Cara Spooner and Alicia Grant are on the move again with a new piece and residency at the Harbourfront Centre as part of the HATCH emerging performance series.
Body Cartography
Created in collaboration with visual artist Simon Rabyniuk, as well as urban theorist Alex Marques, Body Cartography emphasizes and distorts the idea of a city within a city. A performance that mixes disparate details of balancing on rooftops, walking home alone at night, raiding secret swimming pools and feeling too close to strangers – employing installation, dance and question and answer periods.
“Cara Spooner and Alicia Grant make films, installations, curated events, subtle interventions and performances. They come from a contemporary dance lineage and integrate the physicality of their dance backgrounds into their practice and conceptual performances. They collaboratively create art that amplifies, distorts and/or frames everyday experience, drawing attention to disparate details like personal space, contemporary mythology, architecture of food courts and how fast cars can actually move with dances, installations and question and answer periods. They merge inner and outer stimuli to create live art events that are a convergence of their own bodies and the world around them. Their interdisciplinary collaborations unpack the notion of artist as social being into a relational art practice.” from Harbourfront site.
February 25 & 27, 8 p.m at Harbourfront Centre. Studio Theatre. York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay West(Map)
Bogotá, Colombia’s , Doris Salcedo is a part of the Guggenheim’s current show, Contemplating the Void. For the exhibit, which marks the building’s 50th anniversary, nearly two hundred artists, architects, and designers were invited to imagine their dream interventions in the rotunda of the space. Her mash- up art piece combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.
“What Hans was doing was amazing, and it was censored,” said Ms. Salcedo, a sculptor who is also politically inclined. She wrote to Mr. Haacke to obtain his image and then worked with four architects over several months to create the perfect alignment with the other picture. “It was a nightmare in Photoshop,” she said.
Her point is not so much an institutional critique as a take on the power of design, good or bad. “Architecture has a real effect on us,” she said. “The lack of architecture in the ghetto has a real effect on the people who live there.”
In another of her works Shibboleth sets out to intervene directly with the fabric of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.
In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.
‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
Here is another one of her magnificent works she did for the Istanbul Biennial in 2003.
11 December, 2009 – 7 March, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, 10 December, 8-11 PM
Curated by Gregory Burke, Director of The Power Plant
Opening on the artist’s 81st birthday, ‘Recent Snow: Projected Works by Michael Snow’ surveys the legendary Canadian artist’s forays into video installation from the past nine years. With seven projection works on display – most never before seen in Toronto – the exhibition includes works such as That / Cela / Dat (2000) and SSHTOORRTY (2005) as well as the world premiere of two new pieces. A pioneer particularly in experimental film, Snow has broken ground in every medium imaginable, from photography to improvisational music. The exhibition attests to the ongoing relevance of Snow’s playful and experimental practice, and the influence it continues to exert on the international contemporary art world. It also marks Snow’s return to The Power Plant fifteen years after the ambition retrospective ‘The Michael Snow Project’ (1994) was co-organized by The Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The product of a restless intelligence and a sharp wit, Snow’s work deftly juggles and juxtaposes the sensorial and the cerebral. Snow’s video projections manipulate the space between the moments of recording and of reception, the surface of the world and the surface of the screen to stage the dynamic play between a video camera and material reality. Snow uses the camera as an instrument capable of shaping and altering what is pointed toward: in his hands, realism becomes far from realistic and the familiar takes us by surprise.
Condensation . A Cove Story (2008) – which “condenses” footage of weather systems through time-lapse – transforms the passing of time as it unfolds the Maritimes. Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (2002) also takes inspiration from this environment: its dance of sun, window, curtain, and wind becomes “a contemplative time-light-motion work of art…”
The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets (2009) projects a live video feed of traffic on Queens Quay West onto a cubist relief composed of rectangular plinths on the gallery wall. The brand new, four-screen Piano Sculpture (2009) is a composition spanning a quartet of piano keyboards, evidencing the vitality of music – and that instrument in particular – to Snow’s aesthetic universe. Finally, Serve, Deserve (2009)– also premiering in this exhibition – projects a place setting onto a tabletop as dishes progressively fill up with food that seems to fall down the projector beam.
‘Recent Snow’ will be accompanied by screenings of some of Snow’s iconic experimental films, and by a feature article by Montreal-based art historian Martha Langford in the Winter 2009 issue of The Power Plant’s magazine SWITCH.
Michael Snow (born in Toronto, 1928) has exhibited internationally for over five decades. His films have been included in hundreds of film festivals and in retrospectives in Tokyo, Brussels and Geneva. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Àngels Barcelona (2009), BFI Southbank Gallery, London (2008), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), and Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2002), and his work has been selected for recent biennials in Sydney (2008), São Paulo (2006) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006). As a musician, Snow has performed internationally and has released many recordings, most recently with Aki Onda and Alan Licht (Victo, 2008).
All text sourced from the Power Plan website : here.
The new animated works, alongside paintings by Painters Eleven. Eleven in Motion: Abstract Expressions in Animation, will be on display at the Christopher Cutts Gallery at 21 Morrow Street, Toronto, from November 18 – 25, 2009. The gallery opening takes place November 18, 2009 from 6 to 9 PM.
“The Raftman’s Razor” is Keith’s first short film and is a part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. You can see the trailer for his most recent short “Train Town” on YouTube. His first feature comes out next year.
I just watched this little gem and am thourghy impressed. Such great writing and imagery and effective story telling..ahhh. If only my writing was this seamless.
RAGE5’s PURGATORY (or some place like it) exhibition opens at The Emporium Gallery (3035 St. Antoine Ouest) on Thursday, November 5th from 7-11pm. The exhibition will also be open Saturday, November 7th - Sunday, November 8th. Private viewings available by appointment from Monday, November 9th to Wednesday, November 11th.
About PURGATORY (or some place like it)
Appropriating religious iconography in order to develop an aesthetic that takes cues its from the uncanny and the metaphysical, PURGATORY (or some place like it) is an exhibition that exemplifies the state of limbo and unease that RAGE5, a Montreal-based street artist, feels as he increasingly operates within a gallery environment. Bold and immersive, About PURGATORY (or some place like it) is as much a stunning visual statement as it is an insight into a state of mind.
Artist Statement
“Having made a name for myself as a graffiti artist, I now find myself experiencing a rite of passage as I attempt my way into the gallery scene. While keeping a foot firmly set in the urban landscape with my street art, I am now experiencing a state of limbo which PURGATORY (or someplace like it) refers to. The religious imagery and symbols adopted in this new work metaphorically portray my inhibitions, fears, hopes and desires as I now transition from a seemingly unregulated world to an organized system. This new series of work illustrates my limited yet growing understanding of the constructs that make up the art milieu vs. my anarchic approach to street art.” -RAGE5
About RAGE5
RAGE5 is a Montreal-based multi-discinplinary artist. Having studied visual arts at Dawson College and film at Concordia University, RAGE5 is an avid graffiti writer, painter, illustrator, photographer and filmmaker- which explains why his creative outputs can be found in the streets, galleries and cinemas. His iconic posters and stickers can be found throughout the urban landscapes of Montreal, Baja Mexico and Tokyo. He has previously participated in numerous group exhibitions (such as En Masse) and art festivals (having participated in Under Pressure on four different occasions) and, his new film is set to be released very shortly. RAGE5 is undeniably prolific, expressive and a genuine contributor to Montreal’s arts scene.
This exhibition is presented by The Emporium Gallery, Switzerland CS and Bierbrier.
