(Cussy) Updates

Jean-Philippe Harvey at home in black and white

Some (updates) are not worth looking at, we definitely get too many of them, and I often feel like ignoring most.

But when the update comes in the form of a new website by artist Jean-Philippe Harvey, one of the Quebec artists I watch out for, I find myself far more open and interested in the idea of actually paying it some attention.

We curated his work last year during Art Pop, and I have to say, I am very intrigued by the sudden absence of colour in his work. It’s a big departure from what he was doing up until recently, and at some point in the near future, I am sure this lil’ blog will see a more detailed discussion about this movement from his end.

For now, go have a look at his websites if it moves you, and it should, because after all, his newest one has a bunch of cuss words in it. Which is always a bonus if you ask me.

MAX WYSE’S MEXICO TERRARIUM! IN TIME FOR THE HEAT!

I first saw Max Wyse’s work a bunch of years ago at Centre Clark. He was in a show with another fellow whose name slips my mind at the moment. But Max’s name and images never did. I’ve carried my intensely visceral connection to his work around for years, in a back pocket or perhaps as a stain on a favourite shirt. And recently, I’ve had the pleasure of re-visiting his magnificent lint pile and spaghetti drop in a much more direct way.

I think it started when, after leafing through old invites to shows and seeing his name, I contacted him out of the blue to do an interview about his work. Or maybe it started when I was enthusiastically and warm-heartedly invited into his studio/home for a visit that involved talk of world-class lesbians, trips taken and porcelain cows.

However it started, and however it will end, (hopefully in one big blow-up brawl a la Steven Segall in his heyday) I am most delighted to present here some questions and answers about his practice for y’all.

And the interview couldn’t be more timely - tomorrow night at 6pm sharp, come one and all to Galerie Mclure (map embedded in link) for the vernissage of Max’s new solo show, Mexico Terrarium. Not only is it going to be one heck of an awesome exhibition, but seriously folks, you know and I know and everyone knows that you need an excuse to go to Westmount, right? Think of all those hot Westmount…ah….dogs?

But don’t let ME convince you of how awesome he is - he can do that himself. Without further ado, Max in Max’s own words:

TFM: if you could give me an idea about this exhibition that would be great - where, when, etc.

MW: My upcoming exhibition, Mexico Terrarium, at the McClure Gallery is a collection of recent works which are the ripest fruits of an obsession that I’ve been harbouring for four years.

TFM: would you consider this work to be a major departure from your past work? a continuation? do you see shows as an opportunity to showcase “series” or is it a more fluid process for you?

MW: The creation of series of works is in fact a very fluid process for me. Although I proceed from one work to the next, after making large numbers of notational drawings, I do see them as part of a coherent whole.  For the past four years, I have been involved in an obsessive quest to capture and portray an eccentric, magical essence that I encountered during an important sojourn in Mexico, often embodied by a recurring comical peasant figure in the act of metamorphosing into a king of the plant world.

TFM: could you talk a little bit about the materials and the process you use to create your pieces/how and when you started working in this way?

MW: My primary practice consists of creating works on plexiglas which are equal parts drawing and painting.  I begin by sanding one side of the plexiglas, which gives me “tooth,” thus enabling me to draw directly on the surface.  The drawing, which forms the bones of the work, is followed by a process of a layering of pigments dusted into a dirty, liquefied acrylic base followed by further layers of acrylic paint.  The work is done in reverse, foreground to background.

TFM: Who do you consider as inspirations/what are your inspirations for your process? Are you influenced by other artists? By cacti? By world class lesbians? (I feel there’s an affinity between your work and art-of-the-grotesque (Goya, Ensor, etc)…

MW: My influences are varied - some come and go, some are consistent.  I draw continuously upon the richness of plant and animal life and faded but shimmering memories of psychedelic experiences.  I have an ever growing archive of photographic sources and tend to re-employ images of spiders, scorpions, mushrooms, cats, flowers, dogs, rats, cacti, snails, vegetables and meats, etc…..

Artistic influences are similar in that some will fluctuate and go, some remain hovering. From time to time, I will refresh my regard upon certain figures, for example James Ensor, Enzo Cucci, Francisco Toledo, Goya, the Bruegels, the unnamed creators of mesoamerican art.  Without looking too hard, I’ll happen upon an artist whose work really nails me, such as the contemporary Austrian sculptor Elmar Trenkwalder, who I saw in a brilliant pairing with the 20th century French painter Augustin Lesage (associated with art brut) at la Maison Rouge in Paris, in 2008.

TFM: Does text/verbal considerations play a role in your process at all? to me there’s a certain subconscious element (stream-of-consciousness) to your work. true? untrue? do phrases words text play into the shaping of your work?

MW: Flashes of text may play a role but I usually reserve for them the duty of Title. Infrequently, a title will arise which will actually direct the conception of the image.

TFM: could you discuss how you engage with and choose the symbols and motifs you engage with?

MW: So far, I feel that I approach the collection of imagery as would an archaeologist hopped up on psylocibin.  The images, whether of plants, animals or Aztec divinities are classified and grafted upon the human figure, which remains a central element and ground for transformation.

For the lazy-Saturday-art-minds

Or finally, the art world’s greatest secret revealed!

Art + Religion Conference April 15-17th

This is looking like it’s going to be really, really interesting….

Space to be critical

So I’ve been having this long and laborious discussion inside my head and with a small group of people outside it around ideas of what this blog should be in terms of format, content and feel.

On the one hand, I want to promote and encourage art in the city that I am curious about on numerous levels. I feel like the current climate of conservatism felt in the rooms of many organizations and centres (and bedrooms - oh my!!) means that there’s even less space for the promotion and diffusion of visual art.

That in mind, it seems important to use this blog as a vehicle for the positive dissemination of basic information to the general population around art creation. Woah. I am officially turning into Muffy from Today’s Special.

At the same time, film school (animation, specifically) has left deep and lasting pangs of disappointment over the lack of critique I was asked to engage with. In my final thesis class, I sensed that my critical comments were ridiculed and feared, alternatively, by almost everyone around me. This conjures up memories of people muttering “can’t wait until I see YOUR film” under their breaths as I asked them why a pig as a central character instead of a goat? Why watercolour on glass instead of just good old stop motion using your hands?

I don’t think I was ever taught how to be critical, so not only is it hard for me to justify it when I am/want to be, I also don’t think I have it down to a graceful science. Instead of dancing slowly around the room until I have mesmerized myself and everyone else in it, my critical output is metaphorically more akin to a monkey who’s been given high heel tap shoes and then asked to shake it to “the Blue Danube” or something similar. Not a pretty sight.

Another major factor involved is the fact that as the artistic community in Montreal is so small, there are few arenas and places in which to be critical without feeling like perhaps you’re also putting a giant “kick me, I’m an asshole” sign on your back. Which, to be fair,  I’ve done so many times in my life, but still…..

So these three elements then - a) the fact that we aren’t really trained to be positively critical of each other b) the fact that therefore I am very clumsy about it and c) the micro-ness of the art community all contribute to Malo-not-wanting-to-go-there for the most part.

Yet I ache to do so. I am someone very, very, very dedicated to process. That’s the part of visual art I find so fascinating. Not only visual art and the artists that make it, but also for the role of curator, administrator, organization, public. What is the process that is infusing the work like?

As someone so process oriented, it only seems natural that critiquing or exploring that process would be a big part of my interest vis-a-vis writing on art. Yet I feel like I am completely shy around that component of myself. It’s as if the critical side of myself was some hot person at a party leaving me tongue-tied and bashful. It happens to the most verbal of us, trust me.

So here’s a question for folks who’ve read to this point - what’s your perspective on this topic? I think being critical is actually crucial, but how to do it in ways that are invigorating to the subject at hand and that further the discussion or start out a healthy dialogue?

I’d love to get some ideas generating on this one. And if not, well then, I am just going to go ahead and rip into all the work that everyones’ done up until now. All of it. Each and every piece. You know, I’ve got a pretty flexible week this week and vacation time saved up. Shouldn’t take too long.

It’s not even Thursday…

But here, despite all odds, are two art openings happening back-to-back tonight that you should go to. The first, a group show at the Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont Royal. It’s called The Tarot of Montreal, and features 22-ish works on paper dedicated to that special pack of cards with the same name.

Or are they really a pack? Are they a fledgling? Or a pod? I am not sure if you call Tarot groups something different than other card groups, similar to owls and ferrets…..oh the mystery!

It’s going to be an interesting exhibition. The curator, Marie-Claude Bouthiller, invited 22 local artists to create works specific to one tarot card each. Max Wyse will be presenting his take on Le Diable while Sophie Jodoin worked with Justice. There’s work by Yann Pocreau and Andrea Szilasi and Mathieu Beausejour oh my! I am truly looking forward to seeing what everyone’s created, and what the exhibition as a whole feels like in terms of potential cohesions.

It’s going to be an earlier opening, perhaps, so go to this one first. 5pm starting time, at 465 Mont-Royal east. The show runs until the beginning of May.

Next, head to articule for the opening of You, Me and You, a week-long video installation by Annie Gautier and Milutin Gubash. I have been looking forward to this show for a long, long time. The video is a real-time encounter with the lives of this artist-couple. Taken over the course of roughly 9 days, You, Me and You,  is an intimate portrait of their everyday comings and goings. Some of the stuff that makes up their days will surely be of the sort I cringe engaging with (i.e. having to do the dishes, opening mail, etc). But when set against a backdrop of deeper encounters and exchanges, I think the whole of the piece is going to be achingly sweet and true to the strange arch known as making do and getting by.

What I find most compelling conceptually about the piece is that the video is really and truly in real time. No looping here. Unlike almost all video works seen in galleries, you cannot sit and wait for the events to unfold again if you’ve come in to the show late, or weren’t paying attention. The video will play through the night and into the day, and like our lives, be representative of so much in every moment, and then disappear, leaving the traces of perhaps some type of subconsciously-felt patterns, but no more.

So if you go tonight you can go tomorrow and then the next day and still never really get to see it in its’ entirety. A way of reinforcing its strange accessibility as it echos the lives each of us lead that no one else can see in full and we can surely never re-live.

Unless you have a time machine. And if you do, please, please get in touch.

Adrian Norvid show pics, sans Adrian-the-Blemished-Onlooker

Adrians and their Blemish(es)

Saturday was a day spent bumping and bumbling around a few galleries, just taking in funny circumstances and enjoying the outdoors. I got a chance to see Adrian Norvid’s show at the Joyce Yahouda with what seemed like a bunch of CEGEP students yelping in the background - fortunately this did nothing to detract from the ambiance.

A further enhancement of my experience taking in Norvid’s intoxicating, uproariously hilarious work came in the form of another Adrian who had come to the gallery by chance. It’s already slightly weird when your name matches the name of the artists’ show that you find yourself in. Kind of an odd coincidence. However, this Adrian happened to have a red blemish on his nose. Sort of exactly in the spot where Adrian Norvid had drawn a blemish on his own nose in one of his works.

You can see here in this photo the intrepid Adrian-audience-member standing next to the ridiculous Blemish-drawing Adrian and how closely related their blemishes in fact are. I have circled the real life Adrian’s mark in Perez Hilton style red.

This would not happen at any other artists’ show. Guaranteed.

FIFA and I can never quite seem to meet-in-the-middle, OR: First official Frozen Mammoth RANT!

Kim Kielhofner, still from Art of the Amplifier, 2009

As always this time of year (i.e. when the buds are destroying my capacity to think of things other than the bursting of spring) FIFA is well underway and I have yet to see a single film! Oh dear. Living amidst so much possibility often equals not getting out to much - know what I mean?

Tonight, as part of one of the Festival’s short programs, is a series of videos entitled Infiltrations (1 and 2), and it’s chock full of local artists’ work. Indeed, Diane Obomsawin, Kim Kielhofner and Victoria Stanton are just three of my favourites that have short pieces in the mix.

While I look forward to these films, I am not shocked that I often overlook this festival. I was brought up, like many folks I know, on Western European art and studied it on my own-some out of an avid love for the visual world. Yet I chalk my narrowness of scope up to where I come from, (a small town in Ontario) where wanting to know about art history at all was considered very, very suspect. The idea that this history could contain a richness-beyond-description from all corners of the world wasn’t something I encountered until as a grown up I became stubborn about expanding my aesthetic knowledge and sensibilities.

So while I do appreciate much of the subject matter of the FIFA program, I find it very limiting. It seems to be far too Western European focused to be called an International festival. Perhaps it should be re-named FIFAWE - International Festival of Films on Western European Art.

I am realizing now as I write how important it seems to open the scope of the festival. Very little is about contemporary work, the work of women, the work of anyone but old, dead white dudes (for the most part)…

And like I said, I am excited for some of it - I can’t wait to go see 2 films on Rembrandt and Caravaggio, respectively. There’s a short on Vermeer that I am eager about. Yet I suppose I am a wee surprised/disappointed that only 2 short film programs seem to be answering a need to diffuse film and video by and about a diverse pool of contemporary artists.

Or how cool would it be to every year have a focus on a specific area, or country? Art of the Middle East from the 19th century, for example. I refuse to believe that there aren’t films/interests out there that would allow this type of festival to become what it says it is, which is International.

Ok. Rant over. Tonight at 9pm at the Cinematheque Quebecoise promises to be one of the events with more contemporary programming.  I shall be there, sitting shame-faced due to that it’s the first event I’ll be going to. Or perhaps shame-faced that it took me so long to realize why I’ve never invested in FIFA deeply. Thankfully, like the rest of the salle, I will be absorbed in darkness, so no one else will see the burning of my cheeks.

Celebrations, my dear friends, always come in pairs.

Or, well…maybe not. BUT if I was attempting to turn this invented phrase into actual expression, I’d go to PUSH gallery tonight. It is officially re-opening, with Nadia Moss as the artist in charge of drawing us all down to its new headquarters at the Belgo Building. Two things to celebrate indeed.

Megan Bradley, the director of PUSH (wherever it may roam) has done an amazing job curating a show guaranteed to bring folks out of the woodwork and into her new abode. Nadia Moss’ work has always been enriching and worthwhile. It’s dream-like, half-creepy-half-comforting beast drawings done right.

For years there’s been a fractured movement of illustrators whose themes revolve around wolves-eating-wolves-munching-on-dogs-turning-into-people. You’ve seen this work. You know what I’m talking about. It’s an interesting phenomena to have watched unfold. Yet it’s never quite grabbed me by the seat of my pants, or anywhere for that matter.

Some of my favourite artists could be placed into this category if surrounded by a lazy audience. But their work manages to emerge as something altogether unique and important. They create their own language and sentiment from the medium. Nadia Moss has always been an artist I consider from this vantage point.

The most exciting part about this PUSH opening is that she’s really working it right now. The work for PUSH is going to be really intriguing - taking a look at her flckr site gives me notions of colour and layers that I have yet to see from her. The compositional spaces seem to be (perhaps) even more stripped down. This I suspect might be a turning point in her present development. I fully intend to ask her tonight.

The opening is a 6-9pm gig, and PUSH is now located at 372 Rue Ste Catherine, Suite 425. Hope to see you there.