I’m currently waiting in Union station for a VIA Rail train to come sweep me away to Kingston so I can help sail a boat to its winter home. Thank god for wifi.
The first Curatorial Incubator programme debuted tonight at V-Tape and was really spectacular. It was a series of artists and pieces I’d never seen before that were eccentric and surreal but also really gritty and collage-like. Ardele Lister‘s “Hell” was incredible – funny and ridiculous at times (I guess that’s how the 80s were), and then incredibly tense and discomforting. Jacob is going to be a tough act to follow.
It felt good to talk to people about my tentative programme, though. Not only is it nice to know that other people in the world know who your artists are, but it helped me to clarify what people expect from certain artists and certain themes. I think I’ve almost decided what I’m showing. But, as one of the other curator’s pointed out, that’s only half the battle. I haven’t even started thinking about my curatorial essay yet.
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In other news, I started school this month up at York (“if you can hold a fork,…”). The campus actually isn’t as dreary as I’d been led to believe it would be (granted, I just spent four years at UBC, which is stiff competition in the natural scenery department). And I’m a huge dork and am really happy to be back in school and to have permission from the world at large to spend all my time reading and looking at art. It’s only been three weeks, but I’m feeling good about the program and my classes. I’m much happier living a student lifestyle (and shockingly richer), I’ve realized.
The one disconcerting aspect to being a York student is the ridiculous number of sexual assaults that seem to happen on campus. Not that UBC was much better, really, but seeing posters up all over campus warning me about a series of chronic and seemingly unsolvable series of assaults does not really say “welcome to your new school”. Maybe they’re not so unsolvable after all.
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And finally, in all of my newfound free time as a student, I made it over to the Justina M. Barnicke gallery at U of T for Kelly Mark’s solo show, Stupid Heaven. I don’t know her, but I love her. The new, epic video collage, “REM”, totally blew my mind. I want to go back just so I can watch some more elegantly montaged segments.
Plus, she once came to do an artist’s talk for my sister’s studio class and showed, amongst other images, a slide of her cat wearing a suit she had made for him out of fun fur that mimicked his own fur and markings exactly and said “this isn’t really art, I just think it’s cool”. Agreed.
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