At present  I am experimenting with solar developing, creating negatives then printing on various materials. It has been a lengthy learning curve and I have learned that more isn't better in terms of time in the developer, that our hard water makes it very difficult to wash out the undeveloped dye, and that Borax helps with that (thank you Sally). Also high contrast negatives are imperative.
I was introduced to the dyes through a studio visit to Cris Winter in Saranac Lake NY, where she was making botanical prints on fabric for her work. This process hasn't really taken off in Canada and so I have to bite the bullet and pay the exchange and shipping for what are actually low-priced materials -- if you live in California -
One lucky break was a store in North Vancouver selling them off and my Katie just happening to be travelling home to Ontario at the time. So my stockpile is OK for now.

My subject is an exploration of pre and early 20C family photographs that offer socio-historical windows into those times.

We are often made to feel guilty about reading various newspapers magazines and other print media on line for free rather than buying a copy or continuing home delivery, thereby contributing to the demise of print media.

Well

In my community the main local paper is mostly an organ for advertising, and wholly a component of an enormous media empire, while the locally owned dailies are long gone. Loyalties aside, it has occurred to me that our very large internet and cable bills are actually how we purchase media these days.

So - shouldn't the cable companies pay royalties to those newspapers etc that one can access through their stream? And then reporters and journalists in print and other media can receive their fair share of revenue from their work from all of us by way of our internet providers.

The great linguistic professor Noam Chomsky reminds us that we replace awareness of larger societal issues with sports fandom to our detriment.

Quoting TV critic John Doyle in yesterday's Globe:

"A city gripped by a postseason run by its favourite team is a happier place and there’s a purity in the emotional attachment of the fans. It is a truly shared experience, something that is rare in a fragmented society, and only the dullest heart would be unmoved by it."

GO JAYS GO !!!

Unfamiliar with the concept I turn it on the first morning to a message that goes something like

"You f***ing bi*ch I'll kill you. How could you break up with me through a cab driver?

Shocked I immediately blocked the caller  and deleted the offending screed.

To my regret.

In repeating the story I can only paraphrase what he or she wrote at 2:47 a.m., where if I had saved it there would be an additional ring of authenticity, and that it could also make an interesting beginning for a story or poem.  So much better than what my memory throws up.

I could also have written back explaining that I am a 70 year old grandma and as far as I remember I wasn't out in a cab in the middle of the night but who knows? I don't think  have taken up wandering --yet.(HUMOUR)

Or that I  am so sorry that your girlfriend has deserted you.(EMPATHY)

Or a film noir screenplay where the message comes from a really bad guy who proceeded to kill the messenger, the girlfriend, and then come after me.

So in the end maybe I did the right thing.

*Organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and The Robert
McLaughlin Gallery in collaboration with the Southern  Alberta Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Windsor, The Collaborationists is curated by Linda Jansma and Melissa Bennett.

The collaborationists are Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, and they are collaborating with the pantheon of modern artists, in a continuation of their cheeky innovative work that intersects modernist  references with current technologies. Their interactive, kinetic installation Pavilion of the Blind has been travelling across Canada and is scheduled for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA) in May 2015.

 Truly twenty-first century artists, they graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001 and since then have had significant impact on Canadian art both at home and south of the border. Nuit Blanche darlings of 2007, their Event Horizon set extraterrestrial images from popular culture within religious symbolism, with ET and Yoda as centrepieces. Following this was a trajectory into a dynamic career, fueled through an ambitious production schedule that has seen them  mounting installations at the National Gallery of Canada, Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo,  as well as venues in New York, Louisville, Miami, and Basel.

 The current exhibition embodies both minimalist geometric abstraction and hilarious parody. Appealing to toddlers and sophisticates alike, the artists have created a cleverly esoteric crowd pleaser. The fun part is in the motion-sensitive installation that dominated The Robert McLaughlin Gallery's largest gallery space, so enormous that gallery staff had to walk the piece through the building since it was too large for their loading dock. Titled Pavilion of the Blind, it calls up the window blinds section in a big box store. As one approaches, the brightly coloured stripes lift and lower, reforming mechanically. Unbridled childish delight bubbles forth as the blinds go up and down as viewers move about, reconfiguring the colour sets to create seemingly endless arrays.

 This central piece in the exhibit is accompanied by several fine paintings that recall the minimalist abstractions of high modernism by artists such as Guido Molinari or perhaps the colour studies of Josef Albers. Bands of colour not only connect to the present as bar codes and a much-advertised world of window fashions, but could stand alone as examples of high art from an earlier decade.

 Carrying the trope of industry further, one can think about Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was derogatorily called "explosion in a shingle factory" by its critics. In contrast, Pavilion of the Blind,  in its reference to a ubiquitous material world, exhibits a deliberate and controlled restraint where hard edge paintings as well as mechanically derived ones do not invite a commensurate level of abandon. Control is on the agenda.

 Within the context of kinetic work the installation resides in a more ambiguous dimension. The exhibition reads as both an homage and a playful satire that in a larger sense questions the nature and value of aesthetics. But beyond an esoteric discussion of formal issues lies a darker current. As blinds rise and fall the question of surveillance emerges, and while it is lightly touched upon by the artists, the suggestion of the gaze, of spying, of a continual sense of being watched, even if it's only by multi-national retailers, all comes to the forefront.

Admittedly, the exhibition has many layers and goes in many directions. Whether this creates a blurring of focus and intent, or interesting complexity,  is for viewers to decide.

Small artwork shows are a staple of the holiday season, with participating artists presenting affordable creations for a gift-buying public. Almost every gallery, collective,and studio has one, and they are always entertaining and sometimes rewarding.

I titled the VAC Clarington show 100 Small Paintings  in 1989, back when we were still called The Visual Arts Centre of Newcastle and I had come in as a temporary administrator. My temporary job lasted until 2004 and an evolution of titles through Director and Curator, although it was always the same job really. And the 100 Small Paintings name seemed to be one that stuck. While there are many more than 100 paintings they are, however, all under 18 inches square, and priced below $200. 

So far this is the usual stuff about Christmas art sales. The thing that is special about this show in this particular year is that IT'S FANTASTIC!!! And everybody who can, should go to at least see, or possibly buy, themselves or a loved one a treat. There are works in every medium imaginable and the quality is high, high, high.

In the past the Friday night opening for 100 Small Paintings has been a gloriously festive affair, with music and incredible catering. There is no reason to think that this year will be different. The VAC has been drawing enormous crowds to all of their recent events, so it might be wise to get in early for a preview and pick your treasures ahead of time.

The bar has been raised very high. I am already anticipating that next year the artists will outdo themselves. Certainly it feels like it has happened this year.

As a relative newcomer to Facebook, I am still exploring its many and varied facets. One that I have known about for a while is that you can play SCRABBLE on line via this interface. A while back my friend Dale had invited me to play with her, but my limited understanding of how to get this going took me a while to engage.

Until this week.  

I have been inside all week with a virus, and therefore finding perfect couch and Kleenex time to play. I now have games going with Dale (who, incidentally turns out to be a barracuda that beats me most of the time), my daughter, several anonymously numbered people, and a cat named Janet. Janet is also beating me, and I think it's because a lot of the words are in cat language. Words such as "ur" and "ch" are denoted as acceptable, but not ipad, which is clearly a word since I am playing SCRABBLE on it.

Maybe I will have to get a cat.

a-a-a-achoo!

I started this a while back and am reminded to finish it by the recent opening of the Clarington Museums exhibition Rediscovering Identity: The Power of Photography. This is a multi dimensional exhibit that allows visitors to explore many facets of the medium, its mechanics as well as its history. Local artists were asked to interpret a photograph from the archives, so several IRIS members jumped at the chance to do some portraiture and I chose a photograph of what I assume to be two sisters, dressed to the nines and looking a little nonplussed.

Special guest speaker at the opening was Steven Frank, who spoke about the history of photography, and showed some 19C - early 20C artifacts such as a stereoscope, wonderful leather bound album, and postcard book.

Photographer Jean Michel Komarnicki recently commented that it isn't a photograph until it's printed, and that got me thinking about our existences within Walter Benjamin's famous age of mechanical reproduction. We are rapidly moving out of this era as the evanescent digital age overtakes us, and as the majority of images that we capture never become hard copy.


As JMK pointed out, technological changes as well as material degradation of discs may make digital records unreadable in time.  And how about those rapidly fading colour prints from the 1960s? Artists are still, of course creating photographs, mostly printed digitally, but with archival considerations. But the family photos that record so much of daily life, special events, travels etc. are mostly shown on screens rather that stored in albums.  It is noteworthy, as Frank mentioned, that when disaster destroys peoples' homes the victims invariably mention the loss of those family albums. They tell the stories of our lives and become the stories that are remembered.

But they are going.

The earliest extant photograph is believed to be "View from the Window at Le Gras" by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. So figuring that by 2025 or so there won't be any more family albums, we can look at this two hundred year period as the age of the photograph. While the latter 20th century will have the richest repository of printed memories, it is possible to look at pictures taken before 1900 and gain a sense of how people dressed, celebrated, wanted themselves to be recorded. Those long exposure times invite an equally long examination of the images.

Will future generations have this privilege?

If you are on my Christmas card list be forewarned that I am regifting the cards and such that come daily in an endless deluge from various charities. Some of these are from organizations that a) I have donated to in the past; b) I haven't donated to ever; and/or c) I have never heard of.  At first I recycled them, thinking that it would be wrong to imply that I am in fact a donor to the International Brotherhood of Psoriasis Patients (IBPP) or the Drop-in Centre for XXX. But they keep coming. Each day there was a new package declaring "a gift for you!" and after a while it begins to seem brutish to simply keep the paper moving off into the blue box.

So I have them in a pile, thinking that my grandchildren could play with them. But more have arrived, and more and more. And there are also fancy stickers, and name tags, and gift tags, and printed envelopes.

 I don't want to be mean or cheap but at a certain point it becomes an issue of waste. They are usually nice cards with charming images, and not bad cardstock. Each year I send a mix of cards left over from the year before and cards that I buy new. And I am noticing that sometimes we get the same card as we did the year before from others, so I have likely done that too.

Hence the good news is that this year all of the cards will be new ones. And I might be expanding my Christmas card list.

And as they say on TV, the opinions expressed on this card will  not necessarily be those of the sender.

Toni Hamel: The lingering

14 September - 24 November 2013
at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa Canada

Given a long run and two galleries at RMG suggests the importance that the curators attribute to this artist and the thematic direction of her work. Hamel's graphically strong drawings and installations present a forceful narrative on the complications of domestic life in general as well as the psychologically repressive nature of carrying out artistic endeavours on the home front.  While this is a feminist story told many times, the necessity for retelling still exists.

Hamel delivers a powerful , highly skilled discourse,  with content that avoids  polemic with dark,  subtle humour. The hand of the artist is present, as is the idea of women working with their hands. So-called housewifely tasks  are shown in bizarre parody, as images of 1950s style "homemakers" carry out various housekeeping duties that subvert notions of domesticity and underscore its often constricting nature.  Women's hands are at work building a nest, decorating an enormous peacock then cheerfully taking it to market in a wheelbarrow, digging in the garden for hearts, working on a child's costume, slicing bread, and so on.  Women are shown working together, looking out into a larger world to which there is only imaginary access.

Thread and twine are employed throughout, providing a fitting metaphor for gendered constraints. It is also used to extend, accentuate, enhance the finely detailed figurative work on paper and  canvas, to define/confine the walls from which one thousand cranes fly forth, to make a cascade of hair that a woman irons industriously, or suggest the skeletal structure of wings that release a kitchen chair from its base where so much domestic work is done. 

The iconic house image appears in thread in small drawings such as "Attachments" where a woman mows an imaginary lawn, her machine's cord umbilically attached to the house.  In other works the thread is a line pulled out of one picture plane into another.  In a drawing of a photograph of a woman hanging clothes on a line,  a passing bird pulls the clothesline beyond the photo into a freer space. Less whimsically, red thread sews shut a woman's mouth.

While the main floor Alexandra Luke Gallery showcases the artist's exquisitely drawn wall works and three major canvas installations, an ascent to the upper gallery immerses one in a world of origami cranes escaping from six houses, into a central nest-like construction made from twigs. An accompanying sound piece of bird cries, gentle whistling, soft giggles, and a beautiful Chopin Nocturne (#9)  permeates both exhibition spaces. (audio by Peter Nelis) There is unabashed femininity expressed in the aural and visual content, underscoring the multi-faceted nature of femaleness and of feminism.

In general there is a tendency for us to engage in a cognitive dissonance about the role of women within the domestic sphere. There is a comfort level in homemaking that ignores the toll which it has taken in limiting women's lives. Some feminist theory re-evaluates the hand work of women as integral to oral narrative, as safe spaces for discussions, for storytelling, for continuation of a particular cultural environment, for sharing skills, ideas inside a private sphere.  However it is clear from the surreal nature of many of the tasks being done by these smiling, busy women that Hamel's intent is to question the validity of repetitive and often meaningless work or, at least, work that is done at the expense of women having richer more creative lives.

In her book of essays titled SILENCES, author Tillie Olson mourns the silences‑‑ the  literary works unwritten or unpublished because of difficult  circumstances and biased ... practices.  In The lingering Hamel illustrates the issue with biting humour, skill and warmth.