GG_sm Lorna Mills and Sally McKay

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envy
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: envy

It's been quite a day for art in Toronto. Tanya Mars' gigantoid performance, Tyranny of Bliss dominated chunks of the downtown from 12-6pm. Eddo Stern was also talking and workshopping at InterAccess for the exact same period of time. I managed to take in some of each (despite the powerful draw of friends and patios in the gentle summer breeze) and will write something about Stern after I see his show at AGO that opens on Wednesday. For now suffice it to say that I'm thrilled the work is in town and very curious to see his new video.

courage
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: courage

Tyranny of Bliss was a behemoth. 14 tableaux, covering the 7 deadly sins and the 7 heavenly virtues, dotted the provincial legislature grounds and the big boulevard (University Avenue) that leads up to them. White limousines bearing audience, magicians and psychics drove around from site to site. I passed on the experience of sitting in ostentatious cars with strangers in favour of biking up and down on my rattley CCM. Despite spending a lot of time, enjoying myself enormously, and revisiting each site at least twice, I have not taken in the measure of this work. It's rambling and massive and I think each piece actually does belong to a comprehensive, intuitive whole that I can't as yet assemble. Highlights for me were Envy, Greed, Courage and Lust, as well as the rare urban experience of unearthing surprising, engaging art on familiar, traffic-laden streets.

greed
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: greed


- sally mckay 6-13-2004 12:07 pm [link] [4 comments]


venus transit

Just got this great image and message from friends via email...thanks for the permission to post here! - sm

[My friend] sent me this wonderful collage that her brother made of the Transit of Venus. I just love how such an abstract and unearthly event is rendered tangible and familiar. The projection of the sun (inverted!), and being held by [the girl] between her hands reminds me of that famous Blake engraving where Uriel (?) is measuring the cosmos with calipers. Here it's a young girl and her dad grasping the same thing.

blake's calipers The Transit of Venus has a special place in the history of science. Timing the passage of our second planet across the the sun gave up the first big yardstick for measuring the cosmos. It was the stuff of high adventure and scientific prowess - sailing to Tahiti and crossing deserts with astonomical instruments, funded by kings and states.

I saw the transit too, sitting on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield having waited for the sun to climb above the morning mist.

I used a few layers of silvered mylar from an emergency blanket to cover the objective lenses of a pair of binoculars and so protect my eyes (not a recommended technique!) This allowed me to look directly at the Sun and Venus.

There were a few fleeting moments where I swear I actually felt myself to be sitting on one planet and watching another cross in front of the huge sun ... meaning, it wasn't a mental or conceptual thought, instead it was a direct experience - as solid as watching someone walk past on the street.

written by guest poster:
Gordon Hicks

- sally mckay 6-11-2004 9:13 am [link] [2 comments]


Infrasense by Robert Saucier and the collective Kit is on at Interaccess (in conjunction with Subtle Technologies). Horse-shaped machines lumber along tracks. Blob-shaped machines with miscellaneous pieces of obsolete computer equipment stuck all over them lumber around hither and yon. There is some kind of technical interrelationship between the two types of machine involving sounds that are broadcast from the horses. These are "Trojan Horses" and "Bugs". The pun is somewhat compelling: to manifest in clunky, clumsy three dimensions an image of computer viruses that normally have no corporal reality. But it's not working very well. Hardly any of the machines were moving. There was a hand-held controller console with levers to push that appeared to produce zero results. There is supposedly a web component to the project where you can input directives to the "bugs" but the terminal in the gallery was A: confusing in the extreme and B: offline and disfunctional. I can't find a link to the web part of the project anywhere (not on the Interaccess site nor the Subtle Technologies site). To be fair, the installation is complicated, and I think this is the first time it's been installed. For robot-art afficianados there may be some interesting tech going on. I do, however, find this kind of object-oriented technology art pretty tedious. Is it R&D? if so, to what end and in whose service? If its all for the fun of puttering/tinkering invention, then please let go of the forced, tacked-on content and just give us some cool machines (that hopefully function) to interact with (or maybe we can just go watch Junkyard Wars on TV).

infrasense
digital mock up of Infrasense taken from Subtle Technologies
eddo stern
installation shot of Eddo Stern's GodsEye View taken from Postmasters
C-Level member Eddo Stern is showing at AGO next week. I've seen his work at Postmasters in New York and, while his level of artistry is much more sophisticated than Infrasense, some of my complaints still apply: clunky objects that 'refer' to computer casing, with genuine technology going on 'inside" them. I like Stern's work, though, because the dork factor is acknowledged and folded into the content, with reference to the medieval fetish, war tech fetish, and general geek factor of computer games. I like Stern's video work better than his objects, and I like C-Level's exploratory provocations in the interface of gaming very much indeed. I'm hoping to attend Stern's talk at Interaccess on Saturday, and will report back on both this and his AGO show next week.

- sally mckay 6-09-2004 9:24 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]


eat poster I am looking forward to this video screening on Thursday night for several reasons:
  1. I helped Andrew J. Paterson with his video and I'm very curious to see how it came out

  2. I like Allyson Mitchell's videos very much indeed

  3. The event is at Cinecycle, my favourite art-video venue in Toronto

When: Thursday, June 20, 8pm
Where: Cinecyle, 129 Spadina Ave (down the alley)
Who: Trinity Square Video presents Lukas Blakk + Tracy Tidgwell, Heather Keung, Allyson Mitchell, Andrew J. Paterson, Yura Yurinskiy, and Karim Zouak. Conceived and initiated by Day Millman.


- sally mckay 6-09-2004 9:21 pm [link] [add a comment]


matt bahen


Of all the paintings in Matt Bahen's current show at A Space, this one (the PR flagship image, nabbed from the A Space website) is my least favourite because it's the only one with eye contact. This painting has an iconic presence, a valorous, masculine, Harlequin Romance mystique that the others do not share. The formula, however, is pretty much the same throughout; each canvas is divided into two panels,* with a thick-paint-renedered sniper on one, and a series of thermograms on the other. The snipers are wearing ghillies, a term that describes this kind of ribbony, raggedy, flora-esque camo. In most of the paintings the snipers look un-human, like threatening-yet-familiar animalistic blobs of malicious nature. The heavily mediated human forms represented by the thermograms (re-renedered here in pixilated paint chunks) provide a contrast that emphasises a chilling objectification of everyone involved in war. Says Bahen in his artists' statement:
"The target for the sniper is free of context."

...and...

"It is important to pay attention to ongoing world affairs as we are both victor and victim in the same breath"

*Remember 20 years ago when abutting figurative painted images from radically different sources was supposed to mean a negation of content? Hah...thank goodness that's over and done with. I prefer this ernest, perhaps heavy-handed, over-abundance of narrative resonance any day.

Update: my posts in the comments section below much better articulate my interest in the this work than this original post. Thinking out loud.
- sally mckay 6-09-2004 7:49 am [link] [23 comments]


tour de l'ile


Just got in from a very fun (last minute plan) weekend in Montreal riding bikes at Un Tour La Nuit (8000 people), Le Tour De L'Ile (20,000-30,000 people), and our own self-directed jaunts around town (6-7 people). Lots of cycling combined with sitting in the park. Perfect in every respect. Montreal has no right turn on red which lowers the stress level considerably. It also has lots of accessible public space and a culture that accomodates 'hanging out' with gusto. The top image is the intersection where Maison des Cyclists is located, a bike community centre/store/cafe that functions as a hub for both activism and recreation (everyone that you can see in the picture is on a bike except the guy on the steps who's bike is parked in the huge, 1/2 block-long bike racks).

- sally mckay 6-07-2004 7:56 am [link] [4 comments]