Main Space
Tasman Richardson
Necropolis
Curated by Rhonda Corvese.

Necropolis is an immersive video and new media installation. It will realize the translation of over a decade of ethereal video experiments and theorizations into a real world, tactile, audience experience. Necropolis will consist of six new works contained within context-specific spaces, housed inside a single super-structure.

Project Room
NGC@MOCCA
Spectral Landscape
Peter Doig, Tim Gardner, Sarah Anne Johnson

The expression “losing yourself in the wilderness” takes on new meaning in works by Peter Doig, Sarah Anne Johnson and Tim Gardner. Here ambiguous, hallucinatory vistas collide with sublime, pastoral scenes and the idea of the ruggedness of the hinterland clashes with its ultimate fragility. In each case, the realism of the works is interrupted by a sense of sheer uncanny.These multifarious landscapes mix autobiography with illusion and the banal with the extraordinary, offering striking images that suggest a shift in our perceived relationship with the natural world.

Media/Retail Space
Daisuke Takeya
GOD Loves Japan

God Loves Japan is a time-sensitive installation memorializing the earthquake/tsunami disaster that took place in Japan on March 11th, 2011. This installation intends to raise awareness of Japan’s long-term recovery needs and will encourage viewers to re-evaluate the meaning of love and empathy in our time.

Opening Reception: Thursday January 19, 2012 from 7-9pm

Gallery TPW is pleased to present a solo exhibition by emerging artist Christine Negus. Negus’ works range from ephemeral objects, including glittery party banners, neon signs and artificially flowered memorial wreaths, to video works steeped in sweet sadness. At the centre of you can’t spell slaughter without laughter is a constellation of short but intense, single channel videos and digital-animations investigating nostalgia and loss through humour and difficult irony. Here children tell terrible stories, pop songs become awkward and painful poetry, night stars are watching us, and small traumas play out within a larger view of the cosmos.

Based in London, Ontario, Christine Negus has an MFA from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. She has exhibited her work internationally, with notable exhibitions and screenings including the Montreal Underground Film Festival, Cambridge Galleries, The Art Gallery of York University, Xpace Cultural Centre and the Images Festival where, in 2008, she won the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Emerging Video/Filmmaker.

Where: Angell Gallery @ 12 Ossington Avenue
When: January 19th – February 18th
Opening reception: Thursday January 19th 6–9 PM

Curated by Luke Painter, “Pixel Pusher” brings together 4 artists, David Clarkson, Michael Antkowiak, Jillian Kay Ross and Craig Skinner, whose painting practices have strong connections to digital processes. Although painting is a medium that is well known for its plasticity and movement, artists have continually found new ways to incorporate and mediate the techniques and methods of digital space into their paintings.

In Michael Antkowiak’s work these methods include using online content as a source that is translated through paint to canvas. Antkowiak has researched personal webcam sites that individuals set up in their homes (often every room), where anyone can view the activities of their everyday lives. Antkowiak, who is interested in voyeurism and surveillance, takes these pixilated and blurry low-resolution images and further transforms them through paint into emotionally charged, dynamic spaces.

Known for planning paintings out via digital interfaces and painting them after the fact, Jillian Ross has created an entirely virtual space that is animated through the use of 3D software and shown on a HD monitor in the gallery. The animation starts with a framed painting that is sitting on the floor of what we presume to be a gallery space. Water rises up through the floor and eventually covers the painting. The water level falls so that that the scene returns to its original configuration and the animation loops through the cycle again. The realistic looking scene becomes an unusual and irreverent narrative take on the familiar white cube of exhibition spaces.

The artists in “Pixel Pusher” are seeking new ways of incorporating diverse uses of digital media in their work. Utilizing tools found in social media and commercial 3D animation these artists provide a conversation between the rich history of painting and the technologies permeating our everyday lives.

Opening Reception: Friday January 20, 2012

When: January 20 – February 11, 2012.
Where: 58 Ossington Avenue, Toronto.

MAIN SPACE: Magnetic Impulses

The artists in Magnetic Impulses focus on creating tactile surfaces in their works.  These paintings and sculptures explore a combination of natural and manufactured forms.  Bone, hair, smoke and rocks coexist with manufactured materials: plastic pipes, children’s toys and styrofoam.  In an endless process, artists Jaime Angelopoulos, Kali Fisher, Ariel Kellett and Derrick Piens display evidence of their on-going material explorations.

XBASE: It Happened In The Woods

Patricia Beattie transforms Xbase into an enchanted coniferous wood using trees and stoneware clay. Viewers will find themselves in a set like environment, engaging with the sounds, smells and mood of the woods. The construction and placement of clay slab silhouettes determines a loose dream narrative, triggering a self-awareness by viewers moving within the space of a staged dream.

WINDOW SPACE: The “RedOne” Project

A commentary on waste culture and decay, Fabian Mosquera’s The “RedOne” Project is a sculpture built from four months of accumulated waste adhered to a dress and placed on a mannequin bust. As the dress spills into its surrounding garbage filled environment, it represents the waste our culture accumulates everyday, mounting in ever larger quantities while consumer culture never subsides. Not only do the things we buy become part of our identity, but the things we throw away as well.

Where: O’Born Contemporary at 131 Ossington Avenue, Toronto.
When: January 14 – January 28, 2012
Opening Reception is on January 13, 2012 from 6-9pm. 

“Magic Realism is commonly used as a term to describe an aesthetic style of fiction where magic and mythology blends with the real world. Showing in the Gladstone Gallery, the artists in Ethereal Existence use their work to show this concept, usually reserved for fiction, in a visual format. Their drawings, paintings, photographs, illustrations and prints show the darker side of reality, depicting scenes from everyday life to the mythological and where the two meet.”

Showing at the Gladstone Gallery from January 10th to January 22nd, 2012.
Opening Reception: Thursday January 12, 2012 from 7pm to 10pm.

Coming After is a collaborative exhibit featuring both local and international artists. The works focus on queer time.
Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio features the works of artist Stan Douglas

Coming After:
“Featuring artists from New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Toronto, and beyond, Coming After is a response to the recent renewal of interest in the period from the mid-1980s to early 1990s that was decisive for North American cultural politics. This time period witnessed the (first of many) Culture Wars, the birth of “queer” as an identity and theory, and the rise of a direct-action AIDS activist movement — epitomized by ACT UP — fighting a new plague that was devastating communities of artists, queers and people of colour. While these years were highly traumatic, they also represented a galvanizing, dynamic moment for queer citizenship — one that is arguably haunting our present and our future.”

Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio:
“Negotiating their hope and despair about the present and future of our world in complex and compelling ways, the artists in Coming After share a sense of themselves as part of queer genealogies and cultural lineages, with influence and affinity moving across time and space.”

PIN UP
Front Gallery: A Fundraising Sale of Limited Edition Posters by Artists
Back Gallery: Archival Show of posters from the collection of Michael Parke-Taylor

“It’s that time of year again… Mercer Union is offering fine art at street prices! Limited edition posters by artists, each available for just $75, are hot off the press just in time for the holiday season. No nudes but other good things to make the eyes pop: optical tricks, word games, and slick design concepts. Like the best guerrilla advertising, these gift-worthy posters will fill our walls and disappear just as fast. Mark your calendars now – the show is up for three days only!

Posters will be available in limited editions of 5 at $75 each. All sales support Mercer Union’s exhibitions and public programs. For more information, click here.

Running alongside the new works selected for PIN UP, Mercer Union will feature a special exhibition of Toronto gig posters drawn from Michael Parke-Taylor’s extensive collection. This show provides a rare opportunity to peak into the former AGO Curator of Modern Art’s personal archive of paste-up print design. The selection offers an eclectic index of posters for famous and not-so-famous musical acts who have performed in Toronto over the last fifteen years.”

p|m Gallery statement:

“Images breed images in me.” – British painter Francis Bacon

Inspired by fashion and the history of painting, Clyne’s work examines the image as a mirror of our desires. Amidst today’s cultural fascination with beauty and persona, her paintings critique our digital obsession and question the consequences for human intimacy. 

When the viewer first glances at one of Clyne’s paintings, the image and viewer lock eyes. The image stares back with a shifting, slivered gaze, appealing to the viewer to seek resolution of its ever-elusive form. Confronted with irreconcilable fragments or impenetrable blind spots, the viewer struggles to answer the image’s plea. Savoring the seductive exchange, the viewer and image become entwined in an active portrait of the experience of looking.

Clyne begins her process by culling images from fashion magazines and art history books, intrigued by the similarities she sees between contemporary fashion photography and historical portraits of society’s elite — images intended to fuel a spectacle of desire with feigned promises of intimacy and truth.

Cropping the image into a portrait, Clyne re-prints the image on to a surface to which the ink does not adhere, photographing the print as the fluid image morphs and dissolves over time.  She then composes a new image from fragments of these photographs.  Clyne paints this final image as a large-scale painting, the shifting, slivered fragments offering yet denying the viewer resolution of a now elusive form.”

The artist will be giving a talk on January 21, 2012.

To watch a video of the Window Space exhibit, click here.

Here is an interview between Gwendolyn Bieniara and Laura Paolini…  

Jeff Koons’ rock star status and ability (or entitlement) to do, say, and present any ubiquitous object and stamp his name on it makes me wonder if you are mocking him, or simply using his own tactics of borrowing mass iconography for your own use. Is your use of the inflatable bunny a gesture of accession or derision towards Koons?

My use of the inflatable bunny acts as both an homage and a slight towards Koons. Around the time this piece was being considered, Jeff Koons attempted to sue a company for manufacturing and selling bookends that look like inflatable dogs. He saw this as a direct reference to his own inflatable dog sculptures, while 1/16 the scale. [More info on that story here.] It kind of says something when you start using the same logic of public sphere appropriation that made your career happen against someone for your personal profit. Koons and his attorney basically asserted that now Jeff Koons owns all references to, and the actual object of, an inflatable dog. It’s a bit puzzling, as if balloon dogs didn’t exist before Koons and now don’t exist outside of his jurisdiction.

Your previous work involves technology as a medium and a subject. I like asking people why they like what they like and do what they do. So what do you like best about working with electronics and new media?

First, I hate the term new media. A lot of it really isn’t that new, and I just can’t really get it through my head that all innovation and progress ultimately has a commercial end. Also, despite 40 plus years of technology and new media art in galleries, some people (who should now better) don’t understand that it might break, need maintenance, etc. Paintings don’t break, sculptures might fall down but the place where media arts is right now is kind of rough.

I heard this really good example of what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder feels like: you’re in a burning car and you’re struggling to get out. To someone with OCD, if they don’t make the bed 15 times until it’s perfect, they are in a burning car. Not to liken art to therapy, but in my non-art-making periods (they happen more often than I’d like) it feels like I’m in a burning car. I write about art and ‘curate’ occasionally, and I like that as a way to meet cool artists and feel immersed, but ultimately I need to keep making work.

My use of technology in other works is sometimes really explicit, like the title gives you a clue to what’s happening (blowing hot air, talk dirty to some extent) but the tech is a means to an end, I suppose. I keep working in it because that’s what I like making. I’m not going to pick up a paintbrush or make figurative sculpture ever. I might make an object and a video when someone asks me to, but this is what I basically want to do, so I stick to it.

The way I work on art is kind of like a perpetual rehearsal. Rehearsing is like being in my studio figuring things out and then once the work is done, it indicates for me what I can change, and it can be seen as a rehearsal of the next piece.

There are definitive sexual connotations in this work. Can you elaborate on any of them? How intentional are they and do they speak to the other conceptual goals within the work?

Well, it’s pretty explicit. Because they’re objects/toy animals it’s not as intense as it could have been. And because “fuck” is pretty casually used, it’s impact as a verb maybe isn’t too intense.  It’s just like cartoon-violence, which a lot of my work deals with. It’s also become apparent to me recently that the work deals with the complexities of Schadenfreude, which is taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune.

I want to say my work isn’t about sex, and while the innuendoes act as a pretty accessible entry point, it can get dangerous and gimicky to use it as a constant motif. Especially for a woman, because I think we are so easily dismissed when given the opportunity—and any excuse will do. The way I see my work having sexual connotations is also through the way it’s about being close and not being close. Attraction and repulsion. Humour and horror. Interaction with consequences.  Someone said to me a long time ago, “If I were a cartoon character, or even a character in a John Waters film, I would be putting banana peels on the ground for people to slip on.” After experiencing my work, generally everyone is more careful of banana peels.

What significance do rabbits have beyond a reference point from Koons?

In a few artist statements I talk about how many stories use rabbits and bunnies as a signifier for lost innocence and a pursuit of the real. One example would be The Velveteen Rabbit, who had to go away when his boy got sick and needed to heal and grow (up). In the same gesture, Lenny from Of Mice and Men eagerly wanted to be rabbit-keeper for a farm that he and George would never be able to have. Not unlike George and Lenny, rabbits are generally preyed upon by other animals.

When I first wanted to make Untitled (Of Mice And Men Revisited) I found a rabbit toy that ‘fell asleep’ when you stopped playing with it. And with I’m Tired Of Being Fucked I think it was the inflatable rabbit I wanted to get and start figuring out what it would do. I’m not sure. I think I like rabbits because they’re fluffy.