Toronto
Cory Arcangel & Hanne Mugaas at Images | Responsive Space at Lonsdale Gallery | Mariana Vassileva at Olga Korper Gallery | Raffael Iglesias at Peak Gallery
posted by Terence Dick - April 16th, 2009.
I was going to rant about Existentialism and taking responsibility for your actions in relation to Cory Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas’ performance/lecture/thingy Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) at the Images Festival (and co-presented with Pleasure Dome), but then I read some of the blog responses to it (you can start with Andrew J. Patterson’s Images blog here and then head over to Lorna Mills and Sally McKay here) and felt much of what I would have said had been said and any bile I wished to express receded due to my reluctance to participate in a debate about something I had already decided was a waste of my time. That said, it was a waste of time and I would have given one of my high school students a C if he had presented it in class. Arcangel and Mugaas get a D because they should know better, having done this twice before and still not come up with more than a vague thesis statement and a collection of mildly amusing YouTube videos.
Still from a YouTube video of Tiger Woods making art.
As for the online debate about whether Arcangel’s “informality” or “unprofessionalism” was refreshing, I come down on the negatory. His inability to follow an argument through to some sort of conclusion was just intellectual laziness, which was particularly frustrating because the topic could have been illuminating or worthy of debate (the actual topic and not the speaker’s mode of address).
Stanzie Tooth, Floating, 2008, acrylic and oil on canvas
Back on the art gallery circuit, I dropped into the Lonsdale Gallery to see Responsive Space, a group show of young artists concerned with representations of nature. Alex McCleod’s computer generated landscapes present some intriguing images of virtual space but the animated aesthetic is simply too cartoony for a Luddite like me. I like my digital manipulations to be invisible. Laura Paolini and Stacey Sproule contribute a participatory piece each, the first involving a stuffed bunny that I passed on and the second built around the artist or select guests sitting in a quaint sitting room set up under the gallery stairs. Unfortunately, no sitters were around the day I dropped in so I just had to imagine the interaction that would ensue. That left me with Stanzie Tooth’s haunting scenes of forests or gardens, spooky paintings that capture the delirium of light passing through a canopy of leaves. They are both comforting and unsettling.
Mariana Vassileva, Lighthouse, 2008-2009, video
Olga Korper is showing work by Berlin-based artist Mariana Vassileva including a video of a conductor conducting from a rocky outcropping over the sea. Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film is the last word in conductors-in-art, but Vassileva’s attention to her subject’s gestures is evocative. Too bad she hammers the point home with an overbearing soundtrack; methinks it would work better with your ears shut. The rest of the gallery is taken up by figures made of shattered mirror that are then reflected onto the floor or the wall. My gut reaction was not to like such a simple gesture, but I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the storybook-like characters and the ephemeral bodies they were paired with. Call me a softy.
Raffael Iglesias, Event Horizon, 2009, multimedia on panel
Downstairs at Peak Gallery, I went through the opposite reaction. On first glance, I thought I would like Raffael Iglesias bright and noisy paintings, but they didn’t hold up to scrutiny. He’s heading in an interesting direction, mixing styles and materials to create some sort of exultant cacophony, but they never reach escape velocity; the energy that appears from a distance is exhausted at close quarters. Too bad for now, but I’ll keep him on my radar.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog.
Responsive Space continues until April 19.
Mariana Vassileva continues until April 25.
Raffael Iglesias: Some Assembly Required continues until April 25.
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