Attendance was light at yesterday’s press launch for the Gardiner Museum’s new show, Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. Such is the fate of any event daring enough or foolish enough to fly too close to the Toronto International Film Festival. Not that Gardiner staff were especially bothered by the weak turn-out; they know they’ve got a big show on their hands and I do mean BIG.
That’s Gardiner curator Charles Q. Mason, left, staring down one of Frey’s monumental ceramic sculptures. Mason led the press tour with a spirited description of the artist’s life and work, establishing her place alongside San Francisco Bay-area artists of the 1960s like Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bishoff, as well as fellow ceramic artists and sculptors Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos.
Mason confirms that Frey’s works aren’t just big, they’re heavy, too. He personally assembled the sculptures with the help of the late artist’s assistant Sam Perry, who worked with Frey for 17 years until her death in 2004. “Sam is probably the only person who knows how to assemble all of her works,” says Mason, “which are constructed in pieces bolted together.
The show required two trailers to haul the requisite parts across North America. From Toronto it travels to the Museum of Art and Design in New York City and then on to the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
When I ask Mason whether he’s a ceramic artist himself, he laughs and says, “the only art I practice is the martial art of karate.”
An American by birth, Mason moved to Toronto two years ago to accept the Gardiner position. “During the seven years I spent as a curator in Ohio, between the mid 90s and early 2000s, my wife and I visited Toronto every year at least once and sometimes twice,” he recounts. “We came because we loved the city’s many different neighborhoods and its tremendous variety of restaurants. We also enjoy the city’s art scene and always visited the ROM and the AGO and spent time poking around in the galleries and shops on Queen Street West. When the position at the Gardiner was posted, I had a very comfortable job in Florida, but my wife and I were expecting our second child and thought that Toronto would be a fantastic place to raise our children. So I applied, got the job and we moved here.”
Mason is currently working on five exhibition projects for 2010; they include major exhibitions of contemporary Israeli ceramics, historical Japanese porcelain and related arts, and works by four younger Canadian artists who work in ceramic and other media. He’s also working on the 2011 and 2012 schedules and has already booked a major traveling exhibition of large-scale ceramic sculptures and paintings by the Japanese-born American artist Jun Kaneko for the summer of 2011.
When I ask the curator to identify his favorite piece in the Viola Frey show he points to the Weeping Woman sculpture. “It immediately draws you into a complex psychological and physical relationship with the figure. One the one hand, the woman is obviously in distress and you want to know what is wrong and feel an urge to provide some assistance or comfort. On the other hand, her size, body position and nakedness make it uncomfortable to get too close and make it difficult to really understand what is going on. That kind of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality is typical of Frey’s work and is what makes it so compelling.”
WHEN/WHERE: Big, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey is on at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art until January 10, 2010
Photos by Christopher Jones
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