The theory is easy to understand, and talk about: Warholian multiples, Benjamin in a digital age, the problems of late capital in a hot house art market, problematizing the cult of identity, and all of that said, there was something really sexy, really cool, about seeing these pocket sized versions of ArtForum masterpieces, at prices even the most broke could afford.
5. Camille Paglia writing for US Magazine
This is the reactionary punch line, of 25 years of pop culture, even better because it was online, and they were talking about the sacred power of Britney's cunt.
6. http://www.tinyvices.com/Ryan_McGinley_Sun_and_Health_17
McGinley is no longer shocking, but he never really was. This image is kind of heartbreaking for me, because it is so beautiful. The hand and the penis make the same triangle, as the hand and the cigarette, or the fly of the blue jeans. The red and blue provide a kind of proscenium arch, so we can see the penis better. The penis is the same colour as the wall, or the visual movement, of the penis, and the piss, a kind of diagonal line towards oblivion. It might seem like a cop out, to talk about such an intimate and sexually charged image as a formal masterpiece, but it doesn't seem that sexually charged to me, much less so then the other ones we can look at, for example Tillman's AA breakfast, or Mapplethorpe's man in the suit, one who never figured out line and the other who never figured out colour.
7. 64 Videos, One A Day For 64 Days Naomi Leibowitz http://naomileibowitz.com/projects/ofNothing/videos/index.html
I think that it completes many ideas of recent photography, or at least extends thems. By making videos of road trips, cooking, dancing, but off camera, or obliquely, she subtly comments on photographers like Goldin and her followers, as much as she talks about the You Tube culture of digitally videotaping anything, Would be less fantastic, if it wasn't so heartwarmingly and tender in its presentation, banality without being clinical, cold, or vicious.
8. Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, Film.
Assumed by many (mostly male) critics to be two and a half hours of vacuous fluff, didn't listen to the first couple of minutes, where the Gang of Four, shout out the agenda: "The problem of Leisure, What to do With Pleasure". A film about what happens when you have money when no one else does, and also a slaughter of politics as usual, a brilliant film that upends how we view not only their bourgeois, but ours. The best bits are not the large set pieces, but the tiny details, when patterns of dresses and wallpapers match, or the costumes of side players, or the bones on aristocratic dining tables. This is an important and misunderstood masterpiece.
9. State of Emergency, Steve Miesel, Vogue Italia, 2006. http://community.livejournal.com/foto_decadent/1403878.html
Of the same emotional tenor (or terror?) as the Coppola film, these images, of models looking very beautiful, while their civil rights are violated, was one of the more transgressive experiments in form this year, in fact so transgressive in making violence beautiful, it reminded me of David and Marat.
10. Karbon Moos http://www.flickr.com/people/karbon/
A photographer, from rural Montana, talented in an artless way, only discovered via flickr, her pictures of daily farm labour make me worry I am being exotic, but some are so lovely and tough, in a fiery, complete way. Reminds me of my mother and grandmother, and all of my relatives who were farmers. The best work, is of her dog and her horse, the animals infused with an understanding that urbanites cant really understand.
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Top Ten Time 2006 |  |
Do you have a 2006 top ten art list forming in your mind? Email it to me at smblogATsympatico.ca and I'll post it here. Please include links (if applicable)!
The deadline is December 31st, 2006.
Here are links to last year's smattering of top ten lists:
Anthony Easton's top ten 2005 - Mr. Nobody's top ten 2005 - L.M.'s top ten 2005 - Tino's top ten 2005
2004 top ten lists
2003 top ten lists
Julie Voyce
Grade One 2001 screenprint
Sample 2000 screenprint
Frost 2001 screenprint
North 2002 screenprint
Sun 2002 screenprint
Fastwürms
Spoticus - Code Orange 2004 giclee print
Bitch Killin' Machine 2004 giclee print
Ice Station Isis 2006 photos: Liz Lott
M.L.A.(Montecore Liberation Army) Recruitment/Fundraising Drive 2006 TAAFI
Roaming performance w/ Jill Henderson
Miss Canadiana (a.k.a. Camille Turner)
Johanna Householder
stills from Next To Last Tango 2001 lip-syncing to the soundtrack of "Last Tango in Paris" and
playing both characters, Johanna Householder re-constructs the butter scene, shot for shot.
Best Art video ever.
Kristin Lucas
Kristin Lucas, Untitled (propeller) 2006 (currently on view at Or Gallery in Vancouver)
Kristin Lucas Untitled (backup generator) 2006 (currently on view at Or Gallery in Vancouver)
Nestor Krüger
still from two turntables 2002 2 channel DVD projection w/snd
still from Analog 2005 3 channel DVD projection w/snd
(three cameras through a model of Haus Wittgenstein)
installation view for Untitled 2002 Latex paint on wall
Poplars 2004 Latex paint on wall
Andrew J. Paterson
Stills from Rectangle World 2006 digital video
Kenn Bass
sequence from Fire Moth 2005 Single Channel video with audio.
Kenn Bass is also the person behind Media Needle.
Peter Bowyer currently in the Media/Retail Lounge
at the MOCCA - 952 Queen Street West, Toronto
until January 21, 2007
Installation view, from left to right Early Bird 2006 galvanized steel,
The Aristocrat 2005-2006 and Mirage 2006
Mirage galvanized steel, super-8 animation transferred to DVD.
The Aristocrat galvanized steel, super-8 animation transferred to DVD.
These pictures are from our summer road trip through British Columbia. This guy was at the roadside by the gas station in McBride. Chetwynd, further north, is without a doubt the go-to town for chainsaw sculpture. They have an annual competition and the main street is lined with super intricate and ambitious works (see some here). I kind of preferred these modest, smiling animals. I regret that I did not get the artist's name. I was afraid to chat with him in case the words, "I will buy that great big rabbit" popped out of my mouth by mistake.
Some images from makingROOM
curated by Heather Nicol more info here
(closes Sunday at 5pm)
"King Juda" by Michael Bartosik
"Mr. Nobody" by Tanya Read
"The Eye" by Lisa Neighbour
(details from "The Eye")
"Big orange Bird" by Ed Pien
I'm totally nightblind, so the 20 images I took with my video camera of Lisa's work were all badly out of focus. Will replace with something better tomorrow. Excuses. Excuses. Ed forgot to bring a better camera for me to use. It's all his fault.
[eta: Ed has redeemed himself by providing me with a better image of Lisa's eye]
Party Party Party! Liberal leadership race on this weekend.
Remember to guzzle a rye & ginger whenever you hear the word Trudeau. (and remember that you-know-who-from-somewhere-else-with-that-nuanced-view-on-torture bears no resemblance to he that was cool, but still may invoke the name.)
I want to see the country governed by fabulous dead people.
