Category: features

by Steve Rockwell

In his June, 2023 Tokyo Metropolitan Museum solo exhibition Eric Sanders tackles themes of time, history, and timelessness by directly referencing photographer Eadweard Muybridge. By 1887 Muybridge had become one of the most influential photographers of his time, driving both artist and scientist to examine the nature of movement more closely. Through his technique of “freezing” human and animal locomotion, photographers might depict movement as a series of still images, and importantly, unleash the potential of motion pictures. Sanders and and his “Star Walkin’ 7” painting neatly covers this historic reference by printing the familiar sprocket holes of a film strip, here depicting images of his wife Anna walking.

Sanders emphasizes “freeze-framing” by combining body movement and liquid immersion. In “Blinding Lights (1)” it’s a yellow splash, the body falling backward, a screen image of the figure uniting with paint into a split second freeze, as if fossilized in amber for eternity. The moment is an example of the heads-or-tails coin of time, with “heads’ it’s now, and “tails” forever – a reminder that a milli-second cannot be severed from countless millennia.

Gerhard Richter’s “Woman Descending the Staircase” is directly referenced by Sanders in his “Nude Descending Staircase,” here the angle of the stairs resembling the railroad track to infinity schematic, sometimes used in illustrating perspective and spatial depth. The hooded, but otherwise nude, figure carries an aura of mystery as she appears in a shroud of mottled yellow and black. It’s impossible to not be reminded of Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” giving the Sanders “Nude” a double, but necessary, historic reference. It’s clear that Sanders wishes to “run the table” of art linkages, since Muybridge was first out of the gate.

“In these paintings I engage with, and work against, the traditional artist/muse relationship,” Sanders states. If I read this correctly, the artist wishes to give Anna, his wife, greater self-assurance and independence of spirit than we might normally ascribe to the muse of art history. The cinematic aspect of this group of works rises to the fore, especially when read as a whole, and Anna is clearly its star.

Sanders having limited this work to monochrome palette and suggestive titles in groups of “freeze” images opens up the possibility for the viewer to ascribe filmic possibilities to the exhibition. “Bulls on Parade,” an acrylic and charcoal on canvas, whether suggestive of protagonist or antagonist symbolically, conveys a full-frontal charge of energy towards the viewer. “Blinding Lights” and “Inverted,” are splash and explosion of yellow and magenta respectively, while “Bad Bitch O’clock” a catastrophe of some sort.

A series of small print-based works drew inspiration from Muybridge again, and might serve as staccato punctuations to any work in the 12” x 16” acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas board series. Each have suggestive titles such as “The Butterfly Effect,” “Way Less Sad,” and “It Ain’t the Same as it Was.” A simple narrative might be: Woman (10 Million Dollar Baby) walks down staircase only to tumble into turbulent water, where she battles an unseen foe. An acrylic and charcoal on canvas titled “Unchained” suggests a rescue with an eventual happy ending through “Electric Love.”

This first international solo exhibition by Eric Sanders is open-ended with a raw edge, capturing something of the background turbulence that culture and society is undergoing at the moment, and should resonate with a viewer from a diversity of points of view.

Eric Sanders Solo Exhibition: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. Opens June 14th, 2023.

by Steve Rockwell

The cluster of Spring 2023 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto (MOCA), might best be viewed as a bouquet of sorts, its vase the Auto Building, a 10-storey architectural industrial heritage building on Sterling Road. Built in 1919 by the Northern Aluminum Company, the building is characterized by its exposed concrete framing and used as an aluminum foundry and manufacturing plant that was operational as recently as 2006. Its adaptive reuse for the creative and digital sector, as well as its museum venue, seems still to be in the process of completion, and the “landmark structure” as a whole might fully be appreciated when its grounds and architectural nesting are complete. 

Exhibitor Susan For Susan, the collaborative design team of brothers John and Kevin Watts, in their Trade Show exhibit, delivers the bridge between the cultural practices of art, architecture, and design. Central to the exhibit is an elaborate gantry – a system for moving heavy loads across warehouse floors. 

Trade Show is essentially one big sculpture broken into separate parts: a concrete table suspended by chains with a set of box pan chairs, an accordion movable metal mirror, a lamp column structure, and a tilting metal bookcase held in place by the out-stretched arms of an aluminum puppet. An ironically creepy component of Trade Show is a lizarov frame holding a handcrafted black rose made of steel. The lizarov method is used in surgery for limb reconstruction and reshaping bones, but its use here inevitably brings to mind the iron maiden, a medieval torture device with spikes that enclose a human being.

Canadian-French artist Kapwani Kiwanga is presented at MOCA with her first major survey exhibition in Canada. Her Remediation exhibit is the product of researches into the tensions between toxicity and regeneration of our environment. She studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University, but her focus had been medical anthropology. In view of the violent convulsions that the earth has undergone over time, Kiwanga has been interested is in how nature and humankind have variously responded to these phenomena. MOCA’s industrial past inspired the artist to produce many new site-specific works such as flooring and window interventions and inflatable vivariums. In natural settings, plant life has found a way to fight back from contaminated environments. On the other hand, Kiwanga has succeeded here in seeding MOCA’s brutalist interior.

Commissioned by MOCA Toronto, Greek/Canadian artist Athena Papadopoulos produced her large-scale sculptural works The New Alphabet in response to the isolation of the past two years of the pandemic. The first of two bodies of work, Bones for Time makes use of hospital and wool blankets that mime the artist’s body shape into letters. With Trees with No Sound, Papadopoulos finds new use for unwanted furniture, clothing and stuffed objects. It seems that almost anything may grace a Papadopolous tableau, from hair dye, lipstick, red wine, bleach, shoe polish, and iodine tincture to nuts and bolts. The artist’s working process is an exultation in the breadth of cultural effuse and its subsequent regurgitation creatively. She has stated that “The works are not meant to be moving upwards towards a point of precision, they are of a world that is downward and sprawling.”

The ground floor of MOCA’s North End Gallery features Turkish conceptual artist Serkan Özkaya‘s installation ni4ni, or as it would be read when sounded out, “An Eye for an Eye.” The artist combines digital technology with a massive, mirrored sphere for a truly immersive experience, a sense of having been shrunk to the size of a blood vessel, an experience not unlike the 1966 sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage. Here it’s a journey toward an all-seeing eye that casts a 360 degree image. The technology has roots that date to 100 A.D., with scientist and astronomer Ptolemy, who had developed an equi-rectangular projection method able to translate a spherical surface onto a plane.

Approaching the MOCA Auto Building from the rear and seeing a billboard for an apparent real estate advertisement seemed peculiar for an art museum, but less so having exited the museum. Crown land is, in fact, a portrait of Philippine-born artist Patrick Cruz at age fifteen, appearing in the sign as a realtor. If the Cruz lightbox signals an implied entanglement of art world with real estate, and there might be some truth to it, in terms of the present cluster of exhibitions, the connective threads between building, museum, installation, and individual artist, coalesce nicely here into a cohesive whole.

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

The Counter/Self, the title of this exhibition, immediately captured my attention. I have always been interested in the hidden characters of people, including myself. We all have many faces and various personalities in addition to the one we consider our true self. It brings to mind Janus with his two faces in mythology and all the people through historical and contemporary times who often changed their personalities. As I have experienced myself, it can happen when we’re under social pressure, relocating, or trying to succeed in a society that has a different culture than the one we’re used to. Every self is performative and we also summon different characters to avoid conflict with others or to please them, as needed. Each of us express or hide our various sides of ourselves. Both social and personal identities are created by inner drives and external expectations that mirror our dreams and fears. There are also the masks we choose to put on intentionally to transfer us into another world or character. So, I thought this exhibition would offer endless possibilities in addressing this complex and exiting theme.

In this exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in its Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Indigenous and diasporic Canadian artists analyze both national and personal identities by creating imaginative alter-egos with challenging narratives.

The first image we encounter is Meryl McMaster’s My Destiny is Entwined With Yours from the series As Immense as the Sky (2019), depicting a woman wearing shaman-like clothes in a grandiose landscape. Coming from a nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and British/Dutch background, ancestral history is very important to McMaster and is the central theme of her photography. Each image is a contemplation on how one’s identity is formed. She traveled across Canada to site specific locations and research in order to re-experience ancestral stories learned from Elders, Knowledge Keepers within her Plains Cree community, family members, and friends. All of the images have a story to them, documenting the artist’s relationship with the natural world and the history written in the landscape. She admires the beauty of the land, listens to its wisdom but also fears for its future. In her explorations of the self, McMaster’s photographs reimagine many of the stories and traces left behind by different cultures.

She often talks about the collapse of time into the present, while we often feel being outside of time when looking at her artwork. Her concept of time comes from two overlapping ideas. One is that time is a linear path that extends from the present in all directions, while the other one is recurrent and cyclical.

In the series As Immerse as the Sky, McMaster focuses on how the experience of time shapes the self’s connection to the immediate world. She creates dream-like images aiming to break down the barriers of time and space, picturing realities of collective history and the present, in new ways. Her image-making procedure starts with assuming a persona with a character and then playing out the story. All images are private performances, the artist’s responses to memory and to emotion. Landscape plays an important role as a dominant element in the composition as well as in creating the mood. The artist believes that the land holds more knowledge and power than we are able to see. Her pieces feel real as well as magical. Otherworldly figures populate the landscapes wearing mysterious sculptural attires. The created image is mythical and mystical at the same time. What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II (2019) is staged in a winter landscape where everything is covered by blindingly white snow, that is heavy, almost like stone. The sky is blue — one of McMasters favorite colors — and beautiful. The artist stands in a meditative pose, wearing a white garment and veils. Over her dress there are numerous red creatures that look like dragonflies and ants. Red is a powerful color and for McMaster it represents her ancestry and her responsibility to pass down the knowledge of the elders to the next generation. From where and how did these creatures get here? What do they represent? Are they bringing life into this frozen world or invading it? Putting it in some kind of danger? There are no answers for these questions from the artist as she seems to play a passive role. It seems like, as she said earlier, we have entered another dimension of time, where any kind of balance is possible.

Like McMaster, Adrian Stimson is also searching for his identity in his work. He is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, Canada, and an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits internationally. His performance art examines identity, pinpointing how a strange mixture of the characteristics of the Indian, the cowboy and the shaman has been created and idealized. Buffalo Boy and The Shaman Exterminator are recurring personas in his mythology. In the Buffalo Boy performances, the artist fashioned his alter-ego Buffalo Boy (a play on the name Buffalo Bill) into someone totally different, in opposition to the colonial image of a ‘real’ Indian with feathers and buckskin, hunting buffaloes with spears. Stimson wants to change this stereotype and reprogram the Indian image. New Born Buffalo Boy (2022) is a product of his reprogramming of the idea of the Indian, making it more open, and more contemporary with homoeroticism depicted with a great sense of humor. Stimson stands in poses of pride, wearing a strange mixture of traditional and modern outfits. In his images his face is painted with black paint around the chin mimicking Indian tattoos, his lips are red and he wears heavy blue make up around his eyes – giving him a woman’s provocative appearance. He wears a braided wig under a cowboy hat, a leather shirt and buffalo hide leg coverings as well as sexy stockings. In Buffalo Boy, Stimson creates a new person with mixed sexuality that contradicts both the traditional Indigenous and the colonial ideals, opening doors to a new reality where he is free to construct his own identity.

Julius Poncelet Manapul also addresses sexual identity issues in his triptych, Whitewashed Bakla in the Presence of the Rice Queen (2017). The artwork, especially the two male figures on the sides, brings to mind Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, with its crowded composition, the use of masks and decorative ornamentation. The male figures’ outfits combine Indigenous Ifugao, Igorot and Ilocano attire designed from paper templates of butterflies, often used in the Philippines. Their faces are half covered by Asian masks. The Rice Queen in the middle reminds me of renaissance portraits of queens as well as sculptures of the Virgin Mary dressed for a religious procession, carried by singing believers. All the figures are paper cut-outs, framed by butterfly motifs combined with skin whitening products and gay porn elements. The references to Spanish culture are strong as the artist comes from a Filipino background, where the Spanish influence and domination is still present. Manapul’s works show the artist’s opposition to colonialism, European hegemony and sexual normativity.

Stacey Tyrell examines power, heritage and racial issues in post-colonial societies and the Caribbean diaspora. Mistress and Slave is a complex composition with personal and historical references. In this provocative image, Tyrell impersonates two historical women, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her second cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, who lived in 18th century England. Dido Belle was a mixed-race daughter of a British aristocrat, Sir John Lindsay, and an enslaved African woman in the West Indies, Maria Belle. Dido Belle grew up with her Murray cousins in England. Sounds like a happy ending. The pictured Lady Elizabeth and Dido Belle tells a somewhat different story, not that nice. The two young women stand side by side without looking at each other. There is no connection between them as they represent two different worlds. Lady Elizabeth is white and her appearance is an accurate depiction of British society norms at that time. She wears an intricate, rice-powdered wig with a boat, pearls and, more importantly, holds the keys of the household, symbolizing her power over everything and everyone in it. In strong contrast Dido Belle is a black person and appears in a simple white dress with a colored turban on her head. She seems more pure and much more natural than Lady Elizabeth. She holds half a papaya in her hands, a reference to her origins, that also reminds us of female genitalia. It is hard to guess her position in the household. Tyrell beautifully addresses racial issues and her dual (Canadian and Caribbean) ancestry in this artwork.

Like in Tyrell’s work, power is a central element in White Liar and the Known Shore: Frobisher and the Queen (2021). This monumental and theatrical composition, is a collaborative artwork created by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Inuk) and Jamie Griffith (Canada, UK), two multidisciplinary artists based in Iqaluit, Nunavut. In an almost unrealistic landscape, depicted in the winter in Nunavut, when the water is frozen and the mountains are covered by snow, two figures appear. Griffith adopts the persona of the English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher. He is the White Liar, wearing the white clothes of the Elizabethan era, holding a gun in his hand to symbolize his power and cruelty. He is standing with his back to us. Williamson Bathory impersonates Queen Elizabeth I with her famous white make-up that also refers to whitened bones, an Inuit symbol for respects to ancestors. Her dress somewhat mimics Elizabeth’s style, especially the collar but the red color could be associated with blood. She holds a red and black flag that originated in the Greenlandic mask dance. She is turned in the opposite direction from Frobisher. Her facial expression shows anger and fear, screaming into the distance. The entire composition gives me an uneasy feeling. The two figures are not related in any way. The color code is also worrisome, with the whiteness of the land and Frobisher’s clothes juxtaposed against the dominant red of the Queen. We can’t see Frobisher’s face as he looks at the empty, rigid land. There is no welcome from the land or the people. It is an isolated place with people who wanted to left alone. What does he want from this land? In reality, what he got was fool’s gold, a useless rock that the British mistook for real. Fortune seeking went wrong here but colonialization remained, causing the Indigenous people suffering in their own land historically and into the present.

The Counter/Self delivers a strong political message through very rich visuals. Communal histories depicted through the artists’ personal experiences create a dialogue about cultural legacies and social expectations, bringing up questions about our national narratives and power structures. The artists’ stories, being tragic or enigmatic — even flamboyant or whimsical — turn our attention to important, harmful and mostly unsolved issues about racism, colonialism and sexual orientation. It is an exhibition you need to visit more than once to fully understand its message.

The Counter/Self: Group Exhibition, curated by Mona Filip, January 11 – March 25, 2023, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto. Museum hours: Tue, Thurs, Fri, Sat 12 – 5 pm, Wed 12 – 8 pm.

by Graciela Cassel

Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale: Cecilia Alemani curated The Milk of Dreams: The connection Between Bodies and Earth

Sonia Boyce: Drenches viewers in a rhapsodic kaleidoscope of voice, color and geometry.

Francis Alÿs: Gigantic screen projections capture children frolicking in public spaces. Snail races and jump rope games unequivocally switch our minds to a pure state in which laughter and time are without limits.

Uffe Isolotto: A Centaurus near death, an unbearable family story.

Simone Leigh: Leigh allures us to Mother Earth.

Jade Fadojutimi: Harmony and conflict in a fantastical landscape.

Barbara Kruger: Sound and images: A real blaze for human kindness.

Nan Goldin: Goldin composed this film with found scenes of exhilaration, sexuality, bliss and ravishment.

Monira Al Qadiri: Spinning jewel cities in a Persian Gulf-landscape, beaming mythical stories.

Outside the Biennale: Anish Kapoor and Anselm Kiefer

Anish Kapoor: A synergy of science, architecture and humanity.

Anselm Kiefer: Daunting memories, Kiefer in dialogue with master painters.