Whaddya know? The Calgary Herald has done something useful: starting this blog called Art in Calgary by Nancy Tousley. Today's post is about the upcoming Painter as Printmaker exhibit at the Glenbow Museum. Very much looking forward to that.
Just posted book 31 on the 95 books blog, which puts me slightly behind schedule if I want to read 95 books by the end of the year. April started off strong, but then I'm not sure what happened: a couple of weeks of being distracted by life and unable to focus, alternating between being out or being in but watching TV instead of reading. Also instead of writing. Now I have that melancholy, incomplete feeling that comes from giving too little time to the life of mind. Have to get back to it soon.
I'm one of those people who sometimes buy cheap prints of famous art at mall stores, but I don't feel so bad because I only buy Van Gogh. I had a large print of that Cafe Terrace scene for ages but then I got tired of it and abandoned it at my parents' house. Now I have the same size print of Vase with Twelve Sunflowers in my bedroom. If I tire of that, I think Wheat Field with Crows will be next. I love this painting.
"I trust you will find the enclosed satisfactory, but please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns." I type this sentence a couple of times a day at least. It would be more efficient to copy and paste it, or dictate it, but I find typing it out to be a strange form of meditation, or of penance.
Toured the brand-new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton the other week. There were five exhibits, with a nice mix of historical (Goya and Degas), Canadiana (Yousuf Karsh), and contemporary (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), and an extra exhibit on display throughout the lobby of pictures by Edward Burtynsky of the construction of the gallery.
Careful readers will have noticed, as I certainly noticed, that of the six exhibits, only one half is by a female artist. That may be forgivable in the context of historical works -- the gallery can hardly change the fact that women didn't have equal opportunities to make art in previous centuries -- but they could have tried harder to make up for the disparity by featuring more female contemporary artists. It really bothered me as I made my way through the gallery. It bothered me even more when I noticed that the song playing in the gallery giftshop was "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt, although that in itself would bother me in any case. For shame, Art Gallery of Alberta, when a fifteen-year-old pop song comes off as more enlightened than your programming.
That complaint aside, I really enjoyed my visit. The Degas exhibit was lovely, showing mainly sculptures of horses, dancers, and bathing women Degas made to study movement for his paintings. Apparently he only showed a few sculptures during his lifetime, and they were met with disdain for being too realistic and thus vulgar.
The Goya exhibit featured dozens of small prints of various scenes of torture and assorted horrors during the French occupation of Spain in the early 19th century. It became a bit repetitive after a while, but I guess that's sort of the point: the endless, numbing evidence of the inhumanity of war.
The Karsh exhibit was my least favorite, although it was kind of neat to see a display on the image-altering techniques photographers used before Photoshop (like scraping, etching, and colouring the negatives to remove imperfections, alter shadows, etc.).
The Burtynsky photographs were gorgeous, stark and bright, framing lines of scaffolding and arcs of the gallery-in-progress against the Edmonton skyline.
My favourite exhibits were the Cardiff-Miller sound works. The first, Storm Room, was a recreation of an installation created in an abandoned dentist's office in Japan. Viewers stand inside a rectangular construction while the sound of a thunderstorm plays and water rushes over the windows. Standing in the "room", you get quite an intense feeling of being inside during an interminable storm. The original, mostly unfurnished room has been replicated to the last detail, including stains on the ceiling and scraps of paper with Japanese script (maybe a calendar?) tacked to the walls. I couldn't place my finger on exactly why, but the whole thing reminded me so, so much of Japan: something about the slight dinginess of the room, the coziness of it, and of the course the sound of the rain...
The second installation, The Murder of Crows, inspired by Goya's war prints, was set up in a large room on the top floor of the gallery, with 98 large speakers scattered through the room, and one old-fashioned megaphone horn in the centre in front of chairs arranged in a semi-circle. A woman's voice describing disturbing dreams and imagery alternated with various sounds such as an army marching, bird noises, traffic, music, all in a wave ebbing from quiet to cacaphony. Apparently each speaker plays a different track, so the experience shifts depending on your location within the room. I think we sat through an entire rotation of the installation, but I'm not sure how long it lasted, maybe about twenty minutes. It was mesmerizing.
1.
Care took sit syllable:
rub desert / sea common
hurt duck / atom them
Fire try, ring something, pick window.
(Were less knew each big most more)
Seat farm afraid how across dress?
We sudden be able sister,
turned which. Question number share,
replace in express.
Continue nine,
but into talk / prevent season.
Large liquid achieve system probable.
Encourage / brought liquid /
ocean ready / followed
Such release able told sun farm.
“Eye identify describe key difficult hurt born into.”
“Mr cool time tree verb”
City sat own -- rather near morning.
Reveal, inform, quiet, prove
(Hear prove fasten major by).
Quick cat supply appear attack verb!
Same, i avoid early born caught party step.
2.
length translates directly
to happiness –
ejaculate like a fountain
Wendy Walgate is the featured artist in the first issue of Branch, a new magazine of "art and words" (via CanCult). I enjoy this work quite a bit. It's so precious, yet so crammed. It fetishizes the darling ceramic animals as the same time as it devalues them. Also the disarray of colours. I dig colourful disarray.
Play at Being, Wendy Walgate
My Little Chair, Wendy Walgate
It's nothing new, but I couldn't resist linking.
And speaking of nothing new, here's my favorite April poem, posted here two Aprils ago.
eatsleepdraw is a neat blog of artwork submitted by "contributors across the globe". This drawing of Bill Murray as Steve Zissou makes me very happy:
dcbowers.co.uk
Charles Simic writes a chilling portrait of winter wind (via @poetrynews on twitter), but the really interesting writing is in the comments section:
Marjatta Ripsaluoma [Moderator] Today 07:19 AM
As a Finn, and been one for almost 65 years, I know what is a snowstorm, or blizzard or continuing hard cold, especially now after an unsually hard winter, colder and more snowier than since 1961.
I love cross country skiing, but as I moved for more convenient life to nearby city Vaasa, which is right on the coast of Gulf of Bothnia, in Ostrobothnia, we get the benefits of the already warmed North Atlantic in form of more snow - or water, like it's been more common lately.
We don't get many power failures, hardly none at all, but in countryside they would be common. And the older eyes cannot take oil lamp light for reading no more. We have a summer shack in inland, where that was necessary, until we got a sunpanel.
I like the snow rather than sleet and mud. It makes the SAD-syndrome harder to hit. It makes things light. You live more South than we do, as you may know that this is the world's northern most grain growing area. This country would be uninhabitable if Gulf stream would stop.
Soon you'll get the Spring winds again!
Nethermead by Joseph O. Holmes
Drawn to colour lately, combinations, cacophonies. Documenting colour in my house, with either my camera or photography skills not quite up to the task. These photos are faded, or too saturated, some glinting missing:
Matrix magazine posted a link to a picture of Jan Vormann's work on twitter yesterday, and I wanted to see more so found his Dispatchwork website. He has travelled to cities around the world (mainly in Europe so far) fixing crumbling infrastructures with LEGO. I love seeing the shock of colour among the mostly grey or brown bricks:
It's particularly effective when the LEGO fills a small chink in the building that you might barely notice if you walked past:
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn is the 16th book I’ve read so far this year; I’ve started to write up a summary of it for the 95 Books blog, but have been struggling because it’s a really important book and I’d like to do it justice.
For now, check out the website to get a sense of the book’s scope. Also check out the long list of charities that help women in the developing world (all, frustratingly, American charities, although some have Canadian chapters, i.e. CARE).
Also, check out non-charitable philanthropic opportunities, like Kiva.org (you can lend money in increments of $25 to women entrepreneurs throughout the developing world) and Women for Women International (you can sponsor a woman who has survived war by providing financial assistance to her and her family, funding her rights awareness and job skills training, and writing her letters of support).
The disparity between the freedom and opportunity we enjoy in the first world and the oppression many women suffer in the developing world is profound and troubling. "Women's liberation" might seem like an antiquated term but it's still a vital concept, and it won't be complete until all women have some measure of autonomy, power, and self-respect. Let's make it happen.
I spent yesterday all in a flurry over 20x200, a website from New York that sells limited edition prints for very reasonable prices: editions of 200 (8x10) for $20; editions of 50 (11x14) for $50; and various larger sizes for various higher prices. At first I wanted to buy everything, but I've since calmed down and placed a modest order for three prints today. Tangentially, I wonder why my first urge is to buy art that interests me. Shouldn't viewing it, linking to it, knowing it exists out there in the world be enough? Why commodify it, why own it? Luckily, 20x200 artist William Powhida has some answers:
Good points all. I'm just excited to cover the off-white walls of my apartment with something other than cut-outs from art-themed calendars, crap paintings I did myself, scarves hanging from those 10,000 Villages wooden fabric hanger things, a scary early-70s wood face carving my parents got in New Zealand and blackmailed me into rescuing from their basement, and some university degrees.
Anyway, here's a couple of prints I like but didn't buy (yet):
Photographer's Dilemma by Tatsuro Kiuchi
Untitled #10 by Kent Rogowski
I saw some intriguing woodcuts by Calgary artist Lisa Brawn at the Axis Gallery in Art Central this weekend. Apparently she's been using hundred year old Douglas Fir beams from heritage buildings and grain elevators for her material, which is so flipping cool: I love art that salvages local history. If only I had a few hundred bucks to spare, I'd get this Johnny Cash (something about the background stars really appeals to me):
I felt mid-afternoon despair encroaching and wanted to stave it off, so I typed "something beautiful" into Google. Amid the song lyrics and music videos, I found this website for Virginia artist Charlie Brouwer, through a link to his installation piece "Something Beautiful Calls and We Rise":
I love this image, the ordered disorder, the starkness, the red tree, the bleached sky.
And another one:
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