Installation view of "Coming After" with works by Dean Sameshima, James Richards, Adam Garnet Jones, Susanne M. Winterling, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

It felt like The Power Plant had me in mind as a viewer when they planned their winter programming. Not only are they presenting a selection of photographs from a new body of work by Stan Douglas (curated by Melanie O’Brian), but concurrently showing is “Coming After,” a group exhibition curated by Jon Davies that brings together works by a younger generation of artists that address feelings of latency and nostalgia for a period of queer activism (namely the 1980s and 90s in North America) that occurred before they came of age.

I already included “Coming After” on my list of favourite shows from 2011, but I also recently tried to summarize the show’s curatorial propositions for Artforum.com’s Critics’ Picks. I think it’s pretty obvious from the text that Aleesa Cohene and Glen Fogel’s respective projects were some of my favourites, but I also really loved Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz’s No Future / No Past video, Jean-Paul Kelly‘s beautiful suite of drawings and Onya Hogan-Finlay’s Periods 2012 series.

The amazing feedback machine that is Facebook has let me know that not everyone has decided they love the exhibition yet, and I’m looking forward to talking more with folks about where their reservations lie. I know that the relationship between nostalgia and political activism is a fraught one for many, and my guess is this may have something to do with the way some viewers are interpreting “Coming After”‘s main thesis. (For the record, I am quite comfortable with using nostalgia in artworks to address the unfinished work of past political movements, but that might be because I, like almost all the artists in “Coming After,” was also born post-1970 and missed being part of the activism of the 1980s and 90s. I came of age in the era of the queer neoliberal citizen, where ads for gay-friendly bank mortgages were for somehow perceived as an adequate substitution for real political equality.) I’m hoping this is something I can hash out with friends and colleagues in-person in the near future, maybe tonight, at the opening of “Lez Con,” Onya Hogan-Finlay’s complementary solo show at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives.

Renzo Martens, "Episode III: Enjoy Poverty," 2009, film, 90 min.

The second review of “You had to go looking for it,” the group exhibition that made up Zone C of last year’s Nuit Blanche, is a show I included on my list of favourite exhibitions from last year, and was just one of several strong showings at this year’s all-night contemporary art fest. My favourite piece (as is probably obvious) was Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s SOON, a project that on paper sounded like it could go horribly over-the-top and be reduced to a one-liner spectacle (a fate that befalls many Nuit Blanche projects), but which in fact kept me and thousands of other people enthralled well after the actual event ended.

Like Terence, I’ve also found myself thinking back to particular artworks that fascinated me this year within larger exhibitions that weren’t always completely successful. I mostly think back on my favourite shows of 2011 as those that introduced me to new work, or solidified my interest in an artist’s practice by being exposed to more of their work. So here, in no particular order, are my ten standout shows from 2011:

General Idea, "AIDS," 1988, installation view at the AGO

1. General Idea, “Haute Culture” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated by Frédéric Bonnet

I don’t know anyone in Toronto who didn’t love this show and I went back to see it no less than three times. Though I didn’t love the thematic organization of the work that Bonnet employed, it was pretty fantastic to see so much of GI’s practice all in one place, especially some of their very early works, like Felix Partz’s Mylar Purse (1968) performance and the poodles-as-paint brushes appropriation of Klein International Blue in XXX (bleu) (1984). Not only was the exhibition a crowd-pleaser, but it also offered a great chance to revisit and reevaluate a group of artists whose practice still seems overdue for a proper critical appraisal. It was also a pleasant surprise to see contemporary Canadian art take over two floors of the AGO, an event that should really not be such a rarity in an ideal world.

Olivia Boudreau, "L'Étuve," 2011, video still

2. “The Work Ahead of Us,” The Quebec Triennial 2011, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, curated by Marie Fraser, Lesley Johnstone, Mark Lanctôt, François LeTourneux and Louise Simard

The 2011 Quebec Triennial was faced with the difficult challenge of topping the already amazing 2008 iteration of this exhibition which offers an overview of contemporary art-making in the province: a challenge made all the more difficult by the curators’ self-imposed rule that there be no repeats, with each artist showing in the triennial only once. Despite, or perhaps because of, these restraints, the triennial still offered plenty of exciting works by artists who I’ve followed in the past but was keen to see expand their practice in the kind of space the MACM can offer—such as Seripop’s room-sized installation made entirely out of their paper posters, or Charles Stankievech’s engrossing film in an all-white screening room—and a whole host of pieces by artists I was unfamiliar with. Standouts for me included jake moore’s feathery dirigible and hallway installation, Alexandre David’s domed plywood floor, Frédéric Lavoie’s re-edited nature documentaries, Stéphane La Rue’s beautiful geometric drawings and Olivia Boudreau’s minimalist video of an empty steam room that magically became populated as the steam plumes cleared.

Geoffrey Farmer, “Bacon’s Not The Only Thing That Is Cured By Hanging From A String,” 2011, exhibition view courtesy Casey Kaplan. Photo: Cary Whitti

3. Geoffrey Farmer at Casey Kaplan, New York

I wrote a lengthy review of this show for Canadian Art magazine, but it was a quiet but playful exhibition that stuck with me the longer I considered it. Not only was it Farmer’s first US solo show, but it demonstrated a whimsical approach to installation that reminded me of some of his earliest works in Vancouver, such as Catriona Jeffries Catriona (2001) and his solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in which he collected (and then was reprimanded for “stealing”) the parking direction signs from film shoots around the city. It was the kind of solo show that made me excited to see the next phase of his artistic career.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, "Soon," 2011

4. “You had to go looking for it,” Nuit Blanche Zone C, Toronto, curated by Nicholas Brown

This section of this year’s Nuit Blanche, curated by my friend Nick Brown, restored my faith in the “all night contemporary art thing” sponsored by the city and a big corporate bank. I didn’t think I could be surprised by anything at Nuit Blanche anymore, but Nick’s tightly selected group of works, which commented on the financial district as a zone of protection, surveillance and potential revolution, changed my mind. The awe-inspiring, newly commissioned installation Soon, by British duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, also set the bar very very high for next year’s curators. Now, if only someone would hand Nick a gallery to curate 12 months a year (again)…

Jannicke Laker, "Running Woman," 2006 and Paolo Canevari, "Bouncing Skull," 2007. Photo: Morris Lum.

5. “Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times” at Gallery TPW, curated by Kim Simon

TPW is always on my list of “must-see”s when I check out what’s happening at the local galleries, but I almost missed this group show—curated as part of an ongoing dialogue between TPW curator Kim Simon and Trinity Square Video programming director Jean-Paul Kelly, who produced his own show, “Decisive Moments Somewhere Else,” at the same time—and only caught its last few days. Simon chose to reexamine Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous maxim about the “decisive moment” by choosing to show works that hint at a moment or event of trauma or social tension without depicting it. Instead, the photographs and video works she selected depict the affective charges left around the traumatic or horrific event, often being indexed by the responses of witnesses or spectators. The works were tricky to engage with as contemporary viewers who are often quite far, both spatially and temporally, from the events that are being (un)pictured, which I think was Simon’s main goal as a curator: to ask what happens when viewers are faced with these images in the strange context of the art gallery. The curatorial premise left me with a lot of questions (in a good way) about the purpose and function of the gallery space, but mostly I remember the pieces in the show that were immediately arresting in their emotional appeal to the viewer, such as Jannicke Laker’s disturbing video of a woman running along a deserted country road, panting and crying in an exaggerated, yet haunting manner.

Didier Courbot, "French Thonet," 2011

6. Didier Courbot at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto

Another exhibition that I wrote a review of, this was a solo show of new works by Paris artist Didier Courbot, someone whose individual works I’d seen in the context of group exhibitions in the past but whose new works—a series of actions performed on discarded objects in the streets of Paris and documented by photographs—I think need to be seen as a series to be used to best effect. I especially like Courbot’s blend of playful inventiveness and serious conceptual sculpture/photographic practice. There is something slightly anachronistic (it seems totally in keeping with Ed Ruscha or John Baldessari’s works, for instance) yet current about his approach that makes me want to see more of what he does in the next few years.

Laurel Nakadate, "I Want to be the One to Walk in the Sun," 2006, video installation view. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

7. Laurel Nakadate, “Only the Lonely,” MoMA PS1, New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach

Laurel Nakadate is an artist whose work polarizes viewers and critics (in fact, Corinna Kirsch at Art Fag City just published a pretty convincing argument about what’s not to like in Nakadate’s work), but I guess I fall on the schmaltzy/gullible side because her solo show at MoMA PS1 was one of the highlights of my trip to New York last year. While I could have done without her massive photographic installation of the artist crying every day for one year, I loved seeing all of her video work in one place, ranging from the early forays into “interacting” with men she’d found on Craigslist to her more recent, feature-length films made in collaboration with teenaged girls. The power dynamics in Nakadate’s work, for me, are uncomfortable and icky in all the right ways, asking questions about identity and representation rather than shutting them down.

"To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?" installation view at The Power Plant. Photo: Steve Payne.

8. “To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?” and “Coming After,” The Power Plant, curated by Jon Davies

This was the year I felt I got to see the full range of my friend Jon Davies’ curatorial prowess, from his quiet and contemplative survey of artists engaging with depictions of the natural world (which included new works by two Toronto artists whose work I have long followed, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino and Annie MacDonell), to his slightly more raucous look at younger queer artists’ renewed interest in the 1980s and 90s as a period of bygone cultural politics. These were group shows that definitely worked, presenting a convincing overarching theme without suffocating the nuances of individual artworks.

Tricia Middleton, "The Call is Coming from Inside the House," 2011, installation view at Mercer Union. Photo: Jon Sasaki.

9. Tricia Middleton, “The Call is Coming from Inside the House” at Mercer Union

I’m a sucker for Tricia Middleton’s maximalist aesthetic and loved her installation at the first Quebec Triennial in 2008. And while I also loved her messy, sparkly, wax-dripping sculptures that appeared behind the curtain in this Mercer Union show, I was even more compelled by what appeared in the exhibition’s foreground: a kind of manic workspace full of notes, sketches, photographs, art materials and a compilation of engaging hand-written texts (I hesitate to call them letters). Rather than presenting the space of creative work as a superficial rendering of Dr. Jekyll’s lab, Middleton’s workspace was one that felt at once familiar and uncanny.

10. My favourite (re)discoveries of the year:

Aleesa Cohene: just everything the video artist made/exhibited this year; cheyanne turions’ Toronto editions of “No Reading After the Internet;” Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky (Public Studio)’s Road Movie installation as part of TIFF Future Projections; the novels of J.M. Coetzee; fantasy football.

Didier Courbot, "Adirondack Line," 2011

This month on Artforum.com, I review Paris-based artist Didier Courbot’s solo show at Susan Hobbs. I was first introduced to Courbot’s work through “Site Exercises,” a show that Jen Hutton organized at Hobbs’ space in 2010 that featured several of Courbot’s drawings that served as propositions for interventions into the facade and architecture of the gallery. In these new works, similar to his ongoing needs series, Courbot makes temporary interventions in the urban landscape, this time using discarded materials and their constituent parts (such as this Adirondack chair) to create fanciful sculptures.

Courbot’s work is concurrently showing at Paris’ Jeu de Paume as part of the group show “BLOW UP” which focuses on artists’ infiltrations into the gallery space. For the show, which continues to March 2012, Courbot is executing a series of interventions in the gallery that neither the curators nor the gallery staff know about, such as painting one edge of a white wall leading to a staircase a vibrant teal colour, or leaving a fresh flower on the edge of a railing. There are more subtle switches planned, all of which you can follow on the gallery’s website.

Jon Rafman, "78 Myrdle St, Poplar, England, UK 2010." From the series "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View", 2008–.

What I like about Rafman’s project is the way it troubles the simplistic model of the photographer-subject relationship that is often used to measure the ethical implications of social documentary photography. Instead, his compilation of Street View images stresses the ambiguous, uncertain ethical relationship between image, subject and spectator that has become the status quo in a time of authorless (as the Google Street View images seen), globally circulated digital images. It’s a new kind of relationship between spectators and subjects that I try and outline, especially towards the end of the essay, through Lauren Berlant’s notion of “slow death” (this links to a PDF of her article): the exhaustion that accompanies the maintenance of life under capitalism.

Even though the text is “finished,” I still feel it’s a work-in-progress. I haven’t entirely resolved where all these ideas might lead, or what exactly the Street View images, and Rafman’s use of them, is asking from us as viewers. I also didn’t intend for the title of the text, “Exhaustive Images,” to seem like quite such a double-entendre, but if you do make it through the (very long) article, I would love to talk more about it and how we might more adequately address all this exhaustion.

Though the course has explicit connections to my own academic research into the critical pedagogical potential of colonial-era photographs, it’s also prompted me to reconsider how I think of exhibitions and public programming in the visual arts as a form of public pedagogy. In particular, Deborah Britzman’s concept of “difficult knowledge”—the idea that learning from social trauma is always a psychically difficult task that involves the learner vacillating between love and hate—seems useful in analyzing how viewers make sense of their interactions with art. Throughout her work, Britzman underscores that learning is not only a difficult task that involves being psychically vulnerable, but one that often disrupts our sense of linear time. Difficult knowledge upsets our assumptions about the cause (in this case learning about a social trauma) and effect (conducting oneself in a more ethical manner) relationship that happens for learners who approach representations of social trauma. For Britzman, knowledge is often latent: it comes much later than the moment of learning, at a point that is difficult, or even impossible, to pinpoint or represent. Learning is therefore not only a difficult process to engage in, it is equally difficult to represent.

Britzman’s emphasis on the latency of difficult knowledge seems to help to explain why some exhibitions or public programming about social trauma or experiences of difference don’t seem to immediately generate fruitful discussions. This is something my friends and fellow curators cheyanne turions and Kim Simon have both raised in their own writing and programming and is something I think many of us have experienced at the end of a screening or panel discussion: the awkward silence that ensues that might seem to represent a refusal to or anxiety about engaging in the discussion about social trauma, ethics and difference. But I know that I am sometimes one of those silent people, and that that silence does not necessarily mean I have not engaged in or tried to learn from the text, film or discussion at hand. Oftentimes, I think deeply or even obsessively about the learning object after the event, making sense of it in my own interior monologue and in my discussions with others. And it is often only much much later that I think I have made some sense of that original encounter with the object, only to have to reevaluate it again upon new encounters with representations of social trauma.

So the question for me then becomes how to facilitate this latent sense-making or knowledge that art and its public discourses might prompt for people, especially when the economic and temporal practicalities of creating exhibitions and public programming sometimes make one-off events a necessity. Kristina Lee Podesva has suggested that one way that art criticism might tackle this temporal lag is by revisiting exhibitions through critical texts several months or even years after their original presentation to see what sense can be made about them with more historical distance. But I’m curious about how else we might engage with the latent knowledge that exhibitions and contemporary art can help spark and foster.

Barbara Astman, "16, Daily Collage," 2011

This new series seems a bit of a departure from Astman’s past works, but still meditates on the affect of ubiquitous public images through the manipulation of images from newspapers. What particularly appealed to me about Astman’s take on collage was that it managed to avoid the sometimes bombastic readings that the juxtaposition of “political” images with luxury consumer goods tends to evoke in works by some contemporary artists that use the same montaging techniques (Martha Rosler’s most recent iteration of Bringing the War Home came to mind, for instance, which to me seems to over-determine the viewer’s possible readings of the image).

Astman’s work is on view for another two weeks at Corkin Gallery in the Distillery District. If you have a chance to stop by, they’re well worth a look in-person.

In Hayes’ talk for Creative Time, the artist recounts her early, formative years living in New York in a way that tries to eschew “speaking autobiographically,” as Hayes terms it, and attempts instead to “speak singularly” about her experiences and how they informed her practice. Rather than trying to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the artistic, social and political experiences she had and her current practice, Hayes underscores the experiential, affective dimensions of living in New York in the early 1990s and becoming a part of movements like ACT UP seemingly by accident. She describes her entrance into these movements as being immersed into the middle of something that was already underway and also as a process of “accelerated becoming.”

Though Hayes is addressing a very particular time and place, her talk does not follow the traditional confessional model of many of ACT UP’s oral histories, which often attempt to instrumentalize suffering and death into politics in a way I sometimes find unsettling. In this model, the death of a friend, acquaintance or public figure is framed as the catalyst for political and social activism. While I know that those experiences informed the incredibly important work that many of ACT UP’s members did and continue to do, I like Hayes’ notion of “accelerated becoming” as another way that political activism takes shape: as a way of accounting for the osmosis effect that takes place within a social movement, where affect travels among individual subjects in a way that is not always easy to trace. It makes sense to me as a model for understanding how people become immersed in a movement and inspired to take action, and also seems to offer some optimism for the political effects of contemporary artworks.

Suzy Lake, "Extended Breathing: While Highlights Travel," 2009. Photo: courtesy of Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto

Also in this issue of esse is my review of a two-person exhibition at Angell Gallery featuring recent York MFA grad Alex Kisilevich and video and performance artist Geoffrey Pugen, both of whom exhibited photographs (Pugen’s show included some great video works as well). It was refreshing to see what felt like genuinely new work from two local artists that also managed to investigate some of the unique qualities of photo-based practices. They’re two names to keep an eye on in Toronto, including Pugen’s upcoming performance at this year’s Nuit Blanche.

left: Sam Durant, "You Are on Indian Land Show Some Respect," 2008 right: Rebecca Belmore, "Sister," 2010, from "First Nations / Second Nature"

You can read more about the residency, and cheyanne’s contribution to it through iterations of No Reading After the Internet, on her blog, but for now I wanted to draw attention to her commentary on First Nations / Second Nature, a group exhibition at Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery curated by Candice Hopkins. Framing the show as her choice of a significant Canadian curated moment, and as an example of a resonant group exhibition, cheyanne’s description of the show is helpful in locating the gallery within the political and social context of the neighbourhood and city, especially in the lead up to the craziness that was the 2011 Winter Olympic Games. I also appreciate her meditation, inspired by a discussion with residency instructor Anthony Huberman, on the differences between curatorial methodologies that look inward (often selecting works that explain an idea) and those that look outward (searching for works that complicate the idea that was the exhibition’s starting question, or original premise).

I’m not always sure that it’s so easy to distinguish between these two models of curating. For me, an exhibition often begins with an idea or starting question and then it can become difficult not to see/seek out that theme in the works I encounter after I begin contemplating the idea. But it also drives me crazy when curators use artworks as illustrations for a pre-formed thesis, because it seems to overdetermine and suffocate the more nuanced or even contradictory meanings that viewers might bring to the work if it had more breathing room. It’s something I feel I’m always struggling with, both as a curator and a viewer, so it’s refreshing to have cheyanne’s keen thoughts on it, especially when it’s applied to a concrete case study.