‘Tis the Season to Buy Art
Two of Toronto’s leading visual arts establishments are having fundraising sales this week, 401 Richmond’s Open Studio (above) and Gallery TPW, which celebrates its 25th annual Photorama affordable art fundraiser beginning December 2.
Open Studio’s annual artist proof sale is Thursday (December 1) from 6 – 9 pm featuring excellent local print art in the $50 – $300 range. The sale continues until December 17 but for best selection, shop early. Thursday’s print preview begins at 6 pm with the sale starting at 6:30; print making demos will be part of the action.
Photorama features works by renowned local photographers including Ed Burtynsky, Suzy Lake, Robyn Cumming and many other talented photo artists. Your best hope of snagging one of the highest profile works is to buy yourself a gallery membership ($75), which allows you to attend the exclusive members preview (”collectors” get first dibs), December 1 (6 – 9 pm).
Pop Art Poetry
No one is more surprised to see Jeff Campagna doing his first gallery show than Jeff Campagna. He’s a writer primarily – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, movies, a blog – but he refuses to restrict his creative output.
By his own admission he can’t draw or paint “worth a damn” but he knows his way around Adobe Photoshop and decided to apply himself to creating visual treatments for a handful of his poems. The resulting work is on show now at gallerywest with an opening reception slated for Thursday (November 24, 7 – 10 pm).
The works are digital prints on canvas, each one dressed up in a different, ornate gilt frame. For the artist, the frames represent a bridge between the digital present and a romantic, poetic past. The poems themselves are naïve, rhyming affairs, like lyrics for a pop song. Pop poetry meets pop art.
“I’ve gone from filmmaking, specifically screen writing, to fiction to poetry and now to visual art,” says Campagna. “It may not sound consistent but I see continuity running through it all. I don’t see this work as a departure, I see it as an extension.”
Powerful Plasticity at MOCCA
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art lit a rocket under curator Camilla Singh’s latest exhibition Friday night with a lively opening reception that gave the city’s art set plenty to chew on. Titled Ineffable Plasticity, the show features an all-Toronto slate of artists whose works consider “the experience of being human.”
The title is intentionally poetic and ambiguous, explains Singh, as she leads me through the show: “It invites you to put your own take on it rather than being a really descriptive thing that nails it down.”
Like Rogers and Hart’s “Funny Valentine,” some of Ineffable Plasticity is unphotographable, either because it’s too explicit (Mat Brown, Jordan MacLachlan, above) or too experiential (Sherri Hay).
WORKshop Gallery Goes Public
It’s just about the strangest location for a gallery you’re likely to come across — tucked into the Bay Street subway station and not accessible from ground level, WORKshop is an experimental design centre, work and exhibition space. The easy-to-miss gallery has been open since February 2010 but the newly mounted STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward is the first public exhibition to be held in the space.
Once inside the gallery you really have no sense that you’re underground; the space is light and almost airy. READ MORE
Marc Chagall Reigns at AGO
Art Gallery of Ontario CEO Matthew Teitelbaum does an interview in front of Marc Chagall’s “Blue Circus”, one of the highlight works in Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, opening at the AGO October 18 (running thru January 15). Featuring 118 works including masterpieces by Wassily Kandinsky, the exhibition “tells a very compelling story about how artistic genius develops,” noted Teitelbaum at yesterday’s press preview. “It’s an extraordinary exhibition that puts the work of a great 20th century artist, Marc Chagall, in the context of his homeland, Russia, and his adopted country, France.”
“The Dance” by Marc Chagall, 1950 – 52
