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.


 

I grew up in a subdivision where we had some Hungarian neighbors. One was my best friend Helen. Whenever I meet someone with any however remote connection to Hungarian-ness I feel compelled to tell them this, along with several other facts such as that I can count and sing in Hungarian, and say a  few other words. Without any encouragement I will start in describing the magnificent family picnics I would get invited to, the food that was gradually replacing our previously wasp fare, and what I perceive to be the final kicker, that my cousin had a Hungarian-style wedding since English ones were so dull in comparison. Sometimes I tell until my audience starts to back away. I do know not to follow and continue, although it is tempting.
 
But those picnics! To perpetually starving adolescents they were the most amazing of feasts, where all of Helen's relatives contributed enormous amounts of breaded veal and chicken, mountains of potato salad, cabbage rolls, barbecued meats, cakes, little pastries rolled in nuts and sugar, plums, peaches, of course watermelon. Much of this was homemade and home grown in those wide and treeless subdivision lots.
 
We would play in the warm Lake Erie waves, look for fossils along rocky Morgan's point, then go back for more food. I was a big eater for a skinny kid, and one time, on the way home, Helen's family were joking about this, or maybe just mentioning whether anyone was still hungry, and it came up that there was one veal chop left and would anyone want it. The car was stopped and it was retrieved from the trunk for me to eat. That became one of their family stories that, once I got older, would make me shrink with embarrassment at the telling.

The labour market and climate in the Niagara peninsula must have been a major attraction for people coming from Hungary where they could grow the old country fruits and veg. Some were newcomers after the Hungarian revolution in the 50s but the ones we knew were mostly first and second generation families. Nagy and Szabo was as common as Smith and Jones. 
 
Everyone had a garden, and everyone made wine. Our neighbour also had a
still but we were supposed to keep that a secret. 

Helen's stepfather John had emigrated more recently, in retrospect he had clearly had a different past life than factory work. He had paintings in the basement, and on summer evenings the crickets and frogs would be upstaged by his haunting mandolin. Language was a barrier - he would grin at us and say things like "Sonofagun" as he polished and polished his car. There was a swing, that he would sometimes push us on, terrifyingly high.

When my friend came out of gawky adolescence as quite the beauty, boys started calling her. This would be when John's old country values took over. One memorable event was when he told a would-be suitor to fuck off, then slammed the telephone down. The cultural mashup between old and new is always hard. I am sure it gets played out over and over, but at the time it was pretty shocking. For one thing, fuck off hadn't made its way off the streets and into the common lexicon yet. 

There was hard work and the struggle of upward mobility while still maintaining the old values. Everyone helped - both parents had factory jobs and older daughter looked after the little ones. This is how I learned things like "Don't touch that" and "go home you dirty pig" as my friend's little siblings were her constant shadow. Despite outside work, her mother still made soup stock with cordon bleu clarity, rows of preserves including peaches, pears, plums, tomatoes, dill pickles. Peaches had to be arranged in the mason jar with rounded halves facing out, perfectly nestled to be beautiful through the glass.

The house was also kept impeccably clean. If we walked on a carpet Helen would brush the nap back with her hand to erase our footsteps. We didn't play inside, but I have a clear and happy memory of the two of us playing Monopoly on a blanket in the yard, and her mother bringing out a huge bowl of cherries for us. 

My memories from this time are all summer ones. We climbed trees in a nearby orchard, we jumped in the hay in somebody's barn. We played in the construction sites where the subdivision was expanding. We rode our bikes.
 
Over the years we have lost touch, but I often imagine Helen as Baba,  telling her stories of the white bread English families and their goings on.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I have been wrestling with the keyboard on my laptop since I got it
last spring, and this is actually a test to see if there is a happy ending...
The curser would jump all over the place making typing a constant exercise in
craziness, and the more I investigated this problem through the various help
sites the more complicated it seemed. Some suggestions included disabling the
mouse pad, but have you ever tried to find out how to do this through the search
function in Windows 8? 

My daughter also had a new laptop (different brand) and was having the
same problem. Eventually she simply attached an external keyboard. So today I
set out to do the same thing, and ended up at Future Shop where one of the
youngsters showed me another way. 

Those function keys at the top have little blue pictures on them, and
it turns out that they can be activated via the function button at the bottom.
There is one with a picture of a mouse pad and a tiny hand pointing to how to
turn it off. So now my mouse pad is off, and so far the only wildly erratic
typing happening is by me.

well la de da!

As a student I did a project on Navajo sand painting. As I remember, a healing process takes place over several days, where a patient sits in a hogan while a lengthy ritual is carried out by the medicine man.  The oral component has been compared to one person singing all of the parts in an opera. Along with this is the making of a sand painting invoking mythical religious figures and their stories. A principal goddess is Changing Woman, and her images have remained in my memory. 

Changing Woman grows old and
young again with the seasons. She represents the power  of the earth and of women to create and sustain  life. 

 I always thought that there was a strong resemblance to our modern hydro towers, and that a comparison of the function of each would be artistically and philosophically interesting. It would be richly ironic with commentary on environmental issues. It would not involve appropriation, and be visually quite entrancing. There was never quite the opportunity to develop this thought into something fruitful. Or at least not by me.

And then again I am not Navajo, so there's that.

So this little blog.