Crossing the border from Richford, Vermont into Sutton, Canada is always a delight. Not only is Richford this post-industrial gem of a Vermont town just waiting for a revival, Sutton is this understated gourmet haven (yes, it even boasts a cheese shop, chocolate museum and creperie among other delights) with a vibrant arts community. Sutton is a favorite because it is also home to the wonderful Brigitte Normandin, a pen and ink artist by training who has found her way to collage and mixedmedia.
Brigitte works these compact and exceptionally clean constructions within tight black frames. From time to time she produces figurative sculptures out of wood and cleaned up bits of metal and scrap as well. As with the best of constructions, there is always this air of adventure and the circus – they transport and much as delight with their play, textures, tones and glinting aspects.
As much as I try, it seems that while I always catch a new and delightful new piece at the Gallerie Farfelu, I somehow manage to miss her at her studio. L’un de ces jours, Brigitte!
A recent post to an art educators list I subscribe to got me thinking about art and action, and when the risks artists take cease to be acceptable modes of expression. The case in question is a Toronto film and video student who carried out the following action:
A 24-year-old student, Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, at the Ontario Academy of Art and Design built a fake pipe bomb, put it in a bag, labelled it “This is not a bomb” and hid it in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum. He called someone (he picked a random extension) at the museum to tell them that he had left something that “was not a bomb.”
Jonsson went to class at 5 p.m. and revealed his project to his class and teachers. He then posted a video on YouTube showing an explosion inside the museum. The video was called “The fake bombing at the ROM, Toronto.”
The writer didn’t disparage the work per se, but seemed to suggest that it might have been the product of a “privileged” upbringing. This got me thinking…
(more…)
[Crossposted from peacetiles.net] A few days ago my father introduced me to a mural process employed by the Canadian arts group NOA Productions, which has developed what they call “Mural Mosaics.” They just completed their most recent project for the Town of Cochrane, which engaged nearly 200 area artists in the creation of as many individual paintings, each 12-inches square. When combined, these many paintings composed a single, coherent image – or “mosaic” – which was permanently installed at the Cochrane Ranch House in Alberta, formerly a center for the preservation of Canada’s Western culture.
In addition to the striking coherence of a “Moral Mosaic,” I was struck by the relatively few number of works needed to produce the mural – which is 12 tiles up by 18 tiles across (216). In my experiments – and in most that I’ve seen online – upwards of 400 works of art – typically a photograph – have been needed to compose a single larger work – the primary reason being, as far as I can tell, that a great variety of color and density is needed to achieve a suitable “palette” – or range – that can be combined into an image. I have written to NOA Productions to get more details about how they have approached this work, for example whether artists are asked to work within certain boundaries (eg limit their palette to certain colors).
This technique naturally got me thinking about the possibility of composing similar “mosaics” from the growing number of Peace Tiles being produced around the world. I am thinking that there are at least two benefits to this kind of curatorial process…
Read the full article at peacetiles.net
Just back from a wonderful two nights in Montréal where the wash of history, art, and commerce never ceases to reinvigorate my satisfaction with Canada. Of course, coming from a Vermonter, that might not sound so special: what expectations of culture can one hold for the least significant state in the Union? Quips aside, Montréal is a vibrant city on the rebound. Buildings going up everywhere, renewal in the old port section since the nuns started selling off bits of real estate, McGill, UQAM and Concordia attracting young talent across disciplines, the museums awash in cash … the reasons are many!
We opted to try out the Hotel Godin over the Hotel Gault, where we have stayed in the past, and overall were disappointed at the price-to-attention-to-detail ratio, but couldn’t have been happier with the location (around the corner from the Quartier Latin and just up the road from the McCord Museum) and the folks who work there. I don’t have tons of time to write just now, so here are some MM highlights:
Charles Gagnon at the MCM- Henry Saxe at the MCM
- Jon Todd had some compelling collage work at Saint Dizier
- Gary Taxali had some cool decks at Galerie Saint Dizier
- Joan Dumouchel had some interesting figurative work at Galerie Saint Dizier
- Dominic Besner showing dynamic, scarred works also at Saint Dizier
- Hamilton Aguiar had a few glowing and austere works on wood at Yves Laroche Galerie
And of course there are the current works on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art – more about those after I’ve slept a little more 
