The Vernacular Opera by Mark Clintberg
Attention All Shoppers: Demoting the ArtStar, Coming to a Store near You by Nadja Sayej
They have divided the gallery into four shops and handed the reigns over to a selected number of artists who are pumped to hustle, sell, consult and charm as entrepreneurs and salespeople, cheerful retail renegades of their own brand before they are artists.
They step down from being the untouchable ArtStars too snotty to give us their time or handshake. Here, they are not rare and precious rubies, or the quixotic, straggly starlets shining in the glossy pages of Artforum. They get real, for once.
Leveling Hierarchy and the Process of Neutrality by Marissa Neave
The Willing and Able seems simple enough, with tall, lean vertical stripes of multi-coloured paint covering one wall, while a long list of Toronto galleries, in alphabetical order, sits on a perpendicular wall in undecorated black type. Although the visual result of Morrison’s installation appears minimalist in style, the precision with which it is implemented is highly (and obviously) labour-intensive.
YYZTV, and the Promise of Television by Dennis Day
The concept was a monthly show, airing once a week in the Parkdale-Trinity area only. Basically, the idea was to feature a film or video artist, who had been selected by the board, and who was exhibiting concurrently at the gallery.
Something Better by Dany Lyne
Cohene represents the utopian myth by meticulously selecting the textures, colours, patterns, clothing, objects, and architecture of the 1970sthe era of her own childhood. The illusion of togetherness, of family is present and seductive. Memory and fantasy mingle to create a psychological mechanism similar to denial as the architecture blithely enforces the nuclear family construct.
On Mona Kamal’s Journeys
[…]Mona Kamal’s Journeys is an exhibition of collection and reassembly an articulation of years of experiences and travels that have been shipped, shifted and recombined. Kamal has conserved physical and conceptual mementos from her trips to India and Pakistan and reconstituted them alongside material reflections of her past in Canada as well as her current life in New York City. She recontextualizes her journeys and experiences, translating them into publicly and personally legible forms.[…]
A few opening remarks*
[…]Each, insofar as it stands forth, is marked by what it is not, internally spaced out so that if one were to superpose one case onto the other, each unit would see itself imposed upon by this lackits doppelganger as you put it. The actual space between the units that Collyer emphasizes by cropping and the addition of the symbol becomes the representative of their having been re-marked.[…]
The Artist That Therefore I Am by Steve Reinke
John Marriott has too many ideas. It’s a problem; it comes time for an exhibition and he doesn’t know what to show. It isn’t a matter of editing, or of selecting the good or successful or appropriate work from the duds, the losers, the inappropriates. It’s a matter of starting all over again, as if from scratch.
The Artist, the Gallery and the Self-Aware Shed by Michelle Jacques
Today, the modernist vision of the ideal gallery space, which accentuates the art object while the surrounding architecture recedes, is still a prevailing trend.