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Contact Photography Festival Guide: 10 must-see exhibits at the world’s largest photography festival

Seal Heart (from In the Playroom) by Jonathan Hobin

The Contact Photography Festival turns Toronto into a de facto art installation. For the next month, billboards, subway stations, cafes, retail stores and even airport terminals become galleries, joining institutions like the ROM and MOCCA in showcasing more than 1500 artists across 175 venues. With almost 200 exhibits spread across the city, even the savviest gallery-goer can be overwhelmed. We whittled the wonderfully massive list to 10 must-see showpieces to give you an insider edge on where to see the most awe-inspiring images, from iconic photographer Michael Snow’s mind-bending new work to the hauntingly poignant photography of up-and-coming artist Jonathan Hobin.

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The Informer

Events

May 1, 2013 | 12:00 pm

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Going Out: Must-see art openings in Toronto in May

(Image: courtesy of Richard Barnes)

Every month, we select the city’s best art openings. In May, we suggest Richard Barnes’s new show at Bau-Xi Photo, Newfoundland artist Christopher Platt at the Mira Godard Gallery and Doug Ischar’s sampling of photography, installation art and experimental film at Gallery 44 and Vtape.

Richard Barnes
The celebrated New York photographer has a way of seeing things the rest of us overlook. His new show’s title, Murmur, short for murmuration, refers to a flock of starlings, his primary subject. Barnes’s images of the birds swarming over Rome are both poetic and a little frightening—it’s impossible not to think of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Artwork $3,000–$7,000. May 1 to 31. Bau-Xi Photo, 324 Dundas St. W., 416-977-0400, bau-xiphoto.com.

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From the Print Edition

May 1, 2013 | 10:00 am

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Current Obsession: the late shutterbug Arnaud Maggs saved his best work for last

As an artist, Arnaud Maggs was a late bloomer. Before scoring his first exhibition at the age of 51, he worked as a graphic designer and then as a magazine photographer. Those two strains merge in his fine art photography, which followed a stubborn formula: shoot a subject hundreds of times, then present the results in an orderly grid on a white wall. Edward Burtynsky, who chaired the jury that honoured Maggs with the Scotiabank Photography Award last year, says the artist’s meticulousness rubbed off on him: “He was so demanding about everything being just so.” A show this month at the new Ryerson Image Centre—part of the Contact photography festival, and the first major public display of Maggs’ work since his death late last year at age 86—reveals how his subjects got progressively weirder over the years.

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From the Print Edition

March 1, 2013 | 11:00 am

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Current Obsession: painter Peter Harris stalks the city in his eerie portraits of Toronto after dark

By Rachel Heinrichs

Peter Harris loves the Gardiner. And the city’s gas stations. And the boxy ’70s rec centres most Torontonians try to ignore. He also has a thing for cargo vans and vacant parking lots and sagging telephone wires. For the past five years, Harris, who studied painting at the University of Waterloo, has been prowling Toronto in the night, snapping pictures of its quieter corners and then transforming them into fantastically spooky streetscapes. His pursuit of the perfect image occasionally gets him chased off by security guards unamused by his artistic voyeurism—he has been known to scale eight-foot factory fences to get a photo.

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To-Do List

February 21, 2013 | 5:00 am

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Five things to do in Toronto on the weekend of February 22 to 24

The show floor at The Artist Project (Image: Courtesy The Artist Project)

In this edition of The Weekender: a legendary South African musical group, a double bill from hot young playwright Hannah Moscovitch and three more things to do in Toronto.

ART
The Artist Project
Over 250 painters, sculptors, photographers and multimedia artists are participating in this year’s edition of the annual juried art fair, which begins tonight with an opening night party. In addition to plenty of opportunites to score contemporary works from emerging artists, there are also talks on topics like art as an investment and docent-led tours of the show floor. $15–25. February 21–24. Better Living Centre, Exhibition Place, 195 Princes’ Blvd., theartistprojecttoronto.com

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The Hype

From the Print Edition

February 7, 2013 | 3:30 pm

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Current Obsession: punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

By Rachel Heinrichs | Photographs courtesy Patti Smith and Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Current Obsession: trailblazing punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

When the New York singer-songwriter Patti Smith hit the American music scene in the mid-’70s, there was no one quite like her. She hacked her hair into a shaggy bob, wore men’s suits and flaunted her unshaven armpits on album covers. She achieved mainstream success early on with her hit “Because the Night”—still a staple on classic-rock radio—but she was always more about celebrating outsiderhood than being a typical rock star. Now 66, the doyenne of punk is undergoing an artistic renaissance: her 2010 memoir Just Kids won a National Book Award, she recently released her 11th album, Banga, and she’s mounting a new photography exhibit.

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From the Print Edition

November 12, 2012 | 3:45 pm

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The Argument: Why Frida Kahlo is the patron saint of Internet–enabled narcissism

By Stephen Marche

The Argument: Frida Kahlo is the patron saint of Internet–enabled narcissism

(Image: The Broken Column courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario)

On September 17, 1925, Frida Kahlo, then an 18-year-old aspiring medical student, was riding a bus in Mexico City when it collided with a trolley. Her spine was shattered, forcing her to spend the next three months in a body cast, completely immobilized. For lack of anything else to do, she began to paint, using herself as her primary subject because (she would later say) it was the one she knew best. Her interest in medicine soon evaporated, and from a period of suffering was born an explosively cathartic art. Entirely self-taught, she combined folk art techniques with her knowledge of the masters of the Italian Renaissance to capture the raw emotion and turbulence of her life. And what a life—filled with the tumult of her on-again, off-again marriage to the philandering Diego Rivera, a series of miscarriages, a love affair with Leon Trotsky and the ongoing political struggles of Mexico. From that material, she created work that transcended her place and time.

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The Informer

Real Estate

October 30, 2012 | 2:29 pm

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POLL: Are these murals art or vandalism?

The next phase in Rob Ford’s extended bid to tackle graffiti will begin this Friday, when a five-member board of city bureaucrats will meet to do what city bureaucrats apparently do best: decide what constitutes art. That is, they’ll look at photos of murals and deem whether each is art or vandalism that must be removed at the property owner’s expense. The panel, which has been in the works for more than a year, will make its judgments based on the city’s definitions of ”graffiti art” and ”graffiti vandalism”:

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From the Print Edition

October 29, 2012 | 11:52 am

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Behind the Scenes: The Art of Time Ensemble returns with Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds

Photographs by Daniel Neuhaus

Nicholas Campbell (centre) and Marc Bendavid, who play various characters in the show, including a witness to the Martian invasion and a reporter who dies in the attack

The ultra-eclectic chamber orchestra known as The Art of Time Ensemble is always looking for ways to break through the stuffiness and predictability of classical music. To accomplish this, it has done things like arrange and perform an orchestral version of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album and collaborate onstage with Michael Ondaatje, R. H. Thomson, dancer Peggy Baker and singer Steven Page (with whom they also recorded an album of songs by Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, Rufus Wainwright and others). But the Ensemble’s obsessively faithful recreation of The War of the Worlds, Orson Welles’ notoriously fake 1938 radio broadcast about Martians invading rural New Jersey, is its most elaborate project yet.

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The Hype

From the Print Edition

October 17, 2012 | 3:30 pm

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The Collector: How Ash Prakash became the preeminent art dealer for the country’s wealthiest families

A look at the reclusive art collector renowned for his connections, his discretion, and his secret stash of multi-million-dollar masterpieces

By Leah McLaren | Photograph by Daniel Ehrenworth

The Collector: How Ash Prakash became the preeminent art collector for the country’s wealthiest families

One evening last November, at the Sotheby’s auction in the ROM’s Currelly Gallery, Ash Prakash entered into a heated bidding war with David Loch, a Winnipeg-based art dealer. The coveted object was a dreamy, impressionistic early-20th-century canvas by the Quebec artist James Wilson Morrice entitled Evening Stroll, Venice, which depicts a moody twilight scene of women bustling past the gondolas on the lagoon. Prakash wanted the painting for his personal collection, and put in several bids. He paused as the price soared over a million—he hadn’t expected the piece to be so dear. He knew through the grapevine that Loch was bidding on behalf of a client, which only hardened his resolve: he was spending his own money, and he was determined to win.

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From the Print Edition

October 11, 2012 | 12:00 pm

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Best of Fall 2012: Evan Penny’s mind-bending body sculptures at the AGO

In his industrial warehouse studio near Dupont and Dufferin, Evan Penny uses silicone, paint, aluminum frames and real hair to create human figures that put Madame Tussaud’s to shame. His painstaking attention to detail—he has an assistant whose entire job is to affix individual hairs using tweezers—landed him special effects work in the late 1990s on films like X-Men II and Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It was while crafting superhero mutants and iconic presidential noses that he became obsessed with the idea of going beyond realism to explore how our perceptions of the human form have been shaped and distorted by modern technology. Evan Penny Re Figured, a massive new exhibition that comes to the AGO after touring across Europe, captures the decade since that spark of inspiration. The figures are comically exaggerated, stretched, squished, aged, drained of colour, made monstrous.

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The Hype

From the Print Edition

October 10, 2012 | 3:30 pm

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Best of Fall 2012: ten of the season’s top gallery shows

The art world’s most anticipated shows from upstarts and old masters

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The Hype

To-Do List

October 3, 2012 | 3:32 pm

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The Long Weekender: Sister Act The Musical, Toronto Oktoberfest and six other events on our to-do list

Dawn Petten and Jonathon Young in Tear the Curtain! (Image: David Cooper)

1. SISTER ACT: THE MUSICAL
Singing nuns. ’Nuff said. While Whoopi and Maggie aren’t making appearances this time around (we can still dream), the fish-out-of-water story of a Vegas lounge singer hiding out in a convent is no less irresistible. The 2011 Broadway production makes its pilgrimage to the Ed Mirvish Theatre this week, and features Ta’Rea Campbell in the to-die-for lead role of Deloris. To November 4. $35–$130. Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St., 416-872-1212, mirvish.com

2. TORONTO OKTOBERFEST
Grab your lederhosen (who doesn’t have a pair or two at the back of their closet?) and head down to Toronto’s first Oktoberfest celebration at St. Lawrence Market. This Bavarian festival will separate the men from the boys (there’s a strongman contest), with Creemore, De Koninck, Weihenstephan, Erdinger and more breweries participating (there’s also food from Cheesewerks, The Bavarian Nut Shop and Prague European Kitchen). October 4–5. $20–$25. St. Lawrence Market—North Building, 95 Front St. E., torontooktoberfest.ca

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The Hype

To-Do List

September 27, 2012 | 12:05 pm

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Nuit Blanche 2012 guide: our top 20 picks for Toronto’s seventh annual all-night art crawl

This Saturday, September 29, hordes of art lovers, all-purpose revellers and the generally curious will take to downtown for the seventh iteration of Nuit Blanche. The fun kicks off just as the sun goes down (7:03 p.m. this year), and continues until the sun rises the next morning (and if past years are anything to go by, the crowds will stay strong into the wee, wee hours). Essential provisions for the night: warm clothing (or better, layers), a little sustenance (liquid or otherwise) and this guide of the top 20 things to see, in which we translate the oft-baffling art-speak used to describe the various projects into plain old English. This year, the fest is divided into four areas: City Hall, Zone A (downtown south and west), Zone B (central downtown) and Zone C (east of downtown).

See all our picks, starting with City Hall »

September 27, 2012 | 12:05 pm
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The Hype

To-Do List

September 27, 2012 | 8:00 am

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Today in Toronto: Pictures at an Exhibition, SLoE by Julia Sasso and more

Pictures at an Exhibition Tunefulness and conspicuous displays of virtuosity come together in Mussorgsky’s musical tribute to an artist friend who died young. Find out more »

Road Trip (je ne regrette rien) Choreographer Susie Burpee joins up with performer Linnea Swan for a tragicomic duet about two women who act out every variation on female friendship. Find out more »

SLoE by Julia Sasso The acronym stands for Simple Lines of Enquiry, the title of one of the final piano compositions by the late Canadian composer Ann Southam. Find out more »

Walk a Mile in Her Shoes Most marathons or charity walks advise participants to wear comfortable shoes, but not the one put on by the White Ribbon Campaign to raise awareness about violence against women. Find out more »

All stories relating to Art

The Informer

Culture

Contact Photography Festival Guide: 10 must-see exhibits at the world’s largest photography festival

The Informer

Events

Going Out: Must-see art openings in Toronto in May

The Hype

From the Print Edition

Current Obsession: the late shutterbug Arnaud Maggs saved his best work for last

The Hype

From the Print Edition

Current Obsession: painter Peter Harris stalks the city in his eerie portraits of Toronto after dark

The Hype

From the Print Edition

Current Obsession: punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

The Hype

From the Print Edition

The Argument: Why Frida Kahlo is the patron saint of Internet–enabled narcissism

The Informer

Real Estate

POLL: Are these murals art or vandalism?

The Hype

From the Print Edition

Behind the Scenes: The Art of Time Ensemble returns with Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds

The Hype

From the Print Edition

The Collector: How Ash Prakash became the preeminent art dealer for the country’s wealthiest families

The Hype

From the Print Edition

Best of Fall 2012: Evan Penny’s mind-bending body sculptures at the AGO

The Hype

To-Do List

The Long Weekender: Sister Act The Musical, Toronto Oktoberfest and six other events on our to-do list

The Hype

To-Do List

Today in Toronto: Pictures at an Exhibition, SLoE by Julia Sasso and more

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All stories relating to Art

See all our picks, starting with City Hall » September 27, 2012 | 12:05 pm Comments

Contests

See all our picks, starting with City Hall »

September 27, 2012 | 12:05 pm
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