Art In Newfoundland

Trust: India In Sight

2007-06-18T09:08:00.000-02:30

Having known Ryan Davis and Jason Sellars since they returned from their travels in India (amongst other places) roughly two years ago, I eagerly anticipated the opening of Trust at the old Timemasters location adjacent to the War Memorial in downtown St. John's.

I have noted previously on this blog the ease with which individuals can apply for funding from the NLAC, and have suggested more stringent guidelines (or guidelines of any kind, for that matter) be put in place to limit the number of applicants to those with a demonstrable, long-term commitment to an art practice, or showing in peer-reviewed galleries. I've heard too many stories about first time grant recipients failing to complete their proposed projects, realizing too late that this art thing we're all talking about actually requires a lot of hard work, dedication, intelligence and consideration, and isn't just something you can slap together in a weekend.

As both Davis and Sellars lack formal art training, and have limited exhibition experience, not to mention they're both friends of mine, the June 15th opening for Trust brought a great deal of anxiety for both professional and personal reasons. Happily, my worries were almost completely misplaced.

Davis' colour photographs juxtapose the many ironies of contemporary India: a giant Real Estate billboard proclaiming a new house as the way to impress your future wife dominates the street corner under which dozens of filthy beggars congregate. In another, an old woman huddles beneath the word "TRUST" painted on the wall over her head. A third shows an ice cream man sleeping atop his ice cream cart on a deserted, wind-swept beach.

Davis obviously has those two vital skills necessary to being a good photographer: compositional sense and wonderful timing. The photos wouldn't look out of place in some slick, high-end travel magazine, or on someone's living room wall.

Sellars' suitcase installations are more poetic in their manifestation of the artist's experience of India. Using drawings and text from the actual journals he kept while traveling, in addition to sound recordings of trains, snatched conversations and a multitude of other ambient noises, Sellars presents a kind of mythic journey through a haunting, magical and frightening jungle whose ancient secrets can never be known.

But as I walked around the jam-packed opening (the two collaborators know how to throw a party), I found myself wondering about the people in those photographs, and whose voices I heard on the tape recordings, and couldn't shake thinking about the capital (cultural and otherwise) Davis and Sellars had accumulated as a result of this project. Could it be considered exploitative for two Western artists to use the poverty-stricken masses of India in the creation of a cultural product to be consumed by a mostly white, educated, middle-class audience? I thought of Martha Rosler's Bowery photos.

True, the artists did have a box at the door where you could donate some money for one of the schools where Davis and Sellars taught while overseas, but as I watched the crowds of people heading off to the bars, or to their clean quiet homes after the festivities were drawing to a close, I wondered if the subjects of the show would have considered it enough.

Gordon Laurin at the RCA Gallery

2007-05-12T11:05:00.000-02:30

One of the best things to have ever happened to the St. John's visual art community was having Gordon Laurin get hired as the Director of the Art Gallery at the Rooms back in the day. One of the things that must have made that corporate body nervous was Laurin's open door policy when it came to proposals from the community. I remember there being a real sense of excitement about Laurin's willingness to try anything anywhere in that behemoth of a building, with any little cubbyhole or unused storage space being open to projects from whatever artist, musician, dancer or whatever that had the gumption to pitch something.

As we all know, it didn't last, but ironically, the arts community here in town has almost been better served by Laurin since his abrupt dismissal a couple years ago. Not only in terms of his work with Eastern Edge, RCAV, Neighbourhood Dance Works and a host of other groups, but with his stubborn decision to dedicate himself to his art practice here in the province. A lot of other people would have fled this place as soon as the ax had dropped on them.

Laurin's Recent Work at RCA Gallery is the continuation of the artist's exploration of abstracted landscape through decidedly toxic material components: crushed mica, pigments, and resin (amongst numerous other things) are used in a kind of mad scientist's experiment played out on 1' x 1' panels. That Laurin has removed his own hand and intention from these works is vital to how they operate as explorations of landscape: the remnants of the chemical reaction we see on the picture plane is a metaphor for the chaotic indifference of the universe to humankind's own wishes or desires.

Furthermore, Laurin's openness of approach is reflected in the viewer's relationship with the work, as it's ambiguous what feature of the landscape one is actually viewing. There is a tension between the macro and microscopic that suggests what we are observing could be the blistering aftermath of a supernova, or the tiniest workings of an atom, and everything in between.

That the materials themselves are toxic shouldn't be lost on the viewer, since it suggests a quintessentially Canadian take on how we interact with the natural world. That is (and Margaret Atwood and Northrope Frye would tend to agree), that the landscape, perhaps even the universe, is by its nature seen to be harmful to us, rather than as something to be conquered and defeated a la an American Magisterial Gaze. This idea is further complicated by the fact that when one stands in front of a panel, the viewer's own murky silhouette is reflected back at them in the resin, implicating them in the toxicity and potential destruction being presented in the images themselves.
My only complaint is the presentation of the works, which, in a line around the gallery space, and given their small size, are considerably less dramatic than how they'd look in a grid format, or for that matter, in any kind of larger scale.

Otherwise, the RCAV has chosen to shut its doors for the Hall's much anticipated renovations on something of a high note with this show. Go see it.

Also: Good on the RCAVisual crew for getting their website updated and with images. Nice job.

Portraiture Talk Podcast

2007-04-29T18:04:00.000-02:30

Click on this link to have a listen to Michael Crummey, Mary Pratt, myself and Peter Wilkins talk about portraiture. Shauna McCabe moderates.

http://www.wilkins.ws/panel.html

The EVA Awards deadline for nominations: April 30

2007-04-15T11:52:00.000-02:30

It's that time of year again, kids. Nominate early, nominate often, nominate yourself. Let's help make the EVAs even bigger and better than last year.

Nominations: EVA Awards

Nomination Regulations

Awards

1. The Long Haul Award recognizes a substantial contribution to the visual culture of Newfoundland and Labrador by a senior artist.

Award: $1,000.00

2. The Large Year Award* celebrates a visual artist who has enjoyed an exceptional year with much artistic growth, at least one exhibition and critical recognition.

Award: $1,000.00

3. The Kippy Goins Award -- so named for the small pieces of wood one throws on a fire to "keep it going" -- thanks an individual or organization whose efforts have helped to sustain and build the visual arts sector.

Award: original artwork

Nominating Rules

1. The deadline for nominations is: April30, 2007 at 5 p.m.

Anyone can nominate for any or all of the awards listed.
An individual can only nominate one name per award.
A single nomination is enough for an artist to be considered.
Artists may submit their own names for The Large Year Award*.
All nominations must be accompanied by relevant support materials:

· a 1 page letter stating the reasons for the nomination

· the artist’s CV

· 10-20 images in JPEG format only (no slides or photographs will be accepted), OR 10-20 minutes of video on VHS tape or DVD for video art and real-time art documentation (1 minute of video equals 1 still image/JPEG). Original artwork will not be accepted.

Note: you may choose to include no more than three additional pieces of support material (press clippings, reviews, critical writing, catalogues, etc.).

Winners will be selected by an awards jury comprised of three visual arts professions representing the provincial and the national perspectives. A shortlist of finalists will be announced in advance, and the winners will be announced at an awards gala in May 30, 2007 at The Rooms.

Send nominations to:

EVA Awards

Visual Artists Newfoundland and Labrador (VANL-CARFAC)

Devon House

59 Duckworth Street, 3rd Floor

St. John's, NL, Canada A1C 1E6

Eligibility

Nominations will be open to all permanent residents of Newfoundland and Labrador who have resided in the province for at least 12 months previous. Visual artists must be professionals as defined by the International Association of Art and adopted by the Canadian Artists’ Representation (CARFAC). Note: VANL Board members are not eligible for nominations.

*For The Large Year Award, the jury will be considering a Newfoundland & Labrador artist’s activities for the preceding calendar year, from January 1 to December 31.

Please Join Michael Crummey, Jane Urquhart, Peter Wilkins and myself for a panel discussion at the Rooms.

2007-04-12T19:33:00.000-02:30

Saturday April 21st 2007.

2pm.

The topic: Portraiture.

Admission: FREE, with regular admission ($5) to the Rooms, or VANL membership.

Michelle Stamp's Portraits at RCA

2007-03-16T12:44:00.001-02:30

Newfoundland celebrities are like herpes. Always there. No cure. I’ve always thought the incredible number of them was due to a kind of nationalism that exists here; that we feel the need to produce stars in this province to rival what goes on in Canada and America. Call it a cultural inferiority complex.

Once upon a time, I’d never heard of Joel Hynes. I’d never heard of the Novaks. Who the hell was Ed Kavanaugh? The name Paddy Daly had absolutely no meaning for me. I had a fuzzy recollection of Gerald Squires, who, for some reason, lived in a lighthouse for a while.

Even the CODCO crowd were a dimly lit pantheon who I vaguely remembered my parents finding outrageously entertaining.

Halifax has its own constellation of locals who, for various reasons, garner a kind of celebrity of their own: Joel Plaskett, Buck 65, the Trailer Park Boys, and others. In the six years I spent there in art school and bartending, I cannot think of a single time when any of the numerous local luminaries were featured in any way in a visual art exhibition.

Six years, people.

Six years and not once in all that time did any of the local galleries have a show entitled anything close to Portraits of a Bunch of People I Know Whom You Also Know Because, Hey, They’re Celebs, At Least Around Here, That Is.

But it’s a curious thing that in the last year in St. John’s there have been no fewer than four exhibitions based solely on the allure of the local celebrity. Kent Barrett, Cathia Finkel, Eastern Edge gallery’s Click! fundraiser, and now Michele Stamp’s graphite drawings at the Resource Centre for the Arts gallery.

I sometimes wonder if—like in a conceptual piece—local artists and audiences wouldn’t be better served by simply having celebrities’ names printed out and framed instead of having the artist go through the trouble of composing the image. That way, you could just read Paddy Daly’s name and then picture him with your mind’s eye, hosting his television show or whatever, chatting away in that most charming, downhome, Newfoundland accent of his.

Anyway.

Stamp’s show features 32 portraits of different people, some well-known, others less so. They are all delicately rendered, verging on preciousness sometimes. They are of similar size and all in staid black rectangular frames. The line quality is the type that my drawing instructors would have had serious problems with. That is, they would have had her work on a much larger scale, with charcoal or pen and ink, and ordered her to really attack the page. This generally imbues a given work with a lot more life and vibrancy.

As it is, some of the works feel cramped, others lifeless. You get the impression that Stamp was holding back, or that she was afraid to make a mistake. Dynamic drawings are those that have a full range of tonal values, with areas of intense darkness and light playing off the medium tones to produce an engaging interpretation of how light reflects off a given surface. A lot of this work is too preoccupied with the medium tones for my liking.

That being said, Stamp definitely has a gift for rendering, as the subjects do indeed look like themselves. My favourite was of Glen Tilley, noted CBC Radio producer, who gets more handsome with each passing day and possesses the most charmingly cowboy moustache I’ve ever seen. Meow! You’re a lucky woman, Mrs. Tilley.

This show ranks near the top of exhibitions in the relatively tiny canon of art about Newfoundland celebrities, if you go in for such things. However, when you’re there, you may begin to ask yourself, as I did, why the dominant areas of focus for Newfoundland visual artists tend to be limited to landscape painting and local celebrity portraiture.

As a visiting friend from Winnipeg recently demonstrated with her question, Who the hell are these people?—shows such as these have an extremely limited appeal. You’ve gotta be from here to get it. And considering that the province’s acclaimed writers and theatre artists rarely make their work explicitly about real live local celebrities, you’ve got to wonder what is wrong with visual artists for them to be so caught up with the local celebs they know.

I mean, who cares already?

Lectures at RCAV

2007-02-21T15:22:00.000-03:30

I encourage everyone to get down to the Hall tonight to catch Gerard Curtis, Jennifer Dyer and Bruce Johnson give talks at 7pm.

Kathy Browning and Susan Jamieson at RCA

2007-02-21T14:25:00.000-03:30

I was at the opening of this show back in January and have been conflicted about what, if anything, I should write about the experience since.

I was tempted, and had even decided, that I'd just ignore the whole thing and hope it would go away (which almost worked, as this show comes down on February 25th), but something kept gnawing at me. It was this: if I were willing to just let it go, to ignore the show, how was I, as self-appointed critic and visual arts supporter, any different than the numerous artists in Newfoundland whose perceived slights and grievances cause them to trash-talk one another at the drop of a hat?

So, fuck it, here goes:

The work in Shift is simply not of professional calibre.

Jamieson's paintings are pseudo-Impressionist/pseudo-Expressionist renderings of stormy seas, big waves, and so on, that we've all seen a million times already, with the difference being they aren't very well done. They date from 1979 all the way up to 2007, and there doesn't really appear to be much progression or change in terms of her practice, such as it is. For what it's worth, I liked the oldest one the most of any of them.

Browning, it seems, has taken a crack at the digital image game, presenting a series of photos of icebergs emblazoned with other images of trees, rock faces and other facets of the landscape not usually found on the surface of icebergs. If the best art is read in terms of a poetic fusion of form and content, then this work might be seen as a commentary on how the digital age has resulted in a confusion between what's an iceberg and what's a line of trees. Or something.

The images also don't do well in terms of their size, as they look as though they were printed on a home computer, and don't stray much beyond the 81/2" by 11" paper size.

Anyway, I guess we can always hope that Shift lives up to its name, and marks the beginning of a sea-change in what RCAV has decided to show. Time will tell.

Peter Wilkins at the Rooms

2007-01-22T13:27:00.000-03:30

My introduction to the complex and varied history of portraiture occurred in my first year at NSCAD, when my Marxist art history prof contrasted the neo-Classical portraits of Napoleon by J.L. David to the emerging Impressionism of Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers.

The foundation laid by Courbet's depiction of anonymous labourers, as opposed to an Emperor, later made possible, amongst many other things, Manet's Olympia, and Charles Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life. The above examples are the starting points for my eventual engagement with the work of Peter Wilkins.

For some time I've been struggling with what to say about Wilkins' Kinetic Portraits. When I first heard about the original showing of this work at Eastern Edge in 2004 (before I'd moved back to St. John's), in which Newfoundland celebrities were featured, my gut told me it was perhaps the most cynical art practice I'd ever encountered. There's no better way to garner attention for your work than if you pile a bunch of celebrities into it, I thought. Everyone loves their celebs, and Newfoundlanders have enough home-grown pride to make a Texan blush.

So I disregarded the whole thing as rubbish even without seeing it. I'd seen photos. I'd seen the numerous press write ups. I'd heard what the "concept" was. I didn't care for it. I thought, How much excitement or attention would there be for this work if Wilkins, like Courbet, presented regular people instead of well-known and celebrated personalities?

For those of you who don't know, the kinetic portraits work as follows: Wilkins asks the celebrity questions about pivotal moments in their lives, their hopes, dreams, ideals, fears etcetera. He writes down their answers. Then, with the camera on, he reads the answers back to the interviewee. In theory, the celebrity's reactions to their own words creates a truer or more accurate portrait of who they are.

So I went to the Rooms on Friday, and then again (braving a snow-storm) on Sunday to have a look at the newest incarnation of the work featuring 12 celebrated Canadian writers. Atwood, Anne-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel amongst others.

The installation looks great with the twelve flat-screen monitors on the walls with frames around them to reference painting. The writers all variously look amused, intent on listening, fidgety, or stone-faced. A few of them look like they might be passing gas. Martel's was the most interesting because he chose to be video-taped with his pet parakeet moving around on his shoulders and behind his head, suggesting to me, at least, that he was using the bird as a distraction to the viewer, and was uncomfortable with showing too much of himself. But then, I thought, all of the writers were probably doing the same thing in their own way. Anyone who's seen Survivor knows that the presence of a camera doesn't really capture anything "real" or "true" but, in fact, reveals only a person's willingness to perform in front of it.

What emerged for me after this initial revelation was that the sub-text had quickly become the text, as it were. The work isn't actually about knowing these people in a way more profound than watching a television interview, or for that matter, reading their books. It is about the process Wilkins had to go through to meet and interview each of the writers. It is work about the invisible strata of agents, personal assistants, schmoozing, and penetrating the world of Canada's cultural elite. It is work that makes you think: Man, I wish I got to hang out with Margaret Atwood.

So, in this way, due to who's interviewed, the Kinetic Portraits operate as a kind of critique of the art-world and the culture industry. The idea that one's finished product could only ever be secondary to whom one knows is expressed with an irony and eloquence lacking in much contemporary work which claims to critique celebrity culture and the moral bankruptcy of the art-world. I found myself lamenting the naive notion that art could really change the world, that art was anything more than an industry with products and personalities only slightly less disposable than in other industries. I thought about the foolishness of Manet and Baudelaire with their calls for "Modern Heroism", and the irony of their eventual acceptance by the Academy.

As I trudged home in the snow-storm on Sunday after seeing the show, I can safely say that my heart was broken.

The show is up until April 29th.

Les Newman's Death Of The Party/ Immony Men & Mira Lyn Lu's Taking Care Of Business

2007-01-19T12:22:00.000-03:30

Eastern Edge gallery has kicked off 2007 on something of a high note with its first show of the new year featuring Winnipeg's perennial trouble-maker Les Newman and Concordia undergrad students Immony Men and Mira Lyn Lu.

Newman presents four 2D wall works from his series, The Death Of The Party, a collection of text snippets from a plethora of sources set against intense fields of various colour and shape.

Newman's influences run from the Cult of Bacchus with its orgies, drunken frenzies, and obliteration of the senses to the life and writing of Charles Bukowski, a degenerate drunk and problem gambler, whose wry, ironic humour is evidenced in Newman's one-liners. "Irony" as it has been used in the contemporary art-world is nothing more than a code word for being a smart ass, in that artists are generally saying the opposite of what they really mean. The text in Newman's work, however, is truly ironic in that the statements he employs give expression to contradictory emotions that are both felt sincerely.

It's black humour, and in Newman's work, there seems to be a suspicion that life is a meaningless and futile struggle. That we're all fucked, basically, and that one of the meager pleasures of being alive is finding humour and rage in the bowels of our own helplessness and alienation and disillusionment with the (art) world. It also helps to get fucked up. Or once did, anyway. Which, in a way, is the sad part about The Death Of The Party: the realization that, at best, a strategy for dealing with the meaningless of our existence can only be a short term fix. The hangover, and the too bright reality of the day, are always just around the corner.

Men and Lu's installation, Taking Care Of Business, provides an interesting counter-point to Newman's work. A to-scale reproduction of an anonymous office space is printed, post-it note by tiny post-it note on your run-of-the-mill computer printer, and stuck to the gallery wall in a grid format.

The process takes several days to complete, with the artists putting in the regular 9-5 day of an ordinary office employee. The piece puts Men and Yu into the roles of unskilled manual laborers, completing the same small, repetitive, mind-numbingly boring task in a project that once the show ends, will not exist outside of documentation. Equating artistic labour with the mundane paper work of a day job undermines the artist's position as genius or cultural visionary, and emphasizes the notion of artist as worker, subject to the same alienation and exploitation as anyone else who struggles to pay the bills.

As of this writing, the project is still ongoing, and anyone reading this is encouraged to go down to Eastern Edge to check on the progress.

The show runs until February 24th.

One Year

2006-12-11T19:30:00.000-03:30

Thanks to everyone who's stayed interested and kept reading and commenting in the first year of Art In Newfoundland's existence. Here's hoping you (and I) stick around.

Thanks.

City of St. John's Art Procurement

2006-12-11T18:56:00.000-03:30

Last Thursday I went to City Hall to check out which artists our city had decided to support. I had heard there was also going to be free food AND booze, so there was no way I could possibly miss it.

I've mentioned on this blog before how beautiful the galleries at our Provincial Gallery are, and how, should there ever be a show which included a lump of dog shit on its spectacular floors, the tird would still manage to inspire a great deal of awe. Such, unfortunately, is not the case at City Hall. A hulking, cold, grey, concrete bunker, I wonder if anything within its walls (including his Worship) could ever possibly approach anything resembling attractiveness.

That's not to say, of course, that the works presented were sub par (a handful of them were not), but that the paintings and prints on display didn't much benefit from the atmosphere.

I'd give the finger foods a B-, and the beer an A.

What really struck me about the event, which blissfully didn't drag on for too long, was Councilor Shannie Duff's mention of this year's jury for the art procurement.

Get this: they were, in descending order of artistic knowledge: Grant Boland (artist), Shannie Duff (city councilor), and Shawn(?) Skinner (provincial stooge).

I suppose it could be argued that since the art work would be hanging in the chambers of City Hall, a jury comprised mostly of bureaucrats should be able to pick what works they liked. This argument of course would be bullshit, given that the City's art procurement program is supposed to be in service and support of local artists, and not simply to make more pleasant the decidedly unpleasant setting where our city officials work. But then I suppose I should just shut up and be happy that the city buys any art at all, especially given Ron Ellsworth's recent suggestion that we should just do away with the city's art procurement altogether.

Yep, that's some Cultural Capital we live in.

Brian O'Dea and private donations to artists

2006-11-24T12:53:00.000-03:30

I was lucky enough last month to attend the Fresh Fish Award ceremony as part of WANL's annual AGM. It was great fun with numerous workshops over the weekend, a nice supper, and drinks.

Something Brian O'Dea, the Fresh Fish benefactor said before giving out the award has been sticking in my craw ever since. He mentioned how the award is the biggest of its kind in Canada, and given that he "doesn't have any dough" (a matter for some debate), how was it conceivable that he was the one putting up the money for this sort of thing?

Given how the public is constantly bombarded by how proud we should all feel for Newfoundland and Labradorian culture, how can it be that the wealthy members of our community are dropping the ball? I know, I know: the wealthy patrons are out there buying art, making donations to cultural orginazations (Saint Rick Mercer's $10000 donation to the Hall springs to mind), but given the comparably pitiful amount the NLAC has to dole out each year, where is the splashy, headline grabbing generosity for which Newfoundlanders are so renowned?

Paul Bowdring, NLAC, and Arms Length Funding

2006-11-22T12:38:00.000-03:30

Paul Bowdring

Now that the grants have come out (or not, as the case may be), I thought it may be timely to bring up several things that have been bothering me about the functioning of our dear provincial funding body.

For those of you who don't know, Bowdring, poet, novelist, editor and teacher, stepped down in disgust from NLAC, citing "government interference" as the chief cause of his resignation. Why this event hasn't caused a shit-storm of controversy amongst the local community is beyond me, illuminating perhaps artists' ignorance to the growing political machinations behind the Department of TOURISM.

It also illuminates the need for serious action to be taken by VANL (and the various other artist representatives in this province) for Arms Length Funding for the arts. What this means, of course, is that government bureaucrats will have no say on which projects get funded and which do not. As it stands, a representative from the department oversees which projects have been selected for funding, and essentially has veto power over projects he or she believes isn't in the best interest of the government. Many artists I've talked to don't even know what Arms-Length Funding is, leading me to believe that VANL has failed to educate artists about the issues they face in regards to their livelihood.

As for Mr. Bowdring, he deserves credit for being a stand-up guy. Thanks.

NLAC

Recent talks with associates of mine who didn't receive funding for their project grants has confirmed a suspicion I've been carrying for a long time. Appointment to the granting committee at the Arts Council doesn't necessarily indicate an understanding of what visual art actually is. You may have been a hobbyist photographer for the last thirty years, but that doesn't mean shit if you know nothing about art history and contemporary art practice. Contemporary art is not simply defined as art being made today, but rather questions (conceptually, formally, etcetera) the assumptions and conventions under which art production has operated for the last 3000 or so years. That members of a jury in Newfoundland and Labrador have the arrogance to reject projects because they "couldn't decide if the proposed project was art or not", or because they thought the project was flawed "ethically", would be laughable if it weren't so fucking depressing.

What needs to happen in the selection of jury members for NLAC is a bias toward adjudicators who stress fairness and open-mindedness when considering proposals, and not those who adhere to an extremely narrow view of art making that excludes all other modes of expression aside from their own.

And also, I didn't apply for a visual art grant this time around, so it isn't just sour grapes on my part.

Off Hiatus

2006-10-16T15:37:00.000-02:30

Hi. I'm back. I hope there's at least some of you still reading. If so, check out the brief review of Greg Bennett's show below.

Oh. And for more stuff I've written about what's happening in St. John's, check out akimbo.biz

Greg Bennett at the Leyton Gallery

2006-10-16T14:55:00.000-02:30

What does Ferris Ball Blues: A Secular Idol Runs Amok, mean?

I went to see Greg Bennett's latest offering recently at the Leyton Gallery, and while I for the most part enjoyed many of the paintings in the show, I found myself wondering how in the world the above title related to the canvases I saw. Colour me baffled.

Bennett, who recently returned to St. John's after a two year stint in Toronto, is well known for his luscious and labourious oil paintings, one of which, presented in this show, that he's worked on for several years.

What struck me most about these works was Bennett's pre-occupation with double images, mirror effects and numerous, fragmented planes within each canvas. The dual skeletons of Davy Jones' Locker leer at each other from opposite sides of one canvas, while two identical Paliminos stare out at the viewer from another painting. In one image, set in some urban art supply store, the scene is split into many confusing planes that compete for the viewer's attention, recalling, for me, at least, some of Manet's early paintings set in the the decidedly moderne bustle of 19th Century Paris. But it is less the alienation or obliteration of the self by the cityscape that these paintings address, and more an exploration of the shcism between the exterior and interior worlds that Bennett seems concerned with here. Much of the imagery for this work came from Bennett's travels, and I kept wondering if these paintings, as documents of an actual, external journey, mirrored an internal journey Bennet had undertaken while away from Newfoundland.

Either way, the show is worth checking out for the several well crafted paintings being shown, even if the title of the exhibition still throws you for a loop.

Craig Francis Power's Salty Dog at the Rogue Gallery, Eastern Edge

2006-08-07T13:23:00.000-02:30

Please go see my piece, Salty Dog, at Eastern Edge. It's up until August 12th.

100 Paper Moths by Kym Greeley

2006-08-07T12:44:00.000-02:30

Many residents of downtown St. John's may have been unaware of a beautiful installation right under their noses last week amongst the trees of the grounds of the Anglican Cathedral right across from the Casbah restaurant. I found my way there after receiving an invite from the artist herself, and after hearing a very brief interview on CBC radio about the work.

A heavy rain from the night before had me worried about whether the installation had survived, and for about ten minutes I wandered around the grounds outside the Anglican Catherdral looking for the elusive paper moths I'd heard so much about. The real moths were there in strong supply, of course, and many times I'd come up to a tree whereupon a moth was pitching and have it unexpectedly fly away.

I eventually found the paper moths on the trunks of the trees that line the fence overlooking Duckworth Street, and noticed that many of them were also strewn in the tall grass near the ground. They are very simply and elegantly constructed, consisting of the paper cut-out shape, a dab of glue, and a straight pin through the centre of the cut-out for affixing to the trees and grass.

Maybe it's just me (I've been a little fixated on moths lately as well), but I found myself wondering what Greeley was getting at with this piece. I like the idea of art hiding in plain sight: from a distance the paper moths can pretty easily be mistaken for real ones, and you would have had to hear the radio interview or spoken with the artist to know about the work in the first place. But what I kept coming back to was the idea of the moth as a symbol for transformation. Maybe it's trite, but I kept wondering if Greeley was perhaps suggesting there is some larger change coming to the way art is seen and made in our fair city. Time will tell.

There may still be time to see this work if the wind and rain hasn't yet stripped the trees.

Janet Cardiff at the Rooms

2006-07-07T22:06:00.000-02:30

My friend (and sometime enemy), the video artist Emily Vey Duke, once asked me to describe my experience of beauty.

After some thought, I told her that no matter what it was, an art piece, a lilac tree, a sunset, a person, kittens, whatever, that my initial response to the beautiful was a kind of mixture of sadness and happiness, at once.

You mean tenderness, she said.

Yes, I said.

The first time I experienced Janet Cardiff’s Forty Piece Motet was the day after my girlfriend had left me. The last word she had ever spoken to me was loser. This was in Halifax years ago and Cardiff’s piece had just hit the big time, as it were, it seemed like everyone everywhere was really going ape-shit for it. I sat in Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and bawled like a fucking baby, complete strangers standing around trying not to look at me, the voices from Cardiff’s speakers raised in worship.

So when I went back to Cardiff’s piece this time around, at the Rooms just a little while ago, I was curious as to what effect the piece would have on me.

It has become very un-hip to talk about the beautiful in the art world these days, but there is simply no other way to describe Cardiff’s stunning sound installation. The piece, for those not familiar, is a recording of Thomas Tallis' polyphonic choral work from 1575, Spem in alium. Tallis' Latin text translates this way:

I have never put my hope in any other but in you God of Israel who will be angry and yet become again gracious and who forgives all the sins of suffering man. Lord God Creator of Heaven and Earth look upon our lowliness.

The work consists of forty speakers on stands at about six feet from the floor, arranged in a semi-circle in the gallery with metre upon metre of fine copper audio wire connecting them. There’s one speaker for each singer, each voice mastered individually so that you can stroll along hearing each member of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir or sit in the middle of the semi-circular arrangement to get the full effect. It’s an extremely elegant installation, and as I’ve said several times, you could put a lump of dogshit in the Rooms art galleries and it would still look spectacular.

And what happened, you ask? Why, I felt all the old feelings begin to stir again. I thought I could recall every detail of my ex-girlfriend’s face as she left the apartment for the last time so long ago. I felt less alone in the world, and yet, at the same time, the feeling of loneliness I suppose we all carry around with us every day was made greater and more poignant by the beautiful voices coming out of the speakers that surrounded me. I thought about how wonderful it would be if there really was a God of Israel who forgave everything, and about how beautiful it would be if there really was a love that went on and on, forever and ever, amen.

The only question that remains about this work, as it does with all good pieces of art, is whether repeated visits to the gallery will produce the same feelings of tenderness and awe that my initial visits provoked. Or whether, tragically, and against one’s best efforts, those feelings begin to fade.

Janet Cardiff’s Forty Piece Motet is a heartbreakingly beautiful marriage of cutting-edge technology and classical hymn. It’s at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery until September 17^th 2006. Don’t miss it.

My Piece About Cyril Butler, from Current

2006-06-13T17:18:00.000-02:30

No one has ever come on my face.

From what I’ve heard, once the sperm gets in your eyes, those little guys just swim their hearts out. It hurts.

Nor have I ever appeared in public with a giant vibrating dildo up my ass. Not that I recall anyway.

I’m always willing to take an artist much more seriously if they’re willing to put themselves at risk. What sucks worst about bad art is when you get the feeling the artist’s heart is so removed from their work that it’s just a kind of mindless exercise for them. Like filling out a form. That’s why Jerry Bruckheimer (BAD ARTIST) will never be confused with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (GOOD ARTIST).

In Newfoundland (and Labrador), there seem to be two very separate and decidedly unequal camps of artists. Those of the Jerry Bruckheimer variety: you know, the ones whose work will always have some reference to cod, or icebergs, or mummurs, or the innate friendliness and goodness of Newfoundlanders or blah blah blah (insert your own cliché here). There are then the Fassbinders: the ones who consistently challenge themselves and their audience through the form, content, conceptualization or whatever of the work. These latter artists, unfortunately, are in the vast minority.

Which brings me to performance artist Cyril Butler (GOOD ARTIST). Concerned primarily with representations of sex and sexuality in the mainstream media, Butler is perhaps best known for his performance at Eastern Edge Gallery’s Art Marathon last year. If It Fits consisted of Butler on stage in a pair of bright pink underwear with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the rear. He proceeded to lube up and insert a vibrating dildo up his ass while the crowd looked on. With both his mouth and the vibrator heard via separate microphones, Butler began reciting clichéd lines he’d memorized from the very dregs of so-called “queer” mainstream culture: Will & Grace, Queer As Folk, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and so on, while the volume on the buzzing dildo slowly increased. What you eventually heard was only the drone of the dildo, as Butler’s voice was slowly drowned out.

Also causing a stir was Butler’s Free Money Shots at the Ship Inn, wherein the artist was splattered with fake semen by a friend while a third snapped photos. Audience members were encouraged to leave their e-mail addresses to receive the digital photos of Butler free of charge, and some even asked to have their own “money shot” taken on stage. Here Butler was interested in dissecting porn iconography and creating a dialogue about the reality or lack thereof in these shots, the literal climax of just about every porn scene ever recorded since, like, 1990.

But possibly most important to Butler as a performance artist in St. John’s is the fostering of a performance art scene in the city, something that’s been noticeably absent from the capital’s vibrant community of artists with very few exceptions. This summer, Butler is planning a performance series through Eastern Edge to take place in various locations around St. John’s and is requesting input and assistance from other artists and anyone else interested in performance art that challenges the conventions and norms of the art-world, and in creating a space of vulnerability and communication in non-traditional art venues. It’s a good step in the right direction in the struggle to make people understand that there’s more to Newfoundland culture than Screech, hard-drinkin’, rubber boots, dories, and the innumerable other sickening clichés currently plaguing the populace.

Douglas Coupland at the Rooms (Again)

2006-06-06T13:43:00.000-02:30

There seems to have been much more written about Douglas Coupland, mainlander superstar, than about his actual exhibit at the Rooms, and so I'll briefly address his installation, the likes of which probably hasn't been seen too much around these parts in quite some time.

As an artist whose main influences come from Baudelaire and Manet, Pop, conceptual art practice, and performance, I tend to enter into a relationship with art based more upon its political under-pinnings or social critique than upon the purely aesthetic. (That's not to say that I don't like beauty, however).

Coupland's installation, consisting almost entirely of wall text, draws aesthetically from a conceptual and minimalist history, but seems to concern itself more with the tension between text as communicative tool, and text as image, rather than the breakdown of the art market through a de-materialized art object.

The solid block of text upon the opposite wall as you enter the gallery dominates your experience of the show. It's almost like a monolith. It's formal simplicity suggesting complexity. I found that I went back and forth between just seeing this giant square of text, and actually reading what was written: a kind of stream-of-consciousness mish-mash of confession, gossip, keen observation, business slogans and advertising jargon that had the effect of creating a kind of irritating (and yet somehow pleasureable) buzz in my head, like when the radio is tuned to two stations at once.

The opposite wall pieces, consisting of Cheetos ingredients and Chinese lettering for pornography, amongst other things, couldn't draw me away from the main text piece. Even the paper sculpture "wedges" seemed secondary, as did the adjacent room filled floor to ceiling with tiny numbers on black Mac Tac, which felt like something lifted from The Matrix. The entire show felt like it could have been just the main wall piece, and that the other elements were added on and un-neccasary.

It's obvious to me that Coupland has more than a passing interest in the tension between low and high culture, and of technology's rapidly escalating effect on our psyche, but it almost feels as though he's trying to be Canada's answer to William Gibson. By which I mean, a kind of pseudo-intellectual pop-cultural guru trying to sort out where this techonological revolution is leading, and what long term effects life as a video game is having on us. I say: Fair enough. Give'r. And I haven't read the book (which may well cause me to re-visit this work once I have (and I must note: I'm very interested in the crossover between a work of written fiction and it's visual art counterpart, it's a great idea)), but I found the installation interesting, but not something that neccasarily wrenched my heart.

Serious props should go out to Shauna McCabe, who, judging from this, will continue to curate prominent, challenging artists from across Canada and internationally. Thanks.

Who Puts An Art School In Corner Brook?

2006-06-06T12:49:00.000-02:30

Can someone please explain how this came about? I guess it was before my time or whatever, but I've always wondered how the idea of having Memorial's art school in Corner Brook was taken seriously in the first place, and how, in the name of all that's holy, it actually happened.

At the EVA Awards, it was mentioned that Mary Pratt had a hand in the school being there, but who else is to blame? Surely it wasn't just her.

I just can't imagine, say, Garry Neil Kennedy taking over NSCAD in 1969 and moving the school to, like, Pictou, a small town in rural Nova Scotia. It's baffling.

In my experience, very few graduates from SWGC have a grasp of contemporary work, art history, or theory of any kind. It's like they've been told that none of that is very important, and upon graduating carry around a resentment of challenging contemporary work... as if it's all bullshit or something.

I just don't get it.

I mean, I think part of the problem for visual artists in this province is how divided we are. In St. John's, there's the Rooms, two Artist Run Centres, numerous commerical galleries, film and video production houses and a shit-load of other cultural instituions that are constantly producing work. And the art school, the place where our younger artists are being trained, where there's (theoretically) a well-spring of energy and excitement , is clear on the other side of the island. How does this make sense?

Please discuss.

The EVA Awards Ceremony

2006-06-06T12:11:00.000-02:30

The EVA Awards Ceremony happened last Thursday and it was a really swell event at the Rooms. Will Gill won for the Large Year Award, Bonnie Leyton for the Kippy Goins, and Mary Pratt for the Long Haul.

The saucy and be-skirted Angela Antle was the host, and it ran pretty smoothly, aside from the odd technological glitch. It was lovely to see such a diverse group of artists together in one room, from all parts of the province, and from all stages of development. I felt more part of a community as an artist in Newfoundland than at any other time I've been here. So thanks to VANL, at the very least, for that.

What was refreshing for me was the sincerity from each of the winners. It was all very sweet, and also was in such stark contrast to the NLAC Awards, wherein (as just one example of the difference) Paul Pope's self-congratulatory twenty minute acceptance speech for his Lifetime Award or whatever it was he won had me in fits of boredom and resentment. There was none of that shit here, thank God. And while I'm all for more publicity and attention for visual artists in this province, and am somewhat skeptical about this supposed inherent shyness visual artists have, we should draw the line at becoming the self obsessed, obnoxious, ego-maniacs that dominate other fields of artistic expression around here.

I was also quite shocked to learn that there are far more people reading this blog than I thought. I mean, there's a Site Meter I have that tells me how many hits the site gets or whatever, but this was ridiculous. There were people I'd never met there who knew who I was and who liked or dis-liked me accordingly.

To everyone reading this, please comment on the various things I've written. The entire point of this is to foster dialogue. Thanks.

Douglas Coupland at the Rooms

2006-05-23T11:33:00.000-02:30

I wasn't there, and I've yet to see the show myself, but already I've heard wildly varying opinions. Please leave comments about the show, and once I see it, I'll join in.

Have at it.

The Festering, ReAnimated Corpse of Official Newfoundland Culture

2006-05-13T14:18:00.000-02:30

I recently went to see High Steel at the Hall. Given that I know almost nothing about theatre, I just have one question to ask: Is there anyone else out there sick to death of being told how proud we should all feel for being Newfoundlanders? I know I am.

Mike Hansen at James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove

2006-05-11T16:44:00.000-02:30

If I had to choose just one word to describe Mike Hanson’s early works on paper currently on display at James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove, it would be this: Puke-y.

Maybe it was that I was incredibly hung-over from the night before (poker, Scotch) and that that very morning had vomited an evil-looking, purple, viscous liquid into my toilet just before the long drive to the Pouch Cove gallery. Maybe it was the fact that when Angela, Jim Baird’s partner and hostess of the opening offered me a glass of red wine upon my arrival, my stomach, the source of many a mysterious sound and much pain that day, threatened to propel it’s meagre contents onto the gallery floor. Maybe it was that one of Hansen’s pieces has the word BARF stencilled across it. Whatever it was, upon seeing Hanson’s early work, the colours and composition did nothing but remind me of regurgitated food.

This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hansen’s earlier encaustic works on paper (circa 1997-98) entitled the It’s Your Call Series are very weak when compared to the newer mixed media works on display. They look muddled and static and have none of the luminosity encaustic work has in the hands of a more skilled artist. There is a tepid attempt at criticism of post-modern art in Hansen’s collaged in photos of Jeff Koons’ Puppy and a Basquiat painting (stencilled with the words DUH, and EGAD respectively) which do nothing for me aside from reveal Hansen as something of a dimwit when it comes to skewering art he doesn’t like. The inclusion of Chinese Hell Bank Notes (traditionally burned to lessen the time an ancestor’s soul must spend in the Underworld) likewise left me cold as they only seemed to make the composition even less dynamic, more cramped and added nothing interesting conceptually.

Did you ever notice how when after you puke it’s like the hang-over just recedes and you can begin to concentrate on getting better without all that poison in your guts? It seems like that’s what happened to Hansen. Bigger, crisper, cleaner and immeasurably less puke-y, the newer works blow Hansen’s older stuff right off the gallery wall. It’s like he had to purge all the bad stuff from his system. From 2002-03, Vivasection and Storm show a confidence in gesture and handling of materials lacking in the It’s Your Call Series. I kept coming back to one piece, Gideon’s Holy Bibles (2003), a simple drawing of a precariously stacked column of red bibles looking as though they might fall right off the page onto the floor.

It’s interesting to note that Hansen’s recent move to Toronto from Newfoundland has brought out themes in his work related to the traditional iconography of visual art in this province. Fish, landscape and religion are a recurring preoccupation in the new stuff.

It’s also interesting to see an exhibit in which a sampling of an artist’s development over a five-year period is shown in the same space. It makes the earlier, puke-y works more understandable and necessary as growing pains in Hansen’s continued progress as an artist, though they sure didn’t help the health of my intestines the first time I saw them and they make the show as a whole feel more than a little uneven.

The Arts Awards Gala and SchmoozeFest

2006-05-07T12:37:00.000-02:30

Last night was the first of these I was able to attend and the one piece of advice I received over and over about the event was to dress lightly, it gets pretty fucking hot in the Reid Theatre. This turned out to be true, but from what I heard it wasn't nearly as bad as previous years.

If memory serves, the winners were: Emerging Artist: Duane Andrews ( he beat out Ali Pick and Tina Holter (who?)), Patron of the Arts: Dave Hopley of Living Planet. Art Educator: Benni Malone and Artist of the Year: Lisa Moore. It was hosted by Ruth Lawrence and Sherry White and Kelley Russell with Sean Panting and Anita Best (amongst others) providing the music. It was a pretty good event, especially with the opportunity to laugh at/with the step dancers from time to time, who despite screwing up occasionally, were really fun to watch.

The after party was absolutely jam packed with people and food and free drinks and there was this sort of glazed tension hanging in the air that's a mixture of nervousness and shyness and small talk and boredom and shmoozing. We didn't stay long for that.

Nicolas Fleming and Stephen Fisher at Eastern Edge

2006-05-07T12:07:00.000-02:30

I had been looking forward to this show for quite some time, not only due to my interest in landscape in visual art, but also because of the project Nicolas Fleming has planned for when he visits sometime later in May.

Fleming, from Montreal, is put into a canvas bag, while wearing a canvas suit with no eye-holes, and brought into a non-urban enviroment. By which I mean a park, the woods, whatever. Fleming crawls around on the ground, attempting to get a feel for the landscape only through what he can touch and hear and smell. As you can imagine, the video documentation of this performance is hilarious, as we watch Fleming (who just looks like a canvas coloured blob on screen) sort of roll around on the grass while people look on. Fleming then takes what information he has gathered through this performance and attempts to make an accurate depiction of the landscape in a painting.

On display right now at Eastern Edge is the documentation and paintings from two previous performances Fleming did as a sort of teaser for when he actually arrives in St. John's.

Paired with Fleming is Stephen Fisher from Halifax, whose bright dynamic abstract paintings are just wonderful to look at and are just as interesting conceptually. What Fisher has done is to take data related to a particular location: weather patterns, animal migration routes, geological events etcetera and translates this data into visual elements.

When I see work that deals with landscape in this way it makes all of the traditional stuff that dominates Newfoundland art production seem that much more tedious. It runs until June 17th.

Art In Newfoundland partners with Current Magazine

2006-05-07T11:56:00.000-02:30

Hi all. Sorry for my prolonged abscense. (Once again).

This week marks the beginning of an exciting partnership for me and Current Magazine in St. John's. I'll be writing art reviews for them and will be plugging this blog in the by-line of each article so that readers will be directed here to comment and so on. This issue's review is of Mike Hansen out at James Baird's space in Pouch Cove and I'll be posting it on Thursday, when the new issue of the magazine comes out.

The Sad State of Art Writing in St. John's

2006-04-15T11:39:00.000-02:30

I apologise for how St. John's-centric this is, but I just have to address Steve Bartlett's recent piece about Cathia Finkle's MEN at RCA Visual in the April 5th-11th edition of the Express.

Yikes. What a mangle job. If this is the kind of visual art writing that exists in St. John's then no wonder the public is so apathetic. If you haven't read it, consider yourself lucky. If you have read it then you know what I'm talking about.

Bring back Arts Atlantic. Please!

The Strange Case of Mathieu Beausejour

2006-04-15T10:50:00.000-02:30

Beausejour arrived in St. John's the night of a giant snow storm. We had arranged for him to be picked up at the airport but decided that there was no way any flight would be landing in the middle of a blizzard, so the person appointed to pick him up (after some discussion) elected not to go.

As it turned out, of course, Beausejour did indeed arrive in Newfoundland that night and had to take a taxi into downtown St. John's, much to the surprise of everyone involved in his welcoming committee.

A Montreal artist, Beausejour has made his name from engaging with political and artistic history from a decidedly anarchist viewpoint. That is to say, he likes to fuck shit up. His art practice generally consists of traveling to a destination, doing research about the given area, and making an installation or performance specific to that particular place in a gallery or in public space. He is also well known for his installation and performance work involving the destruction of money.

In any event, the morning after he arrived, I found myself in his company, putting up posters for a talk he was giving that night at Eastern Edge with LETS Barter Network spokesperson Lori Heath. He was somewhat surprised to learn of the burgeoning NL nationalism plaguing the province, a symptom of a larger inferiority complex that Beausejour, born and raised in Quebec, could totally relate to. He told me that he had recently been taken to task in Quebec for too often titling his work in English. He said that there was this perception of him amongst the younger generation in Quebec as an artist who had turned his back on his own culture, despite the fact that he has never hidden his desire to destroy the state, let alone support nationalist propaganda bullshit.

He said that for his project in St. John's he was interested in stories about some of the prominent statues and/or memorials in the city. He was interested in learning what was going on behind the scenes while a statue of say, John Cabot was being made. It seemed along the lines of his previous work: an engagement with the un-official culture and history of a place or a thing as opposed to the state defined story. It sounded great. I was pretty excited about the whole thing since I have a similar pre-occupation in my own work. I was looking forward to seeing what came out of his few days here.

Guess what? He didn't get anywhere. The few contacts he had here dried up mysteriously. Anyone who had the sort of information he was interested in were suddenly turned off by him, even though he had made contact with these people about the project months before and they had encouraged him to come to St. John's. He went back to Montreal completely empty-handed except perhaps for the knowledge that Newfoundlanders' openness and generosity to strangers is a shade over-stated.

Sorry Mathieu.

Please Don't Nominate Anyone For The EVAs, Thanks.

2006-03-31T17:54:00.000-03:30

I'd just like to thank everyone for not nominating themselves or someone they know for an EVA. I've heard that there have been so few nominations that my chances of winning some easy cash (and getting to maybe hang out with bigshot Robert Enright), are phenomenal. So thanks everybody for helping my career along, and thanks in advance for continuing to not nominate anybody for the Monday deadline. Cheers.

Four Points of View at the Leyton Gallery

2006-03-25T10:30:00.000-03:30

I always have a hard time reviewing shows at commercial galleries. Or even thinking about shows at commercial galleries. The expectation is that while I might see some pretty paintings or a few nice sculptures, chances are I'm not going to find a work that profoundly changes the way I view the world or art. The primary focus, of course, in opposition to work you might see in an Artist Run Centre or other public gallery, is for the work to sell.

Four Points of View at the Leyton Gallery in St. John's features four "new and much celebrated" painters, two from NL and two from the mainland of Canada.

Taryn Sheppard's landscape paintings of the hills, cliffs, roads and shorelines of Outer Cove and surrounding area are absolutely stunning. Compositionally very strong, there is a confidence and delicacy in the application of paint that far out-strips that of the other artists in the show, whose work can sometimes look a little clumsy in comparison. Her palette is fresh, crisp, and bright. You can almost feel and smell the wind coming in off the ocean in her paintings. It was a wise move on behalf of the staff to give Sheppard the majority of space in the front room of the gallery as her paintings are a great hook to get people inside off the street.

I've heard that Sheppard has been accepted into a Master's program for September and won't be making art as much as she'd like, which is certainly a loss for lovers of painting in this province (and perhaps causes a sigh of relief to ripple through the ranks of the younger painters in Newfoundland who've had their run of the market since leaving Grenfell).

At the bottom of the show is Denis Chiasson, whose derivative Cubist manglings just don't work for me. I mean, I love Picasso and Braque and Matisse, but do we still need somebody out there making their way toward Cubism in the cafes and bars when some of the greatest minds of the last century already cleared that path for us? When I see work like this in galleries I know there's been some very cynical calculation put into the painting based on what the artist thinks might sell. Not my cup of tea at all.

The other two artists, Michael Pittman and MJ Steenberg, are in the middle. The work by Steenberg, in particular: murky, static and heavy feeling, gets bullied off the wall by Sheppard's painting, which, again, is some of the finest painting I've seen in St. John's for ages. And that includes the beloved Grant Boland.

Thanks to Bonnie Leyton for being such a hard core supporter of visual art in Newfoundland. Though we've never met, I just think she rocks.

Gutless Conservative Visits Art In NL

2006-03-20T10:29:00.000-03:30

In the blog business, we refer to this sort of thing as a "drive-by": Comments that add nothing to the conversation and are just bullshit name calling. For whatever reason, this person posted this comment under my review of the Daryl Vocat/Catherine Ross show at Eastern Edge... perhaps thinking that a comment there wouldn't get noticed. How my being a pervert has anything to do with my art writing is beyond me. Although maybe this is supposed to be a joke or something.

Here's the comment:

Anonymous said...: I have to wonder if jpohl read this entire "review". You are such a pervert Craig, and to be frank I'm don't think you would know great art if it hit you in the side of the head. Pity the concept behind this blog had such potential.Pity the task was taken up by such an angry boy. Good luck with that grant application.Here's a insightful review of Craig Power's writing: It sucks and he can't!

When I receive comments like this I know I'm doing something right. Thanks Anonymous, this blog was intended for people just like you.

NLAC Grant Deadline

2006-03-14T16:01:00.000-03:30

Sorry it's been awhile since I've posted but I've been extremely busy putting together my grant applications... one of which is due tomorrow.

Reviews of new shows at Eastern Edge and the Leyton Gallery as well as a report on Graeme Patterson, media artist in residence at the Rooms, will come shortly.

Tara Bryan and Craig Francis Power Artist Talks at the Anna Templeton Centre

2006-02-26T16:52:00.000-03:30

Tara Bryan and I will be giving presentations and talks about our respective art practices Friday, March 3rd at the Anna Templeton Centre on Duckworth Street at 7pm. Everyone is welcome to attend. Five bucks.

The Way They Were at RCA Gallery

2006-02-26T12:33:00.000-03:30

This is the third review of an art show at good ol' RCA I've done, and I'm happy to say, it may well be the last that I do for some time. It just hurts.

I just feel like I'm missing some really important piece of the puzzle. I mean, I'm just not getting something. Maybe I'm just not proud or patriotic enough. Maybe I'm an ignorant fuck. Maybe I'm just not Newfie enough. I don't know what it is, but upon seeing this show, I felt like how I imagine most regular people feel when they go into a contemporary art gallery: Like A Complete Outsider.

At first I was going to write about this show in relation to the Cabot 500 celebrations of 1997. How both events commemorate an important historical event or era, and how they both sort of ring very hollow. But the stumbling block was of course that everyone could relate to Cabot 500 in some way, while The Way They Were has appeal for only an incredibly tiny fragment of the population of St. John's.

Kent Barrett's work consists of a slew of sepia, black and white, and colour digital photographic prints with elements of collage thrown in for good measure. It just looks like the guy plays around with Photoshop way too much to the point where the work is completely over-designed. There are a lot of original photos scanned into the new work, in addition to the use of the original 35mm negatives. Some of the old photos are really nice looking.

But what, you may be wondering, are the photos of? Why, they're portraits of the people who were involved with the whole collective theatre movement of the 1970s in St. John's. A movement that had the LSPU Hall as its epicenter, and from which groups such as the Mummers' Troupe and CODCO (amongst others) eventually emerged.

Which is just fine and dandy, okay? I'm not knocking it. RCA has just turned thirty, and like all thirty year olds during that fabulously neurotic of years, the Hall is looking back over its life with an odd mix of nostalgia and insecurity. The fact remains, however that this art show is only enjoyable if you know personally the people in the photos. I don't, and therefore have no point of access into the work.

The most interesting thing for me (just like it was at the NIFCO 25th Anniversary screening at the Hall last summer) was which people were omitted from the show rather than the ones that were actually included.

So. If you know a bunch of the prominent St. John's theatre people from the 70s, you might want to pop down and check out Barrett's show. But, alas, if you're on the look-out for beautiful, provocative and heart-wrenching visual art, it remains an elusive animal at RCA Gallery.

The Excellence In Visual Arts Awards (Revisited)

2006-02-14T14:41:00.000-03:30

Okay.

A friend said recently that the literary and music scenes in Newfoundland and Labrador are light-years ahead of the province's visual artists when it comes to self-promotion, visibility and credibility.

I'm inclined to agree.

I'm inclined to go further, actually.

Fucking STAND UP and SKETCH COMEDY are taken more seriously in this province than the visual arts.

If you're reading this, you must have at least some amount of interest in the visual culture produced in Newfoundland and Labrador. So, I implore you to go to the VANL site to which I've linked above, and NOMINATE artists in the categories available. We have no one but ourselves to blame for the lack of exposure and opportunities in this province for visual artists. No one is going to make our careers for us. These awards are a great chance for us to pat ourselves on the back for our hard work and to garner some attention for ourselves. So please, do it.

Thanks.

Excellence In Visual Art Awards

2006-02-10T20:52:00.000-03:30

If you are a visual artist, or know one, you should check out these new prizes recently set up by VANL. Nominate early, nominate often. Nominate yourself.

Apparently, one of the adjudicators is Border Crossings' Robert Enright. That's pretty heavy duty.

Which reminds me.... Who do you people reckon are the best established and emerging visual artists in Newfoundland and Labrador?

Will Gill and Beth Oberholtzer at the Rooms

2006-02-05T11:02:00.000-03:30

The Art

Having never before attended an opening at our hulking cultural behemoth of glass, steel and brick, I was really excited about comparing this event to the various other high budget art receptions I've attended at other provincial galleries in the past.

The art is really good, though I somehow think you could put a lump of dog shit in the contemporary gallery on level 4 of the Rooms and it would still inspire awe. It's just such a beautiful gallery. Not only is Will Gill possibly the nicest person in St. John's, his large scale paintings and sculpture on display are just lovely to look at. Whimsical, simple, mysterious and somehow a little sad, his work has the sweet and otherworldly feel of magical objects you might see in a child's storybook.

All of Gill's work in the show seems to circle around the theme of transformation. Fire transforms matter. Day becomes night. One of Gill's sculptures, a wax bowl, like a giant speaker installed into the wall, transforms the sounds of the gallery so that everything seems muted and close, like you were on the inside of a closet, speaking to yourself.

Oberholtzer's work deals with the transformative as well. It's all sperm and eggs all over the place, with vaginas made of flower petals on one wall and a necklace of detritus, literally stuff she found on the sidewalks of the city, hanging opposite. While Gill seems more concerned with a kind of elemental, external change in the world around him, Oberholtzer examines the world of the interior. The world of the fetus, obviously, but also the transformation of the idea into object. It's good work as well, but doesn't benefit from being shown beside Gill's monumental pieces. Her necklace piece for example, while interesting, is placed beside Gill's 28 foot tall sculpture of a ladder going up into a cloud, rendering her work almost invisible as a result. Too bad.

The Food, The Drinks, The Reception

The best opening I've ever been to was at Anna Leonowens gallery in Halifax. I have no idea what the art was all about, but the artist, a middle aged woman celebrating her graduation from art school, had kebabs cooking on a grill right there in the gallery. Man, that was good. When you go to an opening and they've got veggie and chicken kebabs there sizzling away, it just makes you feel really good about the future of art production in the world.

Such was not the case at the Rooms, however. I guess they've blown the budget on the architecture (or maybe its Gordon Laurin's severance package) cause three of four little fruit plates from Sobeys just doesn't cut it, dudes. And sure, there was free beer and wine, but the crowd of seventy or so went through the limited supply in shortly over an hour...but I guess with Dean Brinton in charge, we should be thankful it wasn't a cash bar with QV lager going for eight bucks a pop. Speaking of Brinton, does this guy actually attend events at the Rooms? Several people at the opening said he hasn't been to a single visual art reception, odd, since it would seem he'd want to reconcile with an art community that (at least before apathy set in) thought he was an asshole. Fat Chance.

The Schmooze

Shauna McCabe and Bruce Johnson were in attendance of course, and the two seem to have a steady if somewhat unspectacular vision for the future of the Rooms. I've known McCabe for a few years and I think she's an extremely capable director who won't rock Dean Brinton's boat too much. I've heard that she's applied for the big job on a more permanent basis, and I think she'd be a good one to keep around.

But man, the artists in St. John's sure are a funny group. They'll make fun of Johnson's dangle-y earrings until he's standing next to them, and then treat him with the kind of reverence and deferential treatment usually reserved for the Pope. It's unreal.

At Bianca's later in the evening, it was fascinating to watch nearly every artist in the room slowly make their way to the chair beside McCabe, a procession so over-friendly that I just wanted to tell them to give the woman your proposal and slide list and be done with it.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO OUT AND VOTE

2006-01-23T10:40:00.000-03:30

Daryl Vocat and Catherine Ross at Eastern Edge

2006-01-21T12:25:00.000-03:30

Practical Associations / Fingering and Footing

The new show down at Eastern Edge gallery is really worth checking out, not only for the fact that it's the only place in St. John's where you can see contemporary art from somewhere outside of Newfoundland without having to pay a cover charge at the door, but for the high quality of work that is generally presented and supported there. Daryl Vocat's bright, bombastic prints totally knocked me out. Funny, smart and intelligent, Vocat combines a kind of gay-boy Pop Art visual sensibility with a very tenuous optimism about the future, a distrust of power structures both Marxist and capitalist, the examination of various masculine tropes, and the struggle against alienation. Sweet.

Catherine Ross, from New York, presents her video Fingering and Footing, a hilarious collection of found gestural performances recorded from the television game show, The Price Is Right. The hand and foot gestures of contestants, Barker's Beauties, and even ol' Bob himself have been slowed down to reveal the unconscious movements of people's bodies as an expression of their anxieties, excitement, joy, and so on, but also to juxtapose these seemingly more authentic movements with the practiced gestures of Bob Barker and his Beauties.

Several of these segments are presented on a split screen, so that the viewer can easily compare the movements of the contestants with those of their hosts, and what emerged for me at least, was how you could almost make anything seem suggestive or sinister or funny with the right amount of manipulation to the speed of the footage. What became more interesting as I watched (and perhaps is indicative of my somewhat pessimistic and morbid world view), was how the manipulation of the footage by the artist (not to mention how the art viewer is manipulated by the juxtaposition of images) was similar to the way in which the audience of The Price Is Right is manipulated by the glitz and glamour of what is, I think, America's longest running game show. So, is art the ultimate game show? Is the transcendental moment sought by the art viewer equivalent to the game show contestant's hope for hitting $1.00 on the Big Wheel? Is Ross suggesting that the Modernist project, with its quest for social and spiritual revolution, is at most, our societal equivalent to a new Corvette? Hmmm.

Joe Cooper in the Rogue Gallery

When Joe Cooper first talked about his art practice with me, he self-effacingly described his work as dirty cartoons and doodles of guys with big honkin' cocks, overflowing toilets, skulls, really morbid and angsty sketches done on scraps of paper.

And that's just what it is. And it's good.

Joe Cooper is the guy you knew in high school who was a little weird. A little creepy. He was smart. He was also a smart-ass. He smoked a lot of dope. He loved Iron Maiden. His locker was covered in drawings of "Eddie", Iron Maidens' chain dragging, limping, zombie mascot who appeared, for reasons unknown at least to you, on almost every album cover the band ever produced. Sometimes he'd sit next to you on the bus and embarrass the fuck out of you with his constant head-banging, the other passengers kind of glaring at you both and shaking their heads.

This type of work, the work of the high school reject, the stoner, the underdog, the outsider, has been gathering a lot of attention both in Canada and elsewhere. I'm thinking of course of the Art Lodge, and the innumerable imitators who've appeared since Dzama and Co. took off, but more appropriately of Guy Overfelt, the Canadian multi-disciplinary artist whose most infamous performance is an in-gallery funnel beer-drinking contest followed by pukefest and Iron Maiden cover band. (If you ever get the chance to partake... do so. It's great work). Also, Eric Michaud, a Canadian now in NY, whose work consists of abstract charcoal scribbles done while listening to Metal, like how the Abstract-Expressionists painted while listening to Jazz for inspiration.

In a photo of Cooper at the Rogue Gallery, the artist sits smugly on the ground somewhere in his bare feet. It's a placid Spring or Summer day, there's green foliage in the background. It's just such a lovely little snapshot like anyone might have of themselves, or a friend or family member on some trip to the beach. Off to the side, almost out of frame, is the thing that has Joe smiling so sarcastically: a giant cock-and-balls protrudes from the muddy ground, the testicles formed from wet earth, a tree trunk forming the huge phallus. Now that's landscape I can dig.

The Colour/Form of Bad Art

2006-01-01T18:05:00.000-03:30

I know, I know. It may really seem mean of me to be picking on the ol' RCA gallery all the time, particularly in this season of love, hope and shopping, but upon witnessing RCA's latest Member's exhibition, I can't really help myself.

How a place like Newfoundland, a place whose history has been fraught with poverty, alcoholism, Catholicism, violence and tragedy, a place usually viewed by the mainland with derision, if not contempt, can continually produce visual art that addresses none of these things, that seems, for the most part, to consciously turn a blind eye to the beautiful heartbreak of what it means to be an artist in Newfoundland, is beyond me.

Colour/Form consists of a slew of 2D work with a couple of sculptures, and what struck me most about the selection of work was just how un-imaginatively the artists tackled the theme of the show. Flowers, flowers, and more flowers. A few landscapes. A portrait of local starlet Adrianna Maggs. A truly bizarre sculpture which included brightly coloured geometric shapes hanging in netting above other brightly coloured geometric shapes. One really nice abstract oil painting by Danny Woodrow, conspicuously tucked near the back of the gallery where the door to the office is.

It did look, however, like quite a few pieces were sold, judging from the number of red dots by the title cards, which means, I suppose, the crew at RCA Visual (not to mention those artists who sold work) will consider this latest offering by the membership a grand success. Right on, b'ys.

Maude Barlow
Last month, my partner and I went to hear Maude Barlow give a talk related to her new book. And while I realize her visit is perhaps old news by now, there was one thing that I noticed at the talk that has sort of been playing on my mind since. That is, how there was no presence (none that I saw, anyway) from the local arts community. As far as we could tell, we were the only artists in attendance. I wonder to what, if any degree, artists in St. John's are politically aware? Do they even consider it when they're in their studios? It might explain quite a few things about the work that's being made.

Happy Non Denominational Festive Season

2005-12-23T13:25:00.000-03:30

Obviously, I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had time to do much on-line. Please sit tight, I'll have more reviews and things to discuss soon. I'm pleased to see that some of you are responding with your strong opinons. Peace out.

Members One At Eastern Edge

2005-12-07T15:29:00.000-03:30

I won't say too much about this particular show, given that I have a piece in there, and I don't want this blog to become a promotion for my own work, but it's worth checking out. With any survey show, the difficulty for the viewer lies in the broad range of quality of work presented, and Members One is no exception. There are a number of interesting and well considered works not least of which is Kym Greeley's video Landing, which consists simply of a thirty second clip shot out the window of an airplane as it lands at St. John's International Airport. The soundtrack lends to the sad feel of the piece, and anyone who has returned to St. John's from elsewhere (in this case New York) feeling a bit like a dog fleeing with its tail between its legs, will relate. Greeley, known moreso for her painting, graduated from NSCAD several years ago and moved to Brooklyn where she lived for quite some time. The piece does a wonderful job of addressing the difficult relationship artists from Newfoundland have with the physical beauty of their home province, and the reality of their homeland as a cultural backwater. Nice work.

Clement Curtis' Virgin Territory at RCA Gallery

2005-11-27T12:46:00.000-03:30

Clement Curtis:

Clement Curtis is a fairly well established painter (amongst other things) in St. John's whose latest offering at RCA Gallery at the LSPU Hall is a welcome departure from his usual bloody and dismembered- female bodies. Virgin Territory is a series of landscape oil paintings on canvas of various sizes, apparently drawn from the artist's Wordsworthian wanderings in the wilderness of Newfoundland.

While it may indeed be virgin territory for Curtis, the viewer will very easily fit this work into the long canon of traditional Newfoundland landscape painting; a tradition which embodies a very palpable love for the harsh and rugged beauty of the island, supposedly a metaphor for the harsh and rugged beauty of Newfoundlanders themselves.

It's sure laid on thickly. Curtis' canvases are built up with layer upon layer of paint and his technical proficiency is evident in the creation of compositions which immediately draw the viewer in. But, as luscious as these paintings are, all they do is kind of sit on their asses in the gallery space. There are certain tricks a painter learns at a very early stage of their development which allows them to construct pictures that are pretty to look at. Curtis seems to have that down, but there doesn't look like there's much else going on. I mean, it looks like these paintings were made to just sell, baby. I like my art a little more complicated than that.

I always thought a younger generation of artists had it as their duty to question the assumptions under which the previous generation worked, but that sure ain't happening here. These are pure Gerald Squires hand-me-downs, with, oddly, in one piece, some Bill Rose thrown in. I almost want Curtis to go back to the cut-up girl thing, at least no one else in town was doing that.

RCA Gallery and Website:

I posted the above link to RCA Visual out of a sense of duty, but it's almost not worth the effort. They're not in the habit of posting images of current exhibitions, or updating the site itself. It's a drag. So, the only way to see this work is if you're in St. John's. Sorry.

Also, the LSPU Hall has to change the way it thinks about its gallery space. Out of the four times I went to check out Curtis' show, twice the gallery was filled with chairs for some presentation, and once, unbelievably, a crowd of people were having a full-blown buffet style luncheon in there. What the fuck!

Welcome

2005-11-11T14:36:00.000-03:30

Hello everyone and welcome to Art In Newfoundland. I've been wanting to have a blog about the St. John's arts community for quite some time and am glad I've finally gotten my act together enough to do so. I'm not, of course, limiting this sucker to St. John's visual art, the community just isn't big enough for that, but will be covering a number of topics pertaining to creative endeavor from everywhere with an emphasis on Atlantic Canada.

Because the community is so tiny in St. John's, I've noticed in my two years here that not everyone involved feels comfortable enough to express their true opinions about gallery shows, performances, books, screenings etc., due to fear of personal or professional retribution from those being critiqued. So here's your chance to engage in an actual dialogue, to voice your opinions and/or reservations about what's happening here anonymously.

The first post will be up in a couple of days, as it will take me some time to wrap my head around maintaining this blog. I'm pretty new to this sort of thing.

Thanks, and feel free to introduce yourselves.