Cover of esse no. 75, "Living Things," Spring 2012

And there are also, tucked in among the reviews, my takes on two recent exhibitions in Montreal and Toronto: DHC/ART’s group exhibition, “Chronicles of a Disappearance,” curated by John Zeppetelli; and Annie MacDonell’s recent solo show at Mercer Union, “Originality and the Avant Garde (On Art and Repetition).” I visited the DHC exhibition on a freezing, snowy day in Montreal and it left me feeling both psychically and physically chilled. Having already been impressed by Zeppetelli’s ability to conjure up an all-encompassing mood with his 2008 “Re-enactments” exhibition, it was nice to see him create an even moodier ambiance with this show, which tackled a wide array of depictions of contemporary violence while still giving the viewer enough room and space to make personal connections between and with the works.

Annie MacDonell’s solo show was one I revisited frequently, trying to unpack all of the different permutations of mirroring and re-presentation that her installation offered up. It was the first in what will be a three-part series of exhibitions by MacDonell, with the second part, “The Fortune Teller,” a co-production between the AGO and the Images Festival, on view now at the AGO’s Toronto Now gallery. The second iteration, which depicts the restoration of a hand from an automated fortune teller, is quietly beautiful and tightly focused (I think I might like it even more than the Mercer Union show). I’m looking forward to seeing how MacDonell will bring it all together in the last installment in the series.

I’ll be speaking with my good friend Matthew Hyland about Andrea Bowers’s 2007-08 show, “The Weight of Relevance,” and in particular about the film that formed the centrepiece of that exhibition. The film follows present-day volunteers at the NAMES Project Foundation’s storage facility where the AIDS Memorial quilt is repaired and kept between public showings and demonstrations. With dwindling numbers of volunteers and continued interest in contributing squares to the quilt, and exhibiting it, the NAMES volunteers seem overwhelmed by the literal and symbolic weight of the quilt and Bowers’s quiet, documentary-style narrative carefully draws out the changing political face of the disease. I screened part of the film in a course I taught at York University last year to talk to my students about the use of art in HIV/AIDS activism in the 1990s and many of them said they found it both enthralling and upsetting.

The exhibition opened between Matthew and I’s stints as curatorial interns at The Power Plant, so I’m looking forward to talking to him about the way we each understood the show, as the introduction, or conclusion, to our time working for the institution.

From the Archives

Matthew Hyland & Gabrielle Moser on Andrea Bowers

Sunday 22 April, 2 pm, The Power Plant (on the second floor)

As part of our 25th anniversary programming, we have invited curators, artists, critics, and others to select a key exhibition from The Power Plant’s history and deliver a presentation about it inside the Dissenting Histories gallery space.

Matthew Hyland is Director of Oakville Galleries, where he is working on a series of exhibitions on contemporary feminist art practices. Gabrielle Moser is a writer, curator and PhD candidate in art history at York University whose writing appears on Artforum.com. Both are former Curatorial Interns at The Power Plant and will discuss the exhibition Andrea Bowers: The Weight of Relevance (2007–08).

Jason de Haan's "Year Zero" at Clint Roenisch Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Two art critics whose work I admire—Sholem Krishtalka over at the Toronto Standard, and Murray Whyte at the Toronto Star—have already espoused all of the wonderful qualities at play in Jason de Haan’s sophomore exhibition at Clint Roenisch Gallery, “Year Zero.” So my recent mini review for Artforum.com in their Critics’ Picks section feels a bit supplementary at this point, but hopefully it compels a few more people to go see the show (if you haven’t already).

De Haan’s work has always intrigued me, particularly his comical, nautical-themed performances, Where the Ocean Meets This Guy (2007) and Moby Dick (2009-ongoing), but chances to see it in-person in Toronto have been relatively rare. Thankfully, “Year Zero” offers newer works by de Haan in a variety of media—including sculpture, collage and drawing—that show the full scope of what he’s capable of, particularly when a fascinating theme takes hold of his imagination.

“Year Zero” continues at Clint Roenisch until April 21.

Linda Duvall, "The Toss," 2012, HD Video still, detail. Camera: Lee Henderson

I feel like I’ve become a bit of a convert to pedagogical theory, especially the kind that tries to grapple with our psychic identifications with one another (or with representations of one another), something I have talked about before in this venue, but I am still trying to figure out how to integrate it into the writing I do about art. So this text feels in many ways like a speculative one that tries to bring a few different theoretical discussions together around one artwork.

Watching the videos in their final form for the first time at the opening last night, and watching how other people watch and respond to them, made me realize how often we, as viewers, want to immediately make hermeneutic sense of a narrative, especially by trying to latch on to the artist’s biographical details. Duvall admits that the impetus for this project was her own experience of being tossed by police several years ago, but has strategically tried to avoid autobiography in The Toss through her aesthetic choices, from the parameters she set for herself to make the project, through to the filmic conventions and editing decisions she made in its presentation. Yet, at the opening last night and in my discussions with others about the work, many people persistently asked Duvall questions about where and why she was originally tossed, as though that would provide an interpretive key or answer to understanding the rest of the installation.

Given that I had just come from a lecture by Mieke Bal on the performativity of curating, where she spoke at length about the importance of curators acknowledging their agency and subjectivity by using framing devices that are obvious in their construction, watching the public response to Duvall’s installation felt like a perfect case study of how these framing devices can sometimes exacerbate viewers’ experiences of a work. Duvall is not a curator, in this particular case, but in The Toss, her installation and editing choices do mimic some of the framing strategies used by curators to stage the encounter between the viewer and the artwork. Though Bal was quite clear that she wanted to prolong the time viewers spend with a work through her framing choices as an artist-curator, and I think Duvall is trying to engage the same kind of long-term viewing as we puzzle out what is happening in the installation, I am always curious about how to toe the line between engagement and frustration. How, as a curator, do you encourage the viewer’s fascination with a work without making them feel that it will take too much (time, patience, investment) from them to fully engage with the work and your curatorial framework? When is interpretive frustration productive, and when does it become an obstacle to fruitful discussion and dialogue?

These questions probably don’t have (simple) answers, but it’s something I wonder about whenever I encounter these kinds of viewing experiences. More and more, it seems to me that pedagogical theories, which often assert that frustrations and resentments are vital to our learning (and viewing) experiences, have a lot to offer in how I think through these curatorial issues.

Valérie Blass, "Midnight Viper," 2009, Courtesy Parisian Laundry

Though it’s impossible to do the exhibition justice, I tried to sum up some of my favourite works in my review of Blass’s show on Artforum.com. I only had a chance to mention a few of the excellent pieces on display, but there is much more on offer in the exhibition, as well as in the gorgeous catalogue, which includes an excellent essay on the role of the uncanny in Blass’s work by art historian Amelia Jones. Blass’s show is already on my long list for the Best Shows of 2012: it’s a can’t-miss if you happen to be in Montreal over the next month.

The Journal of Curatorial Studies launches its inaugural issue at Onsite [at] OCAD University. 

Join us in celebrating this occasion.

Onsite [at] OCAD University

230 Richmond Street West, Toronto

Thursday, March 1, 5:30-7:30 pm

The Journal of Curatorial Studies is a new international, peer-reviewed publication that explores the increasing relevance of curating and its impact on exhibitions, institutions, audiences, aesthetics and display culture. Inviting perspectives from visual studies, art history, museum studies, critical theory, cultural studies and other academic fields, the journal encompasses a diversity of disciplinary approaches on curating and exhibitions broadly defined. By catalyzing debate and serving as a venue for the emerging discipline of curatorial studies, this journal encourages the development of the theory, practice and history of curating, as well as the analysis of exhibitions and display culture in general.

The first issue features articles on the use of chance as a curatorial strategy, discursive interventions into art institutions, fashion exhibitions in museums, Haiti’s Ghetto Biennale, early exhibition experiments at London’s ICA, and reviews from around the world. Journal of Curatorial Studies publishes three times a year and contains original research articles on the subject of curating and exhibitions, as well as case studies, interviews and reviews of exhibitions, conferences and books.

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.