It’s been some time since our last post on the project space, so we thought we’d celebrate our 70th (!) with an update on recent developments. As some of you may know, this blog has been TYPOLOGY’s virtual home while our website and physical space are under construction. Both have seen delays for various reasons, but we promise that things are continuing to move forward…

For those who don’t yet know, TYPOLOGY is a not-for-profit project space which will be housed within a historic school building currently undergoing renovation by Artscape, a local organization with an international reputation for city-building through the arts. Award-winning and multi-faceted projects at Wychwood Barns, the Distillery, and Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island have proven Artscape’s model of repurposing underutilized buildings for the benefit of the arts and the greater community.

Bounded by Trinity-Bellwoods Park to the east and the gallery districts of Dundas West, Queen West, and Ossington Avenue to the north, south, and west, Artscape’s newest project is ideally situated to become a magnet for social and artistic connection and creativity at the local, national, and international levels. Once renovations are complete, TYPOLOGY will join a dynamic mix of artists and organizations including Koffler Center for the Arts, SKETCH, Paperhouse Studio, Small World Music Society, Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Barbara Astman, Vid Inglevics, Miriam Grenville and Eve Egoyan, among many others in bringing arts production, performance, education, and exhibition together under one roof in Toronto’s West End. Plus, there will be a new mezzanine café! (Coffee + art = happiness!)

Good things take time however, and Artscape has recently notified tenants of a new completion date for the centre. Based on this information, we are anticipating a grand opening for TYPOLOGY sometime in the summer or fall of 2013 (rather than fall 2012 as previously announced). While we are of course eager to begin, the flip side to having extra time is that our exhibitions and programming will be that much more developed for it.

And that brings us to… our exhibitions and programming! We’re lining up a great first year of shows and events, and will be creating opportunities for artists, architects, designers, curators, and others to participate. Our website will launch well in advance of the project space opening, and we’ll be posting information on how you can get involved, including floor plans, open calls, submission guidelines, and other opportunities. So stay tuned, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr (or subscribe to this blog via email) to receive updates as they occur.
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above: Lyla Rye, Subtext, architectural installation with chalk, from Art School (Dismissed)

In the meantime, we thought we’d feature a few images from a 2010 exhibition curated by Heather Nicol in our then-derelict building. Titled Art School (Dismissed) and billed as a celebration of artists who “extend their creative practices into the realm of education”, the show took full advantage of the school’s classically wide hallways and large, open classrooms as a socio-historically rich context for new site specific installation, sculpture, video, drawing, painting, performance, new media, and hybrids thereof. In her curatorial statement, Nicol writes, “As both makers and teachers, the artists in Art School (Dismissed) are uniquely situated to explore and question notions of authority, history, memory, and the dissemination of knowledge. Childhood and play have inspired many of their works.” (click images to see more views and details on the CCCA website)
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above two images: Tara Cooper (in collaboration with Terry O’Neill), Shirts vs. Skins

above: Ian Carr-Harris and Yvonne Lammerich, Copy one of the following

above: Collette Laliberte and Sandra Rechico, 2 > 1 video installation, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid
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A nicely designed catalogue documenting the exhibition is available from TYPE Books
(click images to enlarge)

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Read Leah Sandals’ review of Art School (Dismissed) for Canadian Art
For more information on the exhibition visit the Art School (Dismissed) website

More information on the featured artists can be found on the linked websites:
Lyla Rye
Tara Cooper and Terry O’Neill
Ian Carr-Harris
Yvonne Lammerich
Collette Laliberté
Sandra Rechico

shown in catalogue spread:
Monica Tap
Gordon Hicks

For background on the Shaw Street School, see our Press page
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Bonus trivia: Apparently, the Shaw Street School has tasted fame before, as a set location for Tina Fey’s 2004 movie, Mean Girls. We have a feeling its next group of inhabitants will be quite a bit friendlier.

This year’s recently unveiled Serpentine pavilion design by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron is a wonderfully poetic exploration into the history and context of the pavilion project itself. Since 2000, when the Serpentine Gallery initiated its celebrated annual commission, the summer pavilion has become an internationally-known site for experimentation by some of the world’s most well-respected artists and architects, including Zaha Hadid, Olafur Eliasson, SANAA, and most recently, Peter Zumthor.

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A largely circular space carved out of the ground and sheathed in cork will take its idiosyncratic maze-like form from the layered foundation drawings of the eleven past pavilions. (Previous plans to repurpose existing foundations were scrapped when none were found upon excavation, but the essential concept of the design has not changed.) Floating a few feet above grade, the rain-collecting roof will be drained as needed to do double duty as an open-air performance space. Rooted in the subterranean history of the site at the same time that it receives and reflects the London skies above, the pavilion becomes a physical and conceptual link between earth and sky, past and future, known and unknown, end and beginning.
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Don’t be misled by the widely circulated photo of the maquette (above), which distracts with an undue emphasis on the main gallery building and a few too many plastic-y white people inside—this is a highly original, visually impactful, and conceptually thoughtful design that has the potential to redefine the idea of what a pavilion can be. We look forward to seeing its final expression this summer, and are planning to update the blog with photos when they are released.
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With the 2012 pavilion’s incorporation of past pavilion designs into its own plan, we felt it apropos to gather together a series of pavilion images going back to the first design by Zaha Hadid. This updates our previous post, A decade+ of Serpentine summer pavilions, which originally linked to an Architizer post also featuring images of all the past pavilions. Our post differs from Architizer’s and other online galleries (some of which we’ve linked to here) in its intentional selection and arrangement of images as a typology of sorts, the purpose of which is to stimulate thinking on features of past pavilion foundations that Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron may encounter and incorporate. (For the sake of thoroughness, we’ve also included MVRDV’s unrealized design for the 2004 pavilion, as well as Zaha Hadid’s “pre-pavilion” installation from 2007, which may or may not factor in the 2012 team’s design considerations.)
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2000 pavilion by Zaha Hadid, photo by Dafydd Jones
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2001 pavilion by Daniel Libeskind with Arup, photo by Hélène Binet
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2002 pavilion by Toyo Ito and Cecil Balmond with Arup
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2003 pavilion by Oscar Niemeyer, photo by Richard Bryant
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2004 pavilion by MVRDV (unrealized)
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2005 pavilion by Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, photo by Charlie Brigante
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2006 pavilion by Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond of Arup
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2007 “pre-pavilion” Lilas by Zaha Hadid by atharabidi
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2007 pavilion by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen
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2008 pavilion by Frank Gehry
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2009 pavilion by Kazuyo Sejima and Riyue Nishizawa of SANAA
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2010  pavilion by Jean Nouvel
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2011 pavilion by Peter Zumthor
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Read Jacques Herzog’s thoughts on the design process at The Architect’s Journal

For additional photos including interiors, see our Serpentine Summer Pavilions board on Pinterest

For information and descriptions of all completed pavilions plus Zaha Hadid’s Lilas installation, see the Serpentine Gallery website

Did you know that the pavilions are sold at the end of each season and that this covers 40% of the pavilion’s building costs? Read about where some of them have ended up (appended to a review of Rem Koolhaas’ 2006 pavilion), at The Guardian

Reviews of the first 10 pavilions by Rowan Moore for The Observer

Arsenal Toronto’s inaugural exhibitions include a solo show of painting by Martin Bordeau in the smaller front gallery, and a group exhibition in the expansive main space. Simply titled Photographie, the group show features work by Isabelle Hayeur, Alain Paiemant, Manon De Pauw, Michel De Broin, Gwenaël Bélanger, and Pascal Grandmaison, and is a featured exhibition of the CONTACT Photography Festival currently running through May. The six artists, all trained in the 1990s and based in Montreal, share an interest in working within conceptual frameworks and developing hybrid photographic practices influenced by digital technology. For this post, we take a closer look at the underwater worlds of Isabelle Hayeur, the fire-consumed universe within Pascal Grandmaison’s photographs, and the mediated landscapes of painter Martin Bordeau.
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Isabelle Hayeur’s Chemical Coast is part of an ongoing series of underwater images she has been making since 2008. Although she eschews the pristine waters and pursuit of colourful sea life that comprise the great bulk of this kind of photography, her images are no less  compelling or wondrous. Drawn to troubled waters near and far from home, Hayeur often captures both the cause and normally hidden effects of environmental degradation in her two-part images, where the water’s surface appears as a softly permeable horizon line. Murky yet luminous, Hayeur’s desolate underworlds are apocalyptic portents existing just below the surface of our everyday lives, captivating with their strange beauty even as they threaten to engulf us within a claustrophobic, dying world.
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Pascal Grandmaison’s series of black and white images are sized at a comparatively smaller scale, encouraging close viewing. Geologic and timeless in appearance, the photographs look as if they could have been made on the moon, or even more fantastically, document the handiwork of some advanced alien race able to rip gaping holes in the fabric of space-time. However, those surprising and ragged openings of seemingly infinite depth are in fact fragments of an image embedded within the ash and ember remains of its own burning—no alien race, just humans playing with fire. But through this alchemical process, Grandmaison has wrought a poetic series of images rich with associations between our elemental natures and our ancient origins—as well as our inevitable end. Ultimately, all that will be left once we are gone is in his images: deep space, and so much dust.
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In the front gallery, the atmospheric paintings by Martin Bordeau have a softly photographic quality, making them a interesting complement to the group exhibition in the main space. Just as Hayeur’s waterscapes present a vision of reality captured by the camera’s partial submersion, and Grandmaison’s spacescapes give form to conceptual realities born of fire and photography, Bordeau’s landscapes are mediated by the presence of a screen. Physically represented by an exquisitely rendered and realistically detailed grid over shades of green and grey, the screen evokes childhood memories of pressing a face to rain, feeling the impression of wire on skin, inhaling the scent of metal mixed with the sweetness of the outside air. Viewing the world through a screen implies a sense of longing for and separation from the other side which never quite goes away.

At the same time, Bordeau references the metaphorical divide between our selves and the experiences we seek through the mediating screens of televisions, computers, and smart phones. Questioning the subtly insidious effects that the now ubiquitous screens may have upon our understanding of reality, Bordeau presents us with an almost digital rendering of painted pictures that can be read at many levels, but paradoxically never fully resolve into a definitive image. Eluding our attempts to pin them down, Bordeau’s images impress upon us the evasive nature of information that comes at us through the progressively more invasive yet increasingly invisible screens of contemporary life, the emotional residue of which bears an uncanny resemblance to that childhood longing for escape, or as Bordeau’s titles suggest, the isolation that moments in between (Attente, or wait) or out of time (Insomnie) can make us feel.
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See the Arsenal Toronto website (under construction) for hours and information

See more work by Galerie Division artists on their website
See more work by René Blouin artists on their gallery website

See more work by Isabelle Hayeur on her website
See more work by Pascal Grandmaison on his website

For information and more images from the Photographie exhibition as part of Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, see the festival website

See the Toronto.com article on Arsenal Toronto, here
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artwork and images:

Isabelle Hayeur, Chemical Coast 2, 2011, inkjet print mounted on aluminum, 51 x 72 inches; Manatee Drive 1, 2011, inkjet print mounted on aluminum, 49 x 60 inches, courtesy Galerie Division

Pascal Grandmaison, image from Void View series, 2010, inkjet print, 22.5 x 15 inches

Martin Bordeau, Sans Titre, 2011, oil on canvas; Attente, 2012, oil on canvas, 22 x 28 inches; Insomnie 2, oil on canvas, 24 x 29.875 inches, courtesy Galerie Division

All exhibition photos of Arsenal Toronto by Shani K Parsons

Spring is in full swing and Occupy has exploded back on the scene with impressive May Day demonstrations. As a movement which unites an incredible array of (sometimes conflicting, but that’s part of the beauty) agendas under the inclusive umbrella of the 99%, it has been uniquely effective in staying on message: Occupy isn’t going anywhere. Or perhaps: it is going to be everywhere.

What’s always been striking about the movement (as we noted in our previous post on Occupy’s aesthetic beginnings, linked below) is its focused attention on creating visually powerful moments that appeal to the heart and linger in the mind. From the start it has adopted a sophisticated, multifaceted approach to protest that is informed by contemporary art, design, and social media as much as it is by socio-economic theory and political action. While we can’t pretend to be able to cover all of the visual, performative, and often subversive mass media tactics that Occupy has deployed over the past weeks and months, we can offer a selection of some of the more intriguing arts-related articles and images that have surfaced in our news feeds over recent days. To a limited extent, we’ll try to update this post with fresh links and images as they emerge during what we’ll call OWS Chapter Two.

But first, we’d like to discuss this somewhat sensationally titled article by BBC News, “Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art?”

Written by an economics editor, Paul Mason, the article makes an excellent case for Occupy’s lasting significance, yet misses the mark with regard to its relationship to contemporary art by suggesting one could replace the other. We’d propose instead that Occupy is an extremely important movement within contemporary art—more like a slap in the face of certain kinds of art being made today (see below), rather than the death blow to all contemporary art that isn’t born out of Occupy.
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This poster makes reference to Damien Hirst’s infamous diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, produced in 2007. It was offered for sale at 50 million pounds, the highest price ever asked for a single work by a living artist. Intentionally controversial, the skull has since become emblematic of the extreme cynicism and commercialism that can exist behind established systems of contemporary art production and distribution. 

We’d also argue with the somewhat simplistic list of visual characteristics Mason gives for the Occupy zeitgeist: “Posters with artistic rather than strictly graphic design values are the norm”? Not that we’ve seen—and what does that mean anyway? The article fares better where it generalizes some of the recurring themes of the movement, such as: “rejection of commercialism”, “a focus on mass, collaborative subversion of mainstream imagery”, and “art with a social purpose”. To this we’d add the effective utilization of crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Kickstarter, and a sophisticated understanding of the power of memes (remember Pepper-Spray Cop?), branding (the leveraging of the 99% concept, the co-opting of multinational brands to Occupy’s purposes), and visually impactful, even poetic, performances (flying tents in Berkeley, river of light across the Brooklyn Bridge) in creating culturally resonant images with staying power. As guerrila projection superhero Mark Read is quoted as saying, “A lot of the work coming out of Occupy is not concerned with how it will be perceived by a buying public. It’s not designed to be bought, but shared—it’s designed to be made available as widely as possible…. The art itself is super ‘copyleft’.” (Definition of “copyleft” here.)
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Pinning down specific visual characteristics is tricky because, much like other movements such as Conceptualism and Feminist Art, Occupy is an expression of a constellation of ideas, and ideals, rather than an exploration of a particular style, method, or mode of seeing. Thus, a distillation of visual characteristics, while possible to a certain extent (yes—much of the art from Occupy is inspired by and resembles the rich visual history and style of protest posters and revolutionary graphics from around the world), may never be complete. One can say less about what Feminist Art looks like than what it expresses, and the same applies to the art of OWS.

Lest anyone think that being labeled an artistic movement dimishes Occupy, think again. Historically, the most radical artistic movements (Impressionism, Futurism, Dada, Expressionism, Feminist Art, Conceptualism, to name just a few)—many of which were themselves political in origin—have done no less than to signal and/or effect sweeping, permanent changes in the way the world sees its present, its past, and its possible futures.

Accompanying the above article is this nicely done video, which succeeds in capturing the artistic spirit behind Occupy, here
Follow The Illuminator to receive updates and images of their striking guerilla projections, here

Artlog’s best protest signs from OWS’s May Day demonstrations in NYC, here

Occupy uses the power of the infographic to make socio-economic inequities visible:
Forbes article on infograffiti from May Day, here
For background: “Some Say OWS Protesters Aimless; Facts Say Otherwise” also on Forbes
More background: infographic from Fast Company, “Who is Occupy Wall Street?”
Final background: fascinating infographic, “How OWS Unfolded Online”, from bullshit not included
Final final background: OWS Structural/Network Schematic (work in progress), from Occupy With Art

We’ve posted on Occupy George before; here’s another article on the infographic-printed dollar bills
See our previous post, “The Aesthetics of Protest: How Occupy Sees Itself (chapter one)” for more infographics and posters (with both art and graphic design values), here
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Art strike: “Occupy is Back!”: Hyperallergic covers May Day at Union Square, with images, here
The Nation live blogs Occupy events all over the US on May 1st, with images and videos, here
And lastly, a clear-eyed, unflinching look at some of the contradictions within Occupy’s demands of the art world, by Brian Sherwin for Fine Art Views—it will be interesting to see how these contradictions will be dealt with and resolved (or not, which we think would be to Occupy’s peril), here

Links added May 4th, 2012:

Occupy-inspired event: here in Toronto, the CONTACT Photography Festival—largest of its kind in the world—is about to begin. The festival theme this year? PUBLIC: Collective Identity /Occupied Spaces. See website for more information on what looks to be an exciting series of exhibitions, here

Related to the photo at the top of this post, a recent survey by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E) reveals great inequities in how artists are compensated for their work for various nonprofit arts organizations in New York City: see it here

In Canada, government-mandated artists fees were instituted by the Canadian Artists Representation/le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC) in the late 1960s: find out more here
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Links and images added May 10th, 2012:

In Protest took place May 9th at the Berkeley Art Museum, an event for which The Kadist Art Foundation, in collaboration with BAM/PFA, invited politically inclined artists and writers to make a protest poster that addresses specific events or generalized demands. Attendees could view the results, join some of the artists in a wide-ranging conversation of protest, and take home a poster. Featuring posters designed by artists such as John Baldessari and Martha Rosler, as well as Zarouhie Abdalian, Amy Balkin, Dodie Bellamy, Charlie Dubbe, Amy Franceschini, Doug Hall, Kevin Killian, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Shaun O’Dell, Rigo 23, Piero Golia, Jordan Kantor, Allan Sekula, Mungo Thomson and Natasha Wheat. (We’d love to see some of the posters—if you know where to find them, let us know!) More info on the event here
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Art is My Occupation (AMO) offers direct support to artists and cultural workers dedicated to advancing the stories, struggles and ideas of the 99%. From visual art to music to public interventions to videos to street theatre and more, AMO aims to create a national network of artists focused on exposing the real costs of the current crisis and envisioning a future that puts people before profits. More at ArtIsMyOccupation.org
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photos:

The Illuminator, Workers of the World Unite guerilla projection in New York, May Day
Rob Cicetti for Hyperallergic, 1% poster featuring Hirst’s diamond skull and Art Strike banner in
Union Square, NYC
General Strike chalk art in Oscar Grant Plaza (Bay Area) by Justin Beck (@pixplz)
Occupy Everywhere (West Oakland) photo by Dawn Danby

This weekend, get thee to Grimbsy for their 34th annual Wayzgoose, a festive fair and celebration of all things book arts-related. While the origin of the word wayzgoose is still up for speculation, there is no doubt that this tradition of annual printers’ parties dates back to at least the late 1600s, when Joseph Moxon, author of Mechanick Exercises (1683-1684), wrote: “It is customary for the Journey-men every year to make new paper windows…because that day they make them the Master Printer gives them a Way-goose, that is, he makes them a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own house, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Nice.

Judging by last year’s attendance by many wonderful book artists, binders, engravers, printers, small presses, and papermakers, it would appear that the tradition is alive and well, at least in Southern Ontario and Upstate New York. Annual Wayzgooses (Wayzgeese?) are also held at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis, The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, the University of California at Irvine, the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and here at Coach House Books in Toronto. For today’s post, we’re featuring one of Grimsby’s exhibitors from last year, (and this year’s producer of the Wayzgoose poster shown above), The Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. Stay tuned for more profiles on book artists and small presses in future posts.

The Western New York Book Arts Collaborative (WNYBAC) is a fantastic organization located in Buffalo, New York. With a mission to promote, encourage and develop the printing and book arts through education and access for individual artists and underserved communities, the center holds workshops in letterpress,  screenprinting, bookbinding and papermaking, as well as field trips and exhibitions. Currently on view is a show titled Serigraphy: The Art of Screenprinting, featuring Sandra Hall and Ed Ott, Jim Butler, and Anne Muntges.

Artist Sandra Hall worked with master printer Ed Ott on this epic series, The Journey of the Spirit, of which the above print is part. Created in Tempe, Arizona in the early 1980s, the images are inspired by the colours of dusk and dawn in the American Southwest. More on this incredible series here.

For his first US exhibition, UK artist Jim Butler is exhibiting 26 alphabetized screenprints of signage and logo fragments he found in various European cities. These prints are proofs for an artist book series titled Signs of Life, the first of which can be seen and purchased on his website.

Anne Muntges’ In Process series introduces viewers to serigraphy and reveals how screenprinters produce their work. The above image is an example of Muntges’ work, which is also available through WNYBAC’s Etsy store. To see more work, visit the artist’s website.

WNYBAC also sells handprinted posters, postcards, and accessories, some of which are shown above, via their Etsy storefront. We won’t geek out here on all the typographic and printing details, but a click on any image will bring you to its Etsy page with an informative description.

Find out more on WNYBAC through their website
See more photos of WNYBAC on Kristen Merola’s blog, composition notebook
See available work for purchase from WNYBAC on Etsy

Bonus: check out this fantastic lockup for their Deerhoof poster, and the beautiful result below!

Not sure why this is so incredible? See this short, sweet video primer on letterpress by Naomie Ross on Vimeo

Now you know.

We’ve been looking at the work of Naoko Matsubara, an artist whose practice spans three continents and nearly 50 years. Focused on a variety of subjects including trees, landscape, the arctic, Kyoto, and Tibet, much of her work is unified by a highly ordered yet playful simplicity in composition, against which gestural markmaking and brightly saturated planes and patterns of colour push and pull the eye.

Through this juxtaposition of contrasting patterns and gradations, Matsubara achieves a sense of framing and depth in many of her prints, which often resemble windows, doorways, screens, or sliding panels, evoking architectural space even as they conjure the natural phenomena of light at dusk or on the water.

Her series of trees, for which she is known, are the exception; these employ a more subdued approach to colour and a focus on the solidity of trunk and branches, the laciness of leaves, or both within the same composition.

Learn more about Naoko Matsubara and see more work on the artist’s website
Additional images of her trees can be seen here

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thanks: Susan Low-Beer 

all images by Naoko Matsubara
from top to bottom:
Sky on Sky, 2008, 69cm x 86.5cm
Summer Garden B, 2008, 95cm x 120cm
Arctic Twilight B, 1987, 80cm x 56cm
Nova Scotia, 1994, 80cm x 56cm
Tibetan Sky B, 1987, 80.2cm x 56.5cm
Inari, 1976, 56cm x 46cm
Arctic Twilight A, 1987, 80cm x 56cm
In Praise of Trees, 1985, 56.7cm x 40.3cm
Pine Fragrance B, 1996, 86.5cm x 69cm
A Giant Willow, 2006, 68.9cm x 43.3cm
In Praise of Trees, limited deluxe edition portfolio, 1985, Mosaic Press, Oakville, London, New York 

John Baldessari, 2623 Third Street, Santa Monica, 2000, suite of four color lithographs with screenprint, overall dimensions 54 x 54 inches, edition of 61, Brooke Alexander Gallery

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As the world’s first online only art fair, VIP has experienced major growing pains since it’s launch in 2011, with many collectors frustrated by tech glitches and dealers reporting low traffic and sales as a result. While the site’s capacity and interface issues are well known and improving, the question of whether the term “online art fair” is an oxymoron continues to be raised. To our minds, this is largely a semantic issue; regardless of what one wants to call it, VIP simply represents yet another web-based opportunity for those who have the art to show it to those who don’t (see our previous post on other online art-buying venues such as Paddle8 and Phillips de Pury, linked below), and the success or failure of any online platform will most likely depend on practical concerns such as whether the art is shown to best effect (sharp, high-resolution, colour-correct images, intuitive and glitch-free scalability, easy and consistent bookmarking for collecting, comparing, and return visits), whether the artwork information is complete, correct, and actually informative, and whether dealers are ready and willing to operate in a more transparent, service-oriented manner (responding to inquiries in a timely fashion, making pricing and availability information accessible, and instituting reasonable return policies where possible, since art sometimes has a way of not actually looking like it does onscreen) which is appropriate to dealing with the wider, more diverse audience that an online platform presumably draws. Improvements in any of these areas would be a welcome development.

VIP Paper, a spin-off of the larger fair focusing on drawings, prints, and editions, launched this week and will continue through the 21st. We aren’t in the market so we can’t comment on VIP dealer practices and policies here, but we can say that the site still needs more work with regard to its interface and capacity. The achingly long wait times for loading and scaling of images did improve noticeably right around 4:30pm, but remained on the slow side for the rest of the evening. Then there were glitches with respect to image sizes and quality (low-resolution, bad crops), insufficient artwork information, and broken links (presumably artworks that had been sold were removed from the site, but previews remained, confusing matters—it would have been far preferable for sold works to remain where they were, marked as such, for the benefit of would-be collectors and return visitors, like us).

All that having been said, a venue like VIP is still a wonderful opportunity to see what’s out there right now, find works one hasn’t seen by artists one knows, and discover artists and galleries one doesn’t yet know. In this spirit, for your viewing pleasure, we selected 44 works from today’s offerings which made us want to know more, including works on paper by Raymond Pettibon, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin and Richard Long. A few are featured below; the entire collection can be viewed on our Pinterest page, 44 from the Virtual Floor, linked below.
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Mickalene Thomas, Landscape Majestic, 2011, woodblock, silkscreen and digital photo collage,
52 x 68 5/8 inches, edition of 30, Durham Press
 
 

Brion Nuda Rosch, Untitled (Aldous Huxley), 2010, acrylic on paper on found book page,
11 x 8 1/2 inches, Eli Ridgway Gallery
 
 

Richard Diebenkorn, Blue With Red, 1987, color woodcut, 37 1/4 x 25 1/2 inches,
edition AP 2/20, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
 
 

Ed Ruscha, If, 1991, Bernard Jacobson Gallery
 
 

Dean Smith, untitled (a18), 2011, graphite on paper, 38 1/2 x 29 inches, Gallery Joe
 
 

Sarah Sze, Notepad, 2008, laser cut paper, edition of 40, Barbara Krakow Gallery
 
 

Yun-Fei Ji, Nine Women, 2006, mineral pigments and ink on mulberry paper,
24 1/2 x 54 1/2 inches, James Cohan Gallery
 
 

Jacques Villon, Le cake-walk des petites filles, (trial proof), 1904, drypoint and aquatint in colors,
12 x 16 1/2 inches, R.S. Johnson Fine Art
 
 

Howard Hodgkin, Bleeding, 1982, lithograph with hand colouring in gouache, 35 53/64 x 48 27/64 inches, edition of 100, Bernard Jacobson Gallery
 
 

Imi Knoebel, Untitled (#’s 2-5), 1996, suite of 4 color lithographs with stencil and hand-printing,
each 24 x 16 inches, edition of 60, Brooke Alexander Gallery
 
 

Josef Albers, Grey Instrumentation II a, 1975, screenprint, 19 x 19 inches, edition of 36, 
Barbara Krakow Gallery
 
 

Tauba Auerbach, FOLD/SLICE TOPO I, 2011, color aquatint etching, 45 x 35 inches, edition of 35, 
Paulson Bott Press
 
 

James Sterling Pitt, Untitled (November), 2011, graphite, acrylic and watercolor on paper,
30 x 22 inches, Eli Ridgway Gallery
 
 

John Cage, Global Village, 1989, aquatint, roulette and drypoint on smoked paper, 38 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches,
edition of 15, Hiram Butler Gallery
 
 

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, 1999, sugarlift aquatint etching with chine collé, 31 x 54 inches,
edition of 30, Paulson Bott Press
 
 

Olaf Breuning, Wassily, 2011, lithograph 11 13/16 x 8 17/64 inches, edition of 12, Poligrafa Obra Gráfica
 
 

John Baldessari, Two Hands (With Distant Figure), 1989-90, photogravure with color aquatint,
52 3/4 x 35 inches, edition of 45, Brooke Alexander Gallery
 
 

Roxy Paine, Study for Coeden, 2006, ink and gouache on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches, James Cohan Gallery
 
 

Robert Barry, Something That Needs Something Else to Survive, 2011, work on paper (drawing),
silver vinyl film on paper, 12.125 x 18.875 inches, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.
 
 

David Ireland, untitled (small cement work), not dated, cement on paper, 20 x 30 x 1/2 inches, 
Gallery Paule Anglim

…
See our entire collection of works on paper at our Pinterest page, 44 from the Virtual Floor
See more works available at the VIP Art Fair: Paper
Read informative reviews of the VIP Art Fair on Hyperallergic
See our previous post featuring online art-buying venues, If I Had a Million Dollars

Quote of the day #1:

In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with
a certain alienated majesty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

…

…

Quote of the day #2:

I don’t even know what street Canada is on.

Al Capone

…
See more quotes on art and Canada at The Power Plant, specifically from Arnaud Magg’s commissioned poster/project from 1992, Intersections, on display through September 3rd as part of Dissenting Histories: 25 Years of The Power Plant

See more work by Jordan Kasey on the artist’s website

artist via: Osborn

images, from bottom to top:
Jordan Kasey, eclipse, 2008, oil on canvas, 77 x 65 inches; backlit figure, 2009, oil on canvas, 44 x 35 inches; cloud and shadow, 2010, charcoal on paper, 29 x 23 inches

On the advice of artist Ken Nicol, we stopped in to MKG127 to see Michael Dumontier’s current show, the middle of the air. Featuring a series of well-crafted works in various media including acrylic on MDF, foil stamp and coloured pencil on matboard, foil stamp on fabric, and string, nails and a fishing weight, the exhibition is both playful and spare, quiet yet engaging. With an incredibly light hand and wry sense of humour, Dumontier utilizes tromp l’oeil effects to fool the eye and surprise the mind. Like zen koans, the best of the works call into question not only the material processes used in their making, but the nature of reality itself.

Michael Dumontier is one of the co-founders of The Royal Art Lodge, a well-known collective active in Winnepeg from 1996–2008. More recently he was featured in a major solo exhibition at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, curated by Micah Lexier. In addition to his ongoing show at MKG127 (closing this weekend), Dumontier is included in the exhibition Read All Over, currently on view at Toronto’s Scrap Metal gallery. His exquisitely subtle artworks are worth making the effort to see in person, wherever they may be.

Speaking of Scrap Metal (and Ken Nicol), this weekend Nicol will be on-site at the gallery executing a performance piece related to his own work in the show, A Thousand Times Fuck Off, 1–9. It seems that the Read All Over exhibition brochure had a nice little error that Nicol couldn’t resist the opportunity to respond to. On April 13 and 14, he will be “correcting” that error 1000 times in the gallery. The corrected handouts, 1000 Fuck Ups, will be available. Scrap Metal is open 12 to 5pm Friday and Saturday.

See more work by Michael Dumontier from the middle of the air on the MKG127 website
For info on his exhibition, A Moon or a Button, at Plug In Institute of Contemporary art, see their website
See work by The Royal Art Lodge (1996–2008) and Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber Ltd.
(ongoing collaboration from 2008) here

See examples of work in the Read All Over exhibition, on view through May 1st at Scrap Metal
More info on Scrap Metal (including a map to their hard-to-find location) can be found on the gallery’s website

See more work by Ken Nicol on his website
See our previous post on Ken Nicol, Art by number: Ken Nicol (and Mel Bochner, and Mary Temple, and Roman Opalka), here
…
images, from top to bottom:
Michael Dumontier, the middle of the air, exhibition view at MKG127 gallery, photo by Shani Parsons
Michael Dumontier, Untitled (pins and string/triangle), foil stamp and coloured pencil on matboard, 2012; Untitled (needle and thread 02), foil stamp and coloured pencil on paper, 2011; Untitled (folded corner), foil stamp on fabric, 2012
Ken Nicol, 1000 Fuck Ups, Scrap Metal Gallery, 2012

It’s the beginning of April, and in honour of Max Ernst’s birthday (April 2) and National Poetry Month, we thought we’d do a little feature on Ernst, key figure in the history of Dada and Surrealism, and Dorothea Tanning, prolific artist and late-blooming poet who also happens to have been Ernst’s fourth wife.

A dashing and charismatic pair, they met in New York in 1942, when Ernst was still married to Peggy Guggenheim. Four years later, upon his divorce from Guggenheim, Ernst married Tanning in a double Beverly Hills wedding with Juliet Browner and Man Ray. Settling first in Sedona, and then the south of France, Ernst and Tanning continued their innovative and ever-evolving artistic practices, encompassing painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, costume and set design, book illustration, and writing.

After Ernst’s death in 1976, Tanning returned to New York, and while continuing to paint, embarked on a new career in poetry as she neared the age of 70. Critics have spoken of Tanning’s poems in visual terms, describing them as “collages, softly surreal” (Louis McKee, Library Journal), which use “language like paint, limning scenes dreamy in hue yet acute in detail” (Donna Seaman, Booklist).

Tanning lived to the age of 101, leaving behind a body of work spanning six decades upon her death earlier this year. Below, images of artworks by Max Ernst followed by writing and artworks by Dorothea Tanning.

…
Sequestrienne

Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?

There was a time
of middle distance, unforgettable,
a sort of lace-cut
flame-green filament
to ravish my
skin-tight eyes.

I take that back—
it was forgettable but not
entirely if you
consider my
heavenly bodies . . .
I loved them so.

Heaven’s motes sift
to salt-white—paint is ground
to silence; and I,
I am bound, unquiet,
a shade of blue
in the studio.

If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.

—Dorothea Tanning, from Poetry, April 2002
…

…
Unshakable, removed. As he lay there it was stunningly clear that he would die. And that there would be no compromise, no revelation, nothing for me anywhere….

Tonight, gray is the end color, the end result. Ash is the color of the sky, the lid of the town, the fur in the mouth. Time lives with space, unperturbed; Father Time, Mother Space. They are king and queen of the world and the universe and the whole bit. Invincible. They are the only ones.

There is no sound, his breath is feather-silent. A private event is taking place. Not to be disturbed by sorrowing faces, Loplop, Bird Superior, prepares in solitude, in the graceful space of his lofty aerie, his diminishing and his departure…

—Dorothea Tanning, excerpt from Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, 2001
…
All Hallows’ Eve

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

—Dorothea Tanning, from Coming to That, 2011
…
Read more on Max Ernst and see a selection of his work on the Tate’s website
MoMA’s collection of Ernst’s works is extensive and varied; start here

A comprehensive website featuring Dorothea Tanning’s life and work, dorotheatanning.org is rich with photographs, images, and writing—a truly incredible resource
Learn more about Dorothea Tanning’s career as a poet and read some of her poems on the
Poetry Foundation’s website
…
images and credits:

Max Ernst, Punching ball or the immortality of Buonarroti (detail), 1920; Dorothea Tanning, Amagansett, New York, photograph by Robert Motherwell, 1945, © Dedalus Foundation, Inc.

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, New York, photograph by Irving Penn, 1947, © The Irving Penn Foundation

Max Ernst, The Couple, 1923, oil and collage on cut printed reproductions on paper mounted on cardboard, 20.3 x 25 cm, courtesy Galerie Daniel Malingue, Paris; Pietà or Revolution by Night, 1923, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London; Ambiguous Figures (1 Copper Plate, 1 Zinc Plate, 1 Rubber Cloth…), ca. 1919–1920, collage, gouache, India ink, pencil, and paint on print mounted on paperboard, 25.4 x 18.5 cm, collection Michael and Judy Steinhardt, New York; Loplop Presents Loplop, 1931, collage of cut printed reproductions and pencil and India ink on paper, 64.8 x 50.2 cm, collection of Dorothea Tanning; all photos from Max Ernst: A Retrospective, © 2005 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, except Pietà, from Tate/London, Art Resource/New York

Dorothea Tanning, Même les jeunes filles (Even the Young Girls), 1966, oil on canvas, 65 1/4 x 80 1/4 inches; The Philosophers, 1952, oil on canvas, 30 x 35.75 inches; Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), 1970-73, fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, and ping pong balls, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Rainy-Day Canapé, 1970-73, upholstered chair, tweed, and wool, 31.5 x 47.25 x 33.5 inches, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Evening in Sedona, 1976, oil on canvas, 45 x 57.5 inches

Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, 2001, New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Dorothea Tanning, “All Hallows’ Eve” from Coming to That, © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning