Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Art and Art History Graduate Exhibitions Meeting Part Two

Art and Art History Graduate Exhibitions Meeting Part Two


Tuesday, January 13, 2009
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.


Sheridan, Lecture Hall B124




All graduating students wishing to participate in our two graduate exhibitions at the Blackwood Gallery in March 2009 should attend this meeting with Blackwood Outreach Coordinator Karen Kraven.

The exhibitions will take place between March 4 – 29, 2009.

At the meeting we will check in on the organization of the shows. Here are the assigned tasks:
· Canadian Art ad design and coordination, signage and show title design, invitation design, Matt Hoffman, Drew Lesiuczok, Andrew Nguyn
· Artist statement editors, press release writing and distribution, Michelle Johnson and Claudia Ciornei
· Reception coordinator, food, Steve Shupak
· Installation coordinators for first exhibition, includes creating list of works in the exhibition (note installations occur on a Monday/Tuesday), Ryan Lord and Jackie Quaresma
· Installation coordinators for second exhibition, includes creating list of works in the exhibition, Michelle Johnson and Raneem Meknes
· Installation strike coordinators for first and second exhibitions, Ricardo Antonio Conte-Oro De Arco, Laura Momeau, Kora Bakier
· Web communications coordinator, Facebook page, Shelley Williams

Contacts
Jackie Quaresma
Robert Fones
Karen Kraven

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Review: Drifting, Slowly: Four Artists Deep in Labour by John Armstrong

Following is an on online review in Canadian Art of 1996 Art and Art History alumna Rhonda Weppler’s 2008 fall show at Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto, written by faculty member John Armstrong.


Drifting, Slowly: Four Artists Deep in Labour
Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto Sep 6 to Oct 11 2008
Music of Chance 2 2008 Detail Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto ">Music of Chance 2 2008 Detail Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto " class="inline">

Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky Music of Chance 2 2008 Detail Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

Over the past five years, collaborative Vancouver artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have travelled across Canada creating exhibitions with centrepieces of cars “cast” in aluminium foil. During this process, the artists have created embossed impressions of vehicles that they’ve reassembled as surprisingly accurate and somewhat droopy sculptural renditions. They’ve engaged in this labour-intensive process for each exhibition and, once the shows have ended, they’ve had the automotive shells crushed into balls.

For “Drifting, Slowly,” Weppler and Mahovsky brought along a box of bric-a-brac to cast over a five-day period at Pari Nadimi Gallery. Music of Chance 2 is an unbroken piece of aluminum foil that links impressions of an ornate metal box and a number of silver-coloured bits and pieces that the box once contained, such as a hash pipe, a harmonica, a hinge, an Eiffel Tower key fob, a fancy hand-held mirror and so on. A set of 30 or so such items is repeated five times over the 17-foot length of the sculpture. As with the auto casts, the artists’ great industry here offers a paradoxical quandary. These modest objects have been painstakingly reproduced, reconceived as budget-rate silver plating and put on repeat. The title of the work alludes to the 1990 Paul Auster novel that chronicles hidden and pointless labour. Weppler and Mahovsky’s labours, although executed on site prior to the exhibition’s opening, result in a delicate sculpture vulnerably set out on the gallery floor. The artists even foresee keeping this sculpture intact. Where big-ticket cars may fall prey to planned obsolescence, cheap knick-knacks, whether cast for posterity or not, tend to stick around.

Weppler and Mahovsky invited two other artists to participate in “Drifting, Slowly,” Vancouver’s Andrea Nunes and Santa Barbara’s George Legrady. Both of these artists treat the persistence of things in the crush and bustle of time. Nunes’s recent three-crayon drawings depict a splash, a cozy campfire with two lawn chairs, a geodesic dome, a textile surface—all of which float in the middle of the paper and evoke transient, post-1960s moments.

Legrady too is concerned with the mid–20th century: his 1993 work An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive CD-ROM projection that uses a floor plan of the former workers' movement museum in Budapest as a matrix for viewers to navigate a conflation of authoritative and personal histories. Legrady juxtaposes photographs, home movies and other documents chronicling his family’s life in both Communist-era Budapest and 1950s-and-beyond Montreal. In one slide, we see a 1930s photograph of a family group in a dining room with a decorative ceramic jug on a corner shelf in the background. In an accompanying image, we see the same jug as clinically re-photographed in the 1990s.

The artists in “Drifting, Slowly” all use laborious techniques to marshal the bric-a-brac of everyday life into associative networks—an aluminium-foil chain, a grid of drawings, an endlessly variable digital archive. These entwined workaday things worryingly imitate the way many such phenomena stick to and ensnare us.


"Drifting, Slowly" 2008 Installation view Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

Monday, December 1, 2008

Free Screening! Takashi Ishida in person

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Free Screening!
Takashi Ishida in person
December 3 at 7:00pm
Curated and presented by Chris Gehman.
Renowned Japanese artist Takashi Ishida, winner of the prestigious Goto Commemorative Culture Award in 2007, has been creating new work here in Toronto over the past several months. As his year-long residency draws to a close, we are delighted to welcome Takashi Ishida to present a selected retrospective of his films and videos (and perhaps something brand-new as an added bonus!). More...

L'Eau chaude, l'eau frette
Director: André Forcier
December 6 at 9:00pm
This Québécois classic by the province's former reining enfant terrible is set in a rundown tenement in Montréal. The film centres on a ruthless loan shark named Polo as he plans a birthday celebration for himself. Unfortunately for him, his enemies aren't as cowed as he believes. More...

Restored 35mm print!
Touki-Bouki
Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty
December 9 at 9:00pm
The picaresque Touki-Bouki, made by one of Africa's greatest filmmakers, follows the adventures of two restless lovers as they ride through Dakar on a motorcycle accessorized with a pair of cattle horns. The anti-heroes of this legendary, French New Wave-inspired film feel alienated from society and long to escape to Paris, where they expect to find freedom. More...

Free Screening!
Restored archival print!
Limite
Director: Mário Peixoto
December 10 at 7:00pm
Widely considered one of the best Brazilian films of all time, Limite is Mário Peixoto's one and only film, an enthralling work of pure cinema with stylistic affinities to Fritz Lang, Murnau and Man Ray. Inspired by an arresting André Kertész photograph, the film exudes an ecstatic Expressionism in its high contrast, elliptical depiction of three castaways battling unforgiving waters on a rickety boat. More...


For complete schedule, visit cinemathequeontario.ca . Order your tickets online or call 416-968-FILM.
All screenings take place at AGO's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West, McCaul Street entrance.
Cinematheque Ontario is supported by Bell, RBC, the Ontario Media Development Corporation and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Visa† is the only credit card accepted by Cinematheque Ontario.