Dalek’s first solo exhibition in Canada introduced Toronto audiences to a Brooklyn-based member of a large underground urban art movement that is attracting attention in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. While the group is still effectively unnamed, the members of this loose affiliation—Shepard Fairey, KAWS, Twist (Barry McGee), Phil Frost, Evan Hecox, Ryan McGinness and others—have exhibited together on many occasions, including in the recent “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture” exhibition at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center.

Dalek, whose real name is James Marshall, is a prominent member. His work, even spray-painted on the sides of buildings, is reminiscent of both historical and contemporary Japanese art. The artist once worked in the studio of Takashi Murakami, and the Pop master’s “Superflat” aesthetic is clearly evident in Dalek’s pieces. Like ancient Japanese scroll paintings, his works always move from right to left, and their humour and quirky violence are comparable to that found in Japanime.

Every piece Dalek paints tells a tale about a character he calls a Space Monkey. Often there is more than one of these creatures in the picture plane, each one focused on carrying out some demented, obscure mission. They execute their destructive tasks with glee as they fly through two-dimensional, Super Mario Bros.-like spaces.

The glory of Dalek is in the attention he pays to the details. Every punk-rock song sounds the same to someone who dislikes punk, but to a true punk fan the small differences are the sites of the purest creativity. Like a snowflake, every Dalek piece is one of a kind, its essence contained in the minor variations on the theme. Each work seems machine-made in its plastic perfection; only upon very close inspection do traces of the artist’s hand in the brush strokes betray the fact that these are all handmade objects.

The works reflect the prominence of the cartoon in the contemporary pop aesthetic. Our culture, like Japan’s, is permeated with animated programs for adults. The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park are supported by leagues of dedicated fans who cherish these programs for their humorous attempts to make sense of a crazy world. Dalek’s images of skinny-armed, fat-fingered Space Monkeys do the same by highlighting the underlying insanity of our highly competitive, violent, goal-oriented, button-pushing wired culture.

{{Postscript by the author:
The article above was originally published in Canadian Art Magazine a number of years ago.  I have not written about Dalek (James Marshall) in a long time but I am so excited by the incredible work he has been doing recently that I wanted to get this article onto Akrylic.  Please see below for some of his recent paintings, circa 2009/2010.  For more info on this amazing artist, you can check out his website:  www.dalekart.com. }}

Dalek, aka James Marshall, at home in his studio

Mexican beer company Dos Equis recently ran a wonderful advertising campaign, presenting “The Most Interesting Man in the World”. In these radio and television spots, a dignified, slightly accented, well-dressed, rough yet sophisticated man is described in impossibly exciting detail. “The police often question him, just because they find him interesting. His blood smells like cologne. His personality is so magnetic he is unable to carry credit cards. Even his enemies list him as their emergency contact number. He never says something tastes like chicken, not even chicken. People hang on his every word, even the prepositions. He can speak French, in Russian. He is the most interesting man in the world.” A cursory glance at the life of Conrad Black could lead one to believe that he was one inspiration for the complex character in these clever advertisements.

One of last true Renaissance men, Montreal-born Conrad Black, aka Baron Black of Crossharbour, has experienced high highs and low lows throughout his illustrious life. As head of Hollinger International, the company that published hundreds of newspapers worldwide including The Daily Telegraph (UK), Jerusalem Post, and Chicago Sun Times, Black held the post of third largest newspaper magnate in the world. Through his ownership of various holding companies, he was involved in many industries including the manufacture of farm equipment, mining, and broadcasting. Perhaps his most lasting creative effort to date was the development of Canada’s daily National Post, a newspaper he launched in 1998.

For most of his life, Black lived a life of luxury and was rated in 2003 as one of the 250 wealthiest people in Britain, where he was raised to the peerage by Queen Elizabeth II who knighted him with a membership in the British House of Lords. Like Icarus, however, Black’s self-made wax wings began to melt as he soared too close to the sun. By July 2007, he had been convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice in the Illinois US District Court. Sentenced to 78 months in federal prison, Black is currently incarcerated in the Coleman Federal Correction Complex near Tampa, Florida.

As the saying goes, you can’t keep a good man down, and Black has continued an intellectually active and decidedly productive life regardless of his present circumstances. A published author of biographies of great personalities from history such Maurice Duplessis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and himself, Black continues to contribute regular editorial opinion pieces to the National Post (a wonderful example of which presents his comparison of cats and dogs) and has published history and criticism articles in a variety of other publications since his incarceration. He continues to work hard throughout his days, writing, communicating via email, and teaching English and the history of the United States to fellow inmates. Considered a “low risk” prisoner, he has practically unlimited access to emails, and the media, and plenty of time for visitors. In an article published in Spear’s Wealth Management magazine, he said his current life is “a little like going back to boarding school, which I somewhat enjoyed, nearly fifty years ago (before being expelled for insubordination), and is a sharp change of pace after sixteen years as chairman of the Daily Telegraph.”

The inquisition that follows was conducted by Randy Gladman via email in May 2010. Conrad Black, Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate # 18330-424, is scheduled for release from Coleman Federal Correction Complex in October, 2013. We expect Baron Black of Crossharbour will be enjoying a cold Dos Equis shortly after he gets home.

Convicted newspaper baron Conrad Black leaves the federal building in Chicago Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, after sentencing in his racketeering and fraud trial. (AP Photo/Jerry Lai)

1. Which historical epoch would you most like to have participated in? (ie. Ancient Rome, Revolutionary France, 1960s Counterculture…)

Twentieth century.

2. If you could live as one historical figure for one month, who would it be? (Feel free to describe which particular month, if relevant.)

Jesus Christ, the month ending a few days before he died. Or Napoleon in 1803, at the time of the Treaty of Amiens. That would have been the time to end the Napoleonic Wars and avoid the nonsense of the Empire.

3. If you could be internationally famous for any achievement, real or imagined, what would it be for?

A timelessly influential book, like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

4. Do you think it is better to be exceptionally intelligent with average charm or exceptionally charming with average intelligence?

The first.

5. Which 3 visual artists do you most admire? (For their work and/or the manner in which they lived their lives)

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Monet.

6. Which 3 musicians’ music most closely resembles a soundtrack to your life?

Wagner, Beethoven, Verdi (everything is to scale).

7. Do you listen to music when you are being creative? What music? If not, why not?

Yes. Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Chopin, Faure, Sibelius, Bach.

8. If you could change one significant aspect of your talent, what would you change?

I would be more naturally musical.

9. What three cities would you most like to live in?

New York, London, and Paris.

10. Imagine you are driving on an open, gently curving highway with a guarantee of no police, no other drivers, and perfect weather conditions. What kind of car would you want to drive and how fast would you go? Is there a particular stretch of road you have in mind?

A Bentley Continental, about 70 mph, between San Francisco and San Luis Obispo, Quebec City and Tadoussac, or on the upper Corniche between Monte Carlo and St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

11. Which current global calamity would you fix with one all-powerful wish? (ie. global warming, HIV/AIDS, starvation, …)

Terrorism.

12. If you could solve one of the great mysteries humanity has never been able to figure out, which would it be?

The existence and nature of God.

13. Do you believe the United States of America is getting better or worse?

Worse.

14. What is your favourite film of all-time?

Richelieu, starring George Arliss.

15. What is your favourite restaurant in the world? (Please name the city, too.)

Mark’s Club, London.

16. What job would you least like to do for 40 hours a week until retirement?

Cleaning public washrooms.

17. What superpower would you find most useful? (Flying, invisibility, indestructibility…)

Indestructibility.

18. Have you ever been in a fist-fight in which blood was spilled? (Feel free to offer a brief description.)

Yes, a few bloody noses, given and received, when I was in elementary school,m especially playing hockey.

19. Do you have any phobias? (Feel free to explain which ones.)

No.

20. Do you think it is better to ask for permission or beg for forgiveness?

The first.

21. If invited to travel on the next NASA space shuttle mission, would you go, knowing that statistically there is a 2.52% chance that you would die (126 missions so far, 2 disasters)?

No, not out of fear but because the preparation would be too onerous.

22. What is humankind’s single best invention?

The wheel.

23. If you could clone a human, would you and who would you clone?

Abraham Lincoln.

24. What is your favourite toy from your childhood?

A little metal model of a pre-war Lagonda convertible.

25. Which news media sources do you most trust? (Please list up to 3 sources)

Wall Street Journal, Economist, Commentary.

26. Which corporation do you think has had the biggest positive effect on the Earth and/or mankind? Which has had the biggest negative effect?

IBM; no opinion.

27. Do fully developed ideas pop into your head or do they develop slowly with effort?

Both.

28. Do you believe in reincarnation?

No.

29. If given a choice for your next life, do you want to be a man or a woman? (As with all these questions, answering “why?” is optional.)

Man, I would know better how to do it.

30. If you could pick, as which animal would you choose to live your next life?

Human. If it had to be another animal, I suppose a whale, the largest kind.

Run With The Hunted, 4.5' x 4.5', oil on canvas, 2010

By Randy Gladman. Original Akrylic Content. Published online April 28, 2010.

One of the strange and disappointing characteristics of the Toronto art scene is the way our local and national art critics have a knack of missing important exhibitions. In 2004, Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini, hosted a museum quality posthumous exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys, marking the twentieth anniversary of that legendary German conceptual artist’s Difesa della Natura project. While New York City-based Artforum.com offered a glowing “Critic’s Pick” review, the Toronto contingent of critics more or less totally neglected to cover this exhibition of works by one of the most important (if challenging) artists of the twentieth century. One of the only reviews was NOW Magazine’s blathering piece that may have caught the show but missed the point entirely. This article wished more explanatory information would have been provided (and lamely suggested viewers spend a night in advance doing library research) yet neglected to mention that an excellent catalogue providing an intelligent backgrounder on the artist and the series of works was published for the show.

The astigmatism of Toronto art criticism-at-large was revealed again recently when Matt Bahen’s “Run with the Hunted” exhibition of paintings at Moore Gallery was all but ignored in our local press. Though I am writing this blog posting on April 27 and it is still possible that press-delayed publications like Canadian Art will offer reviews, the fact that the dailies and weeklies seem not to have noticed this show says so much more about their critical abilities than it does about the show itself. Those who saw it will consider this exhibition one of the best painting shows of the year.

Bahen paints like no one else in Toronto. He modernizes classical impasto handling and earthy palettes by interpreting the catastrophes of twenty first-century societal conflict. While there are a number of interesting painters in Toronto who are currently exploring this thick-paint style, Bahen does not fall into the trap set by Kim Dorland (and followed recklessly by Brendan Flanagan and recently James Olley) whose high-key synthetic colour will surely be seen in the long run as dated as 1980s shoulder pads. Loose and honest, Bahen’s brushwork is abstract up close but offers highly representative interpretations when the entire composition is visible.

With Wings Spread, 6' x 8', oil on canvas, 2010

Bahen is Earthbound. His problems are those of the everyman with whom he empathizes and represents. Hailing from small town Ontario, he struggled to pay for art school and found himself homeless on more than one night during that educational program. Parallel with his art career, he now spends many of his productive hours as a front-line social outreach worker, delivering hot food, condoms, and dignity to Toronto’s most needy. These real experiences inform Bahen’s sense of truth and value. His paintings, dating back to 2002 when he graduated from OCAD, carry the weight of the world and betray his inability to ignore the plight of mankind’s most downtrodden.

In earlier series, Bahen’s works used images reaped from international media sources to present the devastating effects of politics, war, famine and disease around the world. A flag above a Red-Cross tent is shown in stark relief, surrounded by thousands of displaced Africans as they scramble for inadequate supplies of food and medicine. A pick-up truck rolls unsteadily down a broken dirt road, impossibly overloaded with refugees clinging to each other on the last ride to somewhere, anywhere but here.

Winter, 4' x 4', oil on canvas, 2009

In “Run with the Hunted”, which closed on April 24, 2010, Bahen turned his attention away from the suffering masses of people and focused instead on the wildlife that is left after the fall of man. A pack of hungry dogs trudges silently through a broken cornfield, the snow blending seamlessly into the horizon-less sky, searching for food. A stag deer bellows a requiem for its destroyed habitat while in the background a church collapses into ruin. A saddled yet rider-less donkey stands lonely and aimless in a barren wasteland. In these works, the busted and rusting relics of man are left behind while the surviving fauna scavenge the wreckage, searching for food and a new way to live. It is unclear if Bahen’s apocalypse is a warning about or a yearning for the end of man, but his soulful handling of colour and paint suggests a definitive certitude that this, friends, is where we are headed. There is something of Bono’s concerned social gravitas in these paintings but none of that singer’s preaching.

Truthful painting exhibitions like Bahen’s recent effort are rare in Toronto. They should be celebrated, debated, appreciated and recognized. Similar to the way we disrespect our natural environment, we ignore shows like this at our own peril.

Through The Ministry, members access a program of events that include studio visits with rising and established local artists, intimate visits with notable collectors, exclusive gallery exhibition previews, film screenings, talks and panel discussions with published art thinkers, and group art fair excursions. The Ministry offers an informative and creative social environment for young professionals to network and explore the enrichment of collecting and supporting the arts.

For more information, please see our website at www.ministryofartisticaffairs.com.  Though The Ministry is a members-only social network, everyone is welcome to join.  The Ministry values diversity.

Here is the invite we sent out for the first event:

We hope to add at least one new artist per week with the questions changing over time.  Please click the photo or name of the artists below to reach their interrogation.

Dirk Westphal, photographer

Yorgo Alexopoulos, multimediartist

Rob Carter, video and photographer

Cara Bloch, photographer

Jason Gringler, painter

Heather Darcy Bhandari, artist advisor and curator

Ana Benaroya, illustrator

The important Contemporary Art blog “Viet Art Forum”, based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, recently interviewed me via email.  Viet Art Forum seeks to educate Vietnamese artists on how to promote their careers internationally.   www.vietartforum.com   A Vietnamese version of this article is available too!  It was a lot of fun being on the interviewee side of an interview for a change…

PHỎNG VẤN RANDY GLADMAN

An Interview with Randy Gladman, by Marc Djandji - March 29, 2009

Exhibition Essay by Randy Gladman.  Displayed as wall text as part of “Ryan McGinness: Aesthetic Comfort,” Artcore Gallery, Toronto, September 23 - November 15, 2008.

Popular understanding of human history is often given chronological shape by dividing the time we have spent on this planet into various eras defined by our most significant technological innovations. The Stone Age, for instance, marks a broad prehistoric time when humans made their first technological advances, widely using stone for toolmaking. As our ancestors discovered the benefits of metal, the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages followed. More recent eras are characterized by the development of highly sophisticated and complex achievements in culture and science; the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and the Space Age. With the rise to dominance of the internet, our own era is coming to be known as the Information Age or the Communication Age, signifying a general shift in the global economy away from the production of physical goods towards the manipulation and distribution of information.

The fact that our lives are dominated by communication technologies is obvious. It is likely that every person who enters this gallery to view this exhibition will be carrying at least one cell phone. Most of us receive, literally, hundreds of emails per week, often accessible from anywhere via the Blackberry or iPhone in our pocket. Facebook enables us to passively and effortlessly keep track of massive networks of friends and colleagues. MSN, AIM and Skype provide no-cost long distance communications with business associates and loved ones around the world while satellite phones allow for crystal clear communications from the most remote corners of the planet. We are exposed to thousands of advertising messages per day via radio, television and billboards, some of which are so subliminal we do not even notice while others demand our attention by being wrapped around giant buildings with glowing LED lights.

The works of Ryan McGinness reflect the global and omnipresent reality of this modern system of technologically-aided communication. His works present cacophonies of ideas communicated visually and simultaneously. It is as if his paintings allow us to see with our naked eyes all of the cell phone conversations, text messages and emails zipping through the atmosphere all around us in any given second. Like listening to a thousand conversations at once, we can perceive words and ideas in these images but the general meanings are lost in the chaos.

McGinness has developed a unique visual language composed of swirling worlds of original icons that is accessible and eye-tingling. Close examination of the details of his paintings reveals rebus-like words and phrases communicating meaning through visual rather than verbal or textual means. The artist has grown a vast and ever-increasing repertoire of graphic drawings, each of which is legible in the same universal manner that symbols in airports denote where the washrooms or passport controls are located; understandable to everyone regardless of cultural background. McGinness has created a new, beautiful, if utterly quixotic, form of communication which, like ancient hieroglyphs, tells stories whose narratives are left to viewers to decipher. While this sign system draws aesthetically on graphic design, it is different in that it does not seek to clearly convey specific concepts, narratives nor ideas. His works obliterate the line between graphic design and fine art and replace it with a new immense language of mass communication that offers a kaleidoscopic visual mindscape. When using this language, the artist promotes the power of creativity over the necessity of communication.

McGinness began to create this language at the time of the birth of the new millennium and the progress of this language’s development can be traced as clearly as that of a child growing into an adult. Like a baby learning to speak, his first works in this new direction (the artist has been exhibiting his work consistently since 1996 but did not begin to develop this sign system until roughly 2000) were simple, monosyllabic outbursts where the entire picture plane was dominated by one simple icon at a time such as that of a snowflake in a circle or a reflected image of a simplified symbol of a man riding an escalator. The meanings were open to interpretation but complexity was absent. Within a year, the entirety of the artist’s output was focused on developing this new vocabulary and he had soon moved beyond the single word phrases to images that placed numerous icons beside each other within the picture window, resulting in visual sentences. Not only were the compositions becoming more sophisticated but so were the icons themselves. Angels sprouted second heads while Gothic churches were reflected horizontally into heavily-armed military fortresses. Monkeys rode galloping unicorns whose shit sprouted magic mushrooms. Soon, these sentences grew into paragraphs as McGinness began to layer the sentences on top of each other, creating more and more complex relationships between the icons via manipulations to size, color, and depth. With “Aesthetic Comfort”, it is clear the artist has mastered the language. Each piece in this show offers a full chapter of some Byzantine, unknowable story, while the total epic novel is composed of all the works in the exhibition.

The process McGinness uses to write these novels mixes traditional crafts like drawing and silk screening with sophisticated technologies such as Apple computers and Adobe software. With pen on paper, he distills ideas into flat, iconic designs. These analog drawings are turned digital as they are scanned into his Mac and further refined by aligning tangent points and outlines. These digital files are catalogued into what is now a massive icon library and then brought into the mechanical realm in the form of custom made silk-screens. Rather than using paintbrushes, McGinness makes his marks on the canvas using these silk-screens, replacing brushstrokes with pulls of the squeegee. The icons on the surfaces of the paintings seem machine made in their sharp perfection, but these marks all result from a careful marriage of analog, mechanical and digital technologies. With dizzying complexity yet simultaneously beautiful simplicity, the art of Ryan McGinness creatively manipulates various modes of innovative messaging technologies to produce a brand new language that speaks about the Communication Age and the ways we use it within and across societies.

Ryan McGinness
Aesthetic Comfort
Curated by Randy Gladman
September 27, 2008 – November 15, 2008

For Immediate Release

Artcore / Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Ryan McGinness’s first solo exhibition in Canada. Aesthetic Comfort presents a major painting and sculpture installation by this internationally recognized, New York City-based artist.

Ryan McGinness makes work that occupies the stylish space where art and graphic design collide. Influenced by Andy Warhol and mixing digital technologies with more traditional crafts like silk screening and painting, McGinness, who is represented in New York City by the highly innovative and influential galleries Deitch Projects and Pace Prints, is known for his slick, flat, colourful pop works. Made up of swirling worlds of readable custom icons, his rebus-like paintings spill off their canvases and climb the walls. With works that range from consumer products like skateboards, carpets, t-shirts and soccer balls through to museum-collected prints, sculptures and paintings, McGinness has developed an original visual language that is accessible and eye-tingling yet, like ancient hieroglyphs, this sign system tells stories whose non-linear narratives are left to viewers to decipher.

These new works present a cacophony of icons, drawn from the artist’s vast and ever increasing repertoire of symbols. Appropriating the power of corporate branding and advertising graphic design, and acknowledging the universal legibility of visual modes of communication, the baroque mash-ups result in beautiful collisions which inundate viewers with playful stories that do not clearly convey any specific meanings but are somehow never confusing. Drawing from our boundless contemporary visual landscape, McGinness combines symbols as varied as unicorns, fire extinguishers, bathroom indicators, human figures, antlers and electric plugs with pop culture allusions to Pac-Man, Star Wars, Atari, Michael Jackson, Jackson Pollock, Picasso and even Warhol’s famous hairdo, all in a kaleidoscopic effort to promote a new, beautiful, if utterly quixotic, form of communication.

Ryan McGinness, 36, grew up in Virginia Beach and was influenced by skateboard culture, rock concert poster design, and street art. In 1994, he received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and then moved to New York City where he still lives and works. In 1999 he published his first book, Flatnessisgod, with Soft Skull Press, which visually presented the parallels the artist saw between street art and corporate branding, and offered insights into his design process. The book, which is today considered an important graphic design manifesto/bible, was the first in the expanding library of books by and about the artist. In 2005, Rizzoli New York published the first artist monograph, Installationview and this esteemed publisher will publish Ryan McGinness Works later in 2008. McGinness has published many limited edition artist books including No Sin/No Future, Multiverse, Project Rainbow, Pieceofmind and Luxurygood. He has been the subject of hundreds of articles in art, design, fashion and culture magazines, including Ocean Drive, Elle, Art News, Art Review, and The New York Times in the last year alone. His solo shows have been hosted in cities around the world, including Milan, New York City, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, Munich and Seattle and he has been included in many museum exhibitions at highly prestigious institutions including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, P.S.1/MoMA in New York City, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. McGinness has guest lectured extensively in the United States and his works have been acquired by many of the most important collections and museums in the world.

Works from the artist’s new Aesthetic Comfort series will also be shown in simultaneous solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum. A limited edition artist book of the same title, published by Los Angeles-based Arkitip to accompany this series of exhibitions, will be launched at the opening reception at Artcore on September 27, 2008.
______________________
Randy Gladman is a Toronto-based Curator and Art Critic who first met Ryan McGinness in 2001 through his capacity as a Curator and Artist Manager at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York City. He contributed an essay to the 2005 Rizzoli New York monograph on the artist, Installationview, and his articles have been published in many art periodicals including Canadian Art, Contemporary, Artforum.com, and Artext, among others. He has been working to make this exhibition a reality since he returned to Toronto in 2004.

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published on BlogTO.com, July 23, 2008

When it comes to the topic of Contemporary Art, it often seems there are only two kinds of Torontonians. There are the culture-junky downtowners who try to visit the galleries at least a couple times a year, in an effort to find unique gems for their collections and to remain cognizant of the heartbeat of the city. And then there is everyone else, the other 98% of our neighbours who don’t know that there are galleries in the city other than the ROM and AGO and wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to find fresh, exciting new art if it occurred to them to look. What a shame because Toronto sports a wildly creative, at times bombastic and risque, gritty, gorgeous, and cerebral art scene.

Most people in this city, for instance, have no idea that the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (MOCCA) sprouted up like a sunflower in 2005 on Queen Street West. Nestled in the rear of a funky, mural-lined courtyard just east of Ossington, it functions as the anchor of Toronto’s Contemporary Art scene. (While The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery casts a long shadow, any Toronto artist will tell you that the MOCCA does the real, vital field work of supporting local art and keeping it from floating away into irrelevence.)

This internationally respected institution, directed by the rockstar-ish, hockey coach-like, beer-drinkin’, curatorial Godfather of cool art David Liss, hosts public openings for its raucous, sexy, intelligent and adventurous exhibitions every six weeks or so. Not only are these creative parties open and welcoming to everyone and their children, but they are free and fun and come with a nice dose of wild. (At all other times, entrance to the museum is “pay what you can”.)

One thing all the art dealers in the city will agree upon is that they wish more people visited their commercial galleries. Like a tree falling in the forest, art only makes an impact when there is someone there to see it. The more people the better. Unlike the pretentious art galleries of New York City or London, the staff and owners of Toronto’s best galleries are friendly and welcoming, always happy to explain the sometimes mysterious but always thought-provoking pieces on display.

1.  Stephen Bulger Gallery

Galleries simply cannot be higher quality than Stephen Bulger Gallery, in Toronto or anywhere. Always welcoming, professional, educational and relevant, this West Queen West gallery is dedicated to photography. Presenting images by the finest photographers in the world from the earliest days of the medium through to current practice, this gallery is an essential stop on any art tour. For photographers, it is Mecca.

Hands down the freshest gallery in Toronto, young owner/director Wil Kucey consistently looks under wet rocks for visionary, ultra modern artists no one has ever heard of. Many of them are still in art school. Kucey, who graduated from OCAD himself not so long ago, has the best eye for the new.

3.  Clint Roenisch Gallery

More curator than gallerist, some people in the scene wonder why owner Clint Roenisch, possibly the finest curator in the city, runs a commercial gallery when he should be the curator of contemporary art at the AGO. Insightful, knowledgeable and challenging, the exhibitions at this essential Toronto gallery take no prisoners.

4.  Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini

Not only does this Distillery District gallery have the most international program of any of the city’s contemporary galleries, but it also has one of the biggest and best spaces to show art. You may never have heard of the artists showing here, but the rest of the world certainly has. If you are looking for “blue chip” Contemporary Art from around the globe, speak to gregarious and knowledgable Fabrice.

5.  Monte Clark Gallery

The commercial home base of the internationally admired “Vancouver School of Conceptual Photography”, not only does this gallery consistently present art of the highest quality, often by Canada’s finest artists, but it is housed in one of Toronto’s most gorgeous display spaces, down in the Distillery District. If you are lucky, Douglas Coupland might just be hanging out when you stop by.

6.  Interaccess Electronic MEdia Arts Centre

As famous Canadian-Mexican digital media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer says, “the only thing new about New Media art is that it is not new anymore.” Toronto needs more galleries like this Ossington Street staple, dedicated to ballsy, adventurous, techno-geek art that exists at the gummy intersection where technology and creativity collide.

7.  Angell Gallery

With exhibitions that are always daring and original, this gallery was one of the pioneers in the West Queen West art district. You’ll rarely see a safe, conservative show here. Owner Jamie Angell is easily the friendliest, most enthusiastic dealer in the city.

8.  Christopher Cutts Gallery

If you like a spoonful of mean, gruesome, beautiful decadence mixed into your art, Christopher “Cutter” Cutts is your tour guide. The art in his gallery usually has a dark and mischievous side. Though a bit out of the way near the intersection of Dundas and Bloor (yep, they intersect), it’s always worth the visit.

9.  Diaz Contemporary

You could drop this gallery unmolested into any of the great contemporary art centres of the world and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. Owner Benjamin Diaz had an illustrious and influential career in Mexico City’s art scene before opening this important gallery in Toronto which usually exhibits works by Canadian and Mexican artists.

10.  Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects

Now in its tenth year, this gallery is spread across various store fronts on Queen Street West. Edgy, relevant, and, at times, cutesy, this gallery is one of the most respected and established spaces showing “emerging” and “mid-level” artists in the city.

http://blogto.com/toronto/the_best_contemporary_art_galleries_in_toronto/

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Contemporary, Text Art Special, vol.21, Issue 13, 2008

We interact with technology hundreds of times a day. We dial telephone numbers, scan our food through supermarket check-out lasers, change the television channel and move our mouse to surf to another web page. We click, slide, dial, push, swipe, turn and type on our machines to communicate our contextual commands, and we take for granted that the device will understand our desires and provide an expected result. The point of interface, where our bodies meet our machines, is at the heart of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s art. His works create new interfaces and interfere with communications in order to propose new, unexpected, exquisitely simple purposes for our techno-gadgets, and hint optimistically at the intimate things our machines will do for us in the future.

Lozano-Hemmer is the undisputed champion of epic-scale, publiclyinstalled interactive art. His inventive electronic interventions have been exhibited in over 30 countries, and in 2007 he was selected to represent Mexico for the country’s first ever participation in the Venice Biennale. Like all his pieces, his work in the Palazzo Sorano Van Axel used technology to generate spaces that made observers active participants in ephemeral artistic dialogues. Harnessing the power of digital programming and marrying it to the aesthetics and diverse materials at the forefront of contemporary art, his work resides along the fi ne threshold that separates humans from their technology.

Lozano-Hemmer’s works are participatory by nature. His installations provide safe, quirky, technoid environments within which viewers’ movements, thoughts, touches and even heartbeats are recognised, captured and transformed. These are manifested as light and energy through complex yet elegantly refi ned structures to startling, playful and beautiful effect. Drawing on his background in both science and the performing arts, the artist develops spaces where viewers and participants are one and the same.

Holding citizenship for both Mexico (where he was born) and Canada (where he was raised and educated), Lozano-Hemmer maintains studios in Montreal and Madrid. Teams of engineers based in Montreal and Edmonton, Canada, help the artist develop the complex software required for each piece and fabricate the physical structures. During the summer of 2007 he had the opportunity to produce his first major exhibition in Canada during Toronto’s ‘Lumina TO’ festival. Pulse Front redefined Toronto’s skyline waterfront for seven summer nights. Twenty high-power robotic searchlights flashed across the night sky, each beating in synch with the heartbeats of passers-by as they gripped specially designed handlebars at nearby stations. Giant rays of light shot into the night at varying intensities, orientations and speeds to correspond to the viewers’ pulses. Billed as the largest interactive light sculpture ever, Pulse Front’s 200,000 watts of power could be seen from more than 15 kilometres away, seamlessly blending the intimate and spectacular.

Manipulations of text and the technological methods that we use to communicate with one another are always fair game in Lozano-Hemmer’s work. A project at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan in 2003 was similar to Pulse Front in that robotically controlled searchlights penetrated the night sky, but their frequencies and pathways through the ether were determined by intercepting participants’ cell-phone text messages. Encoded into unique sequences of movement and intensity, the abstracted textual messages bounced around in the night until they were received by the intended recipient’s phone. Once ‘caught’, the messages were removed from the night sky and simultaneously displayed on the receiving phone’s screen and projected on to the façade of the museum. In Subtitled Public (2005), he used an infrared surveillance system to track visitors to the gallery, who were then tagged with projections of conjugated verbs. These remained branded by light on the individual, no matter where they went in the gallery, until they touched another visitor, at which point the words switched to a different person. Lozano-Hemmer states that he plays with text and technology in order to ‘slow down communication and transpose it to a more abstract level. The lack of clarity is where communication ends and art begins.’ By injecting digital interference, the artist allows for enriched interpretations of messages.

For many years, Lozano-Hemmer’s works were only recognised in new-media art circles. He has received the Golden Nica award at the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, two BAFTAs for Interactive Art in London, an award of distinction at the SFMOMA Webby Awards in San Francisco, the Trophée des Lumières in Lyon and an International Bauhaus Award in Dessau, among many other accolades. But his major public commissions have now attracted the attention of the contemporary art world, which has recently claimed him and his work. In 2007 he was invited to exhibit at both Tate Modern and MoMA in New York, and while he still works with the newmedia gallery BitForms in New York, less technology focused galleries, such as Artcore in Toronto, OMR Gallery in Mexico City and Guy Bärtschi in Geneva now show his work as well. Though he was the only interactive artist included in the Venice Biennale in 2007, his participation in this elite bastion of established contemporary art signifi es his admittance into the accepted canon of important contemporary artists. It also marks the inevitable, if begrudging, acknowledgment that new media art is an important and central form of contemporary artistic expression. As Rafael Lozano-Hemmer says, ‘The newest thing about new-media art today is that it is not new any longer.’