Marc Audette Photographer Audette created the tableaux vivants that make up his new show in his classroom at York’s Glendon Campus. The images feature time-honoured practices like still life and figure drawing, but the technique and the underlying concepts are up to the minute. Artwork $3,000–$10,000. Find out more »
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Our six favourite pieces from Come Up to My Room 2012 (including one we had to get on our hands and knees to see)
Walking from space to space at the Gladstone’s annual Come Up to My Room event (where the hotel surrenders its accommodations to be reimagined by a clutch of designers) is a bit like taking an absurd, down-the-rabbit-hole-type journey though the minds of several artsy archetypes. There’s the minimalist, who works with little more than white Styrofoam and LED lights; the maximalist, whose room is so packed with hundreds of abstract, laser-cut feathers it’s pretty well impossible to enter; the Parkdale hipster, whose half-shorn hair and acid-wash jeggings are more interesting than the art itself; and the conceptualist, whose work is likely very, very deep but will be likely be lost on everyone without a PhD in philosophy. That said, the show, which is on until this Sunday, is exuberantly creative, spectacularly strange, and well worth a visit. Our six favourite pieces after the jump.
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The Weekender: Winterlicious, Come Up To My Room and six other items on our to-do list
The Weekender: Goya and Gillray, Interior Design Show 2012 and Come Up To My Room
1. WINTERLICIOUS
It seems like every culinary event these days has “licious” tacked onto the end, but it’s this semi-annual fest that started it all. Back in the tourism-light days of 2003 (thank SARS, bird flu and 9/11), the city wrangled 36 restaurants into offering up super-affordable prix fixe lunch and dinner menus. It was enough to get even the city’s non-foodies to surrender to alimentary obsession every now and again—“now” being the next two weeks for Winterlicious and “again” being another two weeks in July for the summertime version. Cue the competitive reservation making, complaints about tipping and overtired kitchen staff. Check out this year’s best bets here. Jan. 27 to Feb. 9. toronto.ca/winterlicious.
2. GOYA AND GILLRAY: HUMOUR THAT BITES Read the rest of this entry »
Poking fun at the ruling elite is a favourite pastime for smart alecks across the world—it has been for centuries and continues unabated to this day (see exhibit A). But it hasn’t always been easy to mock our elected leaders—take Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, for example, who produced a series of satirical miniatures, Los Caprichos, only to be forced into removing them from the public eye after threats of arrest. In this AGO exhibit, Goya’s paintings are on display alongside prints by an English contemporary, James Gillray. Unlike Goya, the English enthusiastically took to Gillray’s work (they’re so snarky), so it’s interesting to note the similarities between works created in two completely different political landscapes. To April 15. $19.50. Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W., 416-979-6648, ago.net.
Today in Toronto: Aga-Boom, Penny Plain and The Malcolmson Collection
Aga-Boom Cirque du Soleil arguably restored the idea of jumping around wearing giant shoes as a legitimate performance art, saving it from the sad antics of so many birthday clowns. Cirque veteran Dimitri Bogatirev heads a troupe that has brought its brand of extreme physical comedy to Mexico City, Moscow, Dubai and now Brampton. Find out more »
Penny Plain Marionette master Ronnie Burkett moves through wonderfully weird territory with this tale of a blind woman, a guide dog who wants to be a man, a cross-dressing banker and a serial killer. Find out more »
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The Conversation: Arsinée Khanjian and Megan Follows on collaborating with loved ones
The place: Caffe Doria at Yonge and Roxborough. The people: actors Arsinée Khanjian and Megan Follows. The subject: collaborating with loved ones
Before Anne of Green Gables made her a teen star, Megan Follows (above right) was known as the youngest in a family of theatre people that included actor-director Ted Follows, her father, and actor Dawn Greenhalgh, her mother. They separated when Follows was young but continued to collaborate occasionally. In the decades since, Megan has worked with various members of her acting clan, including in an all-Follows production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. This month, she stars as the wife of Odysseus in the stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s tartly revisionist The Penelopiad. Arsinée Khanjian also knows the perils and joys of working with family: her best-known roles have been in the films Exotica and Ararat, both directed by her husband, Atom Egoyan. This month, Egoyan directs her onstage for the first time ever in Cruel and Tender, by the British playwright Martin Crimp and based on a work by Sophocles. Like Follows in Penelopiad, Khanjian plays the wife of a soldier who brings his work home with him—in this case, a terrorism-fighting general who may be doing more harm than good. We invited the two to Caffe Doria in Rosedale and listened in as they chatted about mixing the personal and the professional.
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The Argument: the Group of Seven has finally been set free (with help from art-obsessed London)
As a native Torontonian who has spent the better part of the past decade living in London, England, I get two questions on visits home: 1) Isn’t it expensive there? And 2) What do they think of us?
The answer to the first is, it isn’t too bad if you factor in cheap booze and avoid taking taxis. As for what the British think of us, the answer is, they don’t.
Of our many collective insecurities, the enduring Canadian obsession with how other cultures view us is by far the most cringingly parochial and self-defeating. And, as they like to say in London, it really gets on my tits. We’re like the anxious party guests sweating silently in the corner. Our palpable desperation to be liked precludes the very thing we want most, which is serious attention and respect from places more populated and historied than our own.
You can understand, then, the extreme trepidation with which I approached Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, an exhibit at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. Yes, I was glad the Group of Seven had finally commanded a large-scale show in a major European gallery—and it is, without question, the group’s most important international exhibition to date. At the same time, I was determined not to be reduced to a state of slathering patriotic gratitude by the mere fact of its existence.
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Today in Toronto: Editions, Part One
Editions, Part One The first of two shows draws on the gallery’s long-standing exploration of etching, silkscreen, lithography, photography and a few hybrids. Among the many well-known artists on display are Stephen Andrews, Tom Dean, Candida Höfer, Glenn Ligon and Michael Morris. Artwork $1,500–$60,000. Find out more »
The Pick: Mercer Union’s Diane Arbus retrospective, a glimpse at the birth of the modern magazine
Pierre Leguillon’s Diane Arbus retrospective as displayed at Malmö’s Moderna Museet (Image: Courtesy Mercer Union)
Diane Arbus was as much a voyeur as an artist, famously focusing her lens on the fringes of ’60s society—freaks, transvestites, mystics, bohemians. “You know how every mother worries that their baby will be a monster? Well, I think I got that on film,” she once said about one of her photographs, titled, with perfect deadpan, “Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx.” It’s that precise ambiguity—between intimacy and prying—that makes them as striking and unsettling today as they were half a century ago.
Iconic paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera coming to an exhibit at the AGO next fall
Frida Kahlo’s Autorretrato con monos, 1943 (Self Portrait with Monkeys, 1943) (Image: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Mexican Art)
Judging from this winter’s Chagall show and next summer’s Picasso exhibition, we’d say the Art Gallery of Ontario is counting on big names to bring in the museum-goers (especially now that its Frank Gehry renovation is no longer a novelty). The latest blockbuster exhibition to be announced features Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the prolific early-20th-century artists known for their evocative paintings, tempestuous personal lives and passionate political activism. Set to open in October, Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting will feature 75 of the painters’ key works, mainly drawn from Mexico’s Museo Dolores Olmedo, which houses the world’s largest collection of Kahlo paintings.
The show will include Kahlo’s iconic Hospital Henry Ford (Henry Ford Hospital) and Autorretrato con monos (Self Portrait with Monkeys), along with Rivera’s La canoa enflorada (The Flowered Canoe). Kahlo’s paintings have a fantastic quality that has sometimes seen her labelled a surrealist, but Rivera always maintained that her (and his) inspiration came from reality, not dreams. The paintings selected for the AGO show, for instance, allude to Rivera and Kahlo’s lives, both together and apart, their support for the Communist movement and their identification with Mexico’s indigenous roots. Now, if only we could be painted alongside some monkeys.
Today in Toronto: Will Munro and Jews, Music and the American Dream
Jews, Music and the American Dream The third instalment of a four-part cabaret series sponsored by Jazz.FM, this tribute to American popular song (and the Jewish composers behind so much of it) features the talents of pianist, producer, singer and composer Ben Sidran. Find out more »
Will Munro The late Will Munro, who died in 2010 at the age of 35, was an artist, a hyperactive community builder and a high-profile queer about town. This show is a retrospective of the audaciously sleazy art he found time to create during his all-too-short life. Find out more »
Today in Toronto: ROM Sleepover: Maya
ROM Sleepover: Maya Night at the museum: Mayan style. Kids get to sleep over in the after-hours quiet of the ROM while learning the ancient secrets of the mysterious Maya. Palace life, rituals and beliefs, art and artifacts are all part of the Maya story they will experience through exhibits and mask-making. Ages five and up. Find out more »
Today in Toronto: The Nutcracker and Chagall Through Toronto’s Artists
Ballet Jörgen Canada: The Nutcracker Same old score, but choreographer Bengt Jörgen moves the action from Russia to Canada (not much of a stretch, at least in winter) and plunders the McMichael Canadian Art Collection for set and costume inspiration. Don’t be surprised if a Mountie and a lumberjack crash the party. Find out more »
Past Present: Chagall Through Toronto’s Artists As part of the AGO’s big-ticket Chagall exhibit, the Koffler Centre of the Arts is hosting an evening of music, dance, art and more, all inspired by the Russian modernist master’s Jewish origins. Singer Theresa Tova will team up with pianist Matt Herskowitz for an excerpt from Bella: The Colour of Love, about the painter’s wife. Find out more »
Toronto art collector Ash Prakash triumphs in a bidding war at a Sotheby’s art auction
Ash Prakash expanded his art collection at Sotheby’s Canada’s live auction at the ROM Monday evening, scooping up a J.W. Morrice painting for a cool $1.5 million after apparently exchanging heated offers with Winnipeg-based gallerist David Loch, who has also been known to drop exorbitant sums of money in the Canadian art market. (Interesting aside: Loch is the former confidant of the late Kenneth Thomson, and Prakash is known to buy art on behalf of Kenneth’s son David.) Of course, Prakash wasn’t done there. He purchased two other Morrices the same night: a sketch called Venice for $82,000 and a garden scene for $232,500. These aren’t Prakash’s first major purchases. In 2008, he bought Tom Thomson’s Pine Trees at Sunset for a record $2 million. Thanks to Prakash’s buys and dozens more that day, the auction reported sales of nearly $8 million. If all this sounds a little excessive, rest assured that some 99-per-centers were also in attendance: demonstrators protested outside the ROM to support locked-out art handlers at Sotheby’s in New York City. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »
The Power Plant’s new director is Quebecer Gaëtane Verna
After an “extensive international search,” the Power Plant has found its new director right next door in Quebec. Gaëtane Verna is currently executive director and chief curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette in Lanaudière, and from 1998 to 2006 was curator of the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University. “Gaëtane Verna comes to Toronto with an outstanding set of achievements, exemplifying her competence in all capacities of museum operations,” Power Plant president Shanitha Kachan said in a release. Verna will be taking over from acting director Christy Thompson, who has been keeping order since the fabulous Gregory Burke’s departure. Visitors will be able to see Verna’s handiwork in March, when the whole gallery becomes free to enter.
Joe Freezy (also known as Joe Fresh) is going to Miami to throw a party
No, Joe Mimran isn’t living out a Will Smith video as part of his bucket list, but he is heading to Miami (where “hot mommies scream ay Papi”) to throw a party at Art Basel. In tandem with The Warhol’s Eric Shiner and Sara Tecchia, Freezy himself will be toasting the arts with a performance from Holly Woodlawn, a nearly 80-year-old drag queen and former Andy Warhol–made superstar. Could this mean that Papa Joe’s empire is expanding even more?
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