Amy Lockhart @ La Centrale
I’m as late as late can be on the Amy Lockhart promo-bandwagon, and the vernissage and artist talk were both happening over a week ago. But trivialities aside, you should still try to catch her show over at La Centrale (4296 St. Laurent) before it ends on June 21st.
Amy’s style is weird, grotesque and recognizable, with a je-ne-sais-quoi that sets her appart from the ever-expanding crowd of underground independant DIY-ers. Two thumbs up fto her or having a discernable and unique vibe without ever limiting herself to a specific format/medium/character.
Her exhibition features art that range sfrom papier-maché sculptures and installations, to drawings, paintings, zines and superbly fluid animation of Marc Bell doodles. She works with a ton of different mediums and styles while remaining ‘edgy’ and ‘relevant.’
You can find more of her work in the Nog-A-Dod anthology, edited by Marc Bell and published by Conundrum Press (available at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, 211 Bernard O). The bookstore also has a copy of the Ganzfeld 5: Japanada! anthology in stock, in which her work is also featured, among pages and pages of equally impressive artists.
Filed under animation, art shows, artists, illustration, installation, local, painting, publications, review | Tags: Amy Lockhart, Drawn & Quarterly, La Centrale, Marc Bell | Comment (1)My 3 Nuit Blanche Pictures
Nuit Blanche was fun and exciting, and certainly the most enjoyable way to catch a disease from so many different people in just one night (the flu). Fun enough for me to get my old and heavy camera out of the house! And exciting enough for me to only manage to take 3 shots in total :-(
First up is what I understand to be the remnants of a performance I missed at the Art Matters show that took place at Les Territoires, in the Belgo building. The ‘I don’t give a shit and I rip my art up’ vibe of this is nice. There was a lot of other cool art around too - not seen on this picture: furniture that looked like it was made of cake+icing, a replica of the stargate (I think this one was part of a performance I missed too) and various gross and moldy-looking cakes that were actually edible-ish. Also cool and not in the picture, the Christian Marclay exhibition at DHC/ART, En Masse at Galerie Pangée and Jean-Maxime Dufresne at SKOL.
After the belgo sweat party, no time was left for either Usine C or the UQAM headquarters, so my two buds and I went straight for the Eaton center for YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN which was really swell. Props to them for their props, skills and various animu & vidya game references. The Red Bird Studios was the last stop of the night, endless fun was had with self-illuminated artworks. I don’t have a single shot of the art though, not even one of the drawing I was showing there. I do have a picture of my aforementioned two buds drinking beer at the Red Bird, but I’m censoring their faces off because they’re models. Enjoy?
We LOVE peace signs :-)
Filed under events, installation, performance, review | Tags: Art Matters, Belgo Building, Cake, Julien Ceccaldi, nuit blanche, Red Bird, Territoires, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan | Comment (0)My New York Diary (Kind of)
Sorry y’all Julie Doucet fans, I’m actually going to talk about my own trip to New York City, and not about the awesome cartoonist’s. That will happen some other time (and maybe somewhere else), but not today. Anyhow, this January I hopped on a greyhound overnight-party-machine and went for a carefully google mapped out visit of the city.
I vividly remember Funny Not Funny, curated by Becky Smith and Allison Kave over at the Bellwether gallery (134 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets). According to the press release, it’s a group show that deals with “the language, content, and representation of humor in overt and subtle ways. Artists who incorporate wit, absurdity, or satire into their practice create and confront the challenge of making serious work with humorous content, and question our understanding of “what is funny”. The exhibition aims to reveal the careful balance of levity and intellectual rigor inherent to works by artists who take the risk of using the language of humor in a discipline that is not a joke.”
I spent most of my time in the gallery in the final room for many reasons, one of them being Tamy Ben-Tor’s video, Normal (2006); in which she brilliantly performs as a familiarly overbearing and anxious (but latently fragile) character leaving voice messages after voice messages. The video showcases her excellent role-playing skills, as well as her fine sense of humour which resonates in many ways with the realistically grotesque style of Ryan Trecartin, Erica Eyres and Prettythingsss (btw, it turns out both are youtube subscribers of Trecartin, the more you know…). Speaking of Trecartin, he was also part of the show with his collaborator Lizzie Fitch and their elusively (and genitally?) humorous installation:
David Shrigley was also on hand, exhibiting a few giggle-worthy drawings. And although I will admit I prefer to enjoy his art in book or pocket format, props must be given to him regardless, for his masterful wit and sense of comedy. The crudity of his lines and letters, and his queasy use of space and text, seems to transform the way words are internally read into something invariably funny that make me pee my pants, hard. You can get 2 of his artbooks, a set of postcards and two smaller booklets by him at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore (211 Bernard W), just saying.
I suggest you take a look at this to see more of this show’s jewels. Coming up soon: MOMA, PS1, New Museum and Greene Naftali kind-of-coverage, plus cool zinesters and more?
Filed under art shows, installation, out-of-town, review, video | Tags: Bellwether gallery, David Shrigley, Drawn & Quarterly, Erica Eyres, Lizzie Fitch, New York City, Prettythingsss, Ryan Trecartin, Tamy Ben-Tor | Comment (0)Of Massimo, holding things
To post about the exhibition currently up right now of the beautiful work of Massimo Guerrera at the Joyce Yahouda is not an easy task. Guerrera, a relatively young and spritely artists born in good old Roma in 1967 is one of Quèbec’s most lauded artists and has been for some years. He is also one not to be pinned down as he zips around (well, I don’t know if he zips, call it an intuition) etching, drawing, sculpting and performing in equal parts. He is one giant recipe for a multi-tiered art-cake with all of the ingredients at the ready in his sleeves.
He was trained at Atelier Graff, (which truly deserves its own write-up), and his etching background shines through in the Yahouda show, Partager Les Outils d’Affection, up until the 17th of January.
Guerrera is partially difficult to write about because of the way in which his many mediums compliment and contrast each other. His sculpture, photography (documentation of his non-performances) and illustrations inhabit spaces in unison, breathing together in some sort of rhythm reminiscent of family relations. Verbally interacting with his work is akin to being asked to write an essay on someone else’s trip home to mom, pop and extendo-mix-siblings for a week. You almost wouldn’t dare, and you might not want to show them the final results.
Difficulties aside, this exhibition is quite an experience and a precious one at that, (and not in the my-little-porcelain-dolly kind of a way at all) as to see Guerrera work in multiple forms and functions is not only to see his flexibility as an artist but to also witness how he carries beauty with him like a tincture in his pocket.
It also serves as a reminded of the traces we leaves behind or weave into the things we do, regardless of what medium we work/sing/hum/play/yelp in.
And that I call the man art-cake is especially apt considering that what weaves and binds his practice together, from the performative and sculptural to the bits-on-paper, is his grapple with the constant subject of food as a place/substance where bodies/rituals/identities meet and collide. I could go on about that one for well, masters degrees, PhDs, post-docs and more, but let’s just say there’s enough “meat” there (pardon the pun) for a lifetime’s worth of amazing art. Thankfully.
Filed under artists, events, illustration, installation, local, review | Comment (0)Of Man, Mouse & Dance…
Ok, so perhaps I shouldn’t say this straight off in my first blog post, as initial impressions cling to the body like scared little ghosts forever threatening to haunt you, but I don’t like dance. Or perhaps more aptly put, I don’t tend to appreciate dance, which is an altogether different type of creature although perhaps no less offensive.
This admittance comes from wanting to be totally frank here about my approach to aesthetics and the ways in which I pick the bits off the bones of the work I encounter on a daily basis, whether they be my own or this one at the gallery or that one those birds peck at constantly. It also comes from a certain type of confoundedness I have about my face’s automatic scowls in regards to the medium.
Which is one of the reasons why this first post of mine here inside the depths of our dear frozen mammoth is about dance. To fell these branches of generalized mistrust I have towards said world might not be such a bad idea.
And the aiders and abettors in the fight to cut away the scraggly-toothe’d fears I have about this type of artistic physical movement come in the form of 4 fiendishly rebellious Montréal dancer/choreographers who have come together under the moniker The Choreographers.
About 1 year ago, Katie Ward, Thea Patterson, Peter Trosztmer and Audrée Juteau banded together to create this rather unusual troupeau that blurs notions of authorship and creative process by at once being a dance group and their own choreographers at the same time. Think à la baroque ballroom where everyone danced to the music but could play it, too.
I don’t know if it’s this concoction of utter investment (of both creating and performing within such a communal structure) that shapes their works into ones so absolutely arresting and immersive, or if it’s just because they’re all so darn gorgeous (ah, seriously…) but The Choreographers have managed to do for me what Devora Neumark did for my attitude towards performance art - totally kick my ass through my head and leave me thinking that perhaps, after all, it may just be me that has the problem, and not the whole dang medium.
Last something-night (Wednesday?) I had the pleasure of being one of those in the audience at the Salon Illusion Coda Club to witness their latest creation, Man and Mouse. The pictures here in this post are not of that night’s performance, but of the piece in an earlier incarnation which lacks the flavour of the immediate but still retains an accurate idea of what it all looks and feels like.
The work is loosely based on the themes and relationships found within John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but is supported by the narrative of his work similarly to how a stoner might be by a magic eye poster - the characters of Lennie and George as Steinbeck renders them are used here as a point of departure for dancers Audrée Juteau and Peter Trosztmer and choreographers Katie Ward and Thea Patterson.
Filed under artists, dance, local, review | Comments (2)
