MOCCA – annetteandquebec

March 26, 2023

MOCA/NOT MOCCA

MOCA is the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. It was, previously, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), located for more than 12 years on once trendy (now pandemic battered) Queen Street West. Going back further, MOCCA was founded on the Art Gallery of North York, which originated in 1999. MOCCA went dormant from 2015 to 2018 after which time it emerged as MOCA, at 158 Sterling Road, in a former auto parts factory, and there, it identified itself with the globalized world of the 21st century.

MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto

Remediation – Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga‘s exhibition at MOCA, (see above) titled “Remediation,” is original, playful, uplifting to visit and a breath of fresh air. (This is something we desperately need as spring is so far not arriving.)

Installation view of “Remediation” exhibition by Kapwani Kiwanga

The botanical world has a role in most of the pieces in this show. In fact, one definition of remediation is a way to cleanse soil of toxins, specifically using plant life.

The large, see-through, feather-light, air-filled shapes the artist created are also about plants. She calls them vivariums. I was informed that Kapwani Kiwanga is referencing vivariums in their historical role, as methods to transport life, particularly plant life, from one place to another. This could be a metaphor with all kinds of ominous connotations, but the thing about this artist’s work is that it’s not heavy-handed/didactic. The visitor can just enjoy looking at these strange and surprising objects amid the ponderous concrete pillars that dominate the second floor at MOCA.

Installation view of Vivarium by Kapwani Kiwanga. Some names of vivariums are named as follows: Vivarium: Cytomixis, Vivarium: Adventitious, Vivarium: Apomixis. The names reference botanical anatomy.

Originally The Vivarium, I learned on Wikipedia, was the name for the enclosures where ancient Romans kept living things used in their entertainments. Various wild animals, mainly imported from Africa and the Middle East, like tigers, crocodiles, ostriches, elephants and aurochs waited in The Vivarium for their cue. Gladiators waited elsewhere.

“The Marias” installation view of work by Kapwani Kiwanga

This artist doesn’t flinch from using a range of materials in her work. These delicate paper flowers — the piece is called “The Marias” — are surrounded by dazzling yellow plinths and walls. They’re pretty enough, but the artist has created them because of their unique properties and historical function.

…the flower on show, native to Latin America, was known by the locals for its abortive powers. The chemicals in the flower were used by enslaved women to break the reproduction of servitude.
from “Remedition” exhibition booklet

On the main floor of MOCA Kapwani Kiwanga has produced a massive installation composed almost entirely of sisal. She has said that she “considers how various natural materials become witnesses to history. ” Sisal, for example, played a big economic role in Tanzania. When the prices plummeted because of synthetic immitations, the country suffered.

The material, in the form in which the artist uses it, has a fascinating colour, texture and the unique, undulating lightness which the artist uses to create artfully draped, other-worldly environments. It’s so hard to refrain from touching it!

Sisal recently rebounded on the world markets. The roll above is availabe at Canadian Tire for about $5.00

A video piece included in the show, was shot in Tanzania, where soil is a reddish colour and coats everything in the dry season. We see the artist cleaning the lush roadside vegetation in a gesture of maybe aesthetic intervention or perhaps its a symbolic, sishyphean act of appreciation.

Detail of “Vumbi” by Kapwani Kiwanga

I like the fact that this mesmerizing piece is open to interpretation.

I know so little about Tanzania: an East African country with vast wilderness areas. They include the plains of Serengeti National Park, a safari mecca populated by elephants, lions, leopards, buffalos, rhinos, and Kilimanjaro National Park, home to Africa’s highest mountain. Offshore lie the tropical islands of Zanzibar, with Arabic influences, and Mafia, with a marine park home to whale sharks and coral reefs

Giraffe in Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania

Trade Show – Susan for Susan

Trade Show is another exhibition presently on display at MOCA. Susan for Susan is the name of the design collaboration between Kevin Watts and John Watts. (One of the MOCA volunteers at the show told me the mother of John and Kevin Watts is the Susan in question. Nice.)

How brutalist would it be to have a concrete table in your kitchen, hanging from the ceiling by thick chains? I did not realize it was something I always wanted. That would be a place to have some serious conversation, espcially with the right lighting, a battery of flourescents maybe.

Detail of “Trade Show” installation by Susan for Susan

Susan for Susan has created an installation that gestures toward the idea of an apartment, employing industrial materials in a coarse state. I think they are trying to get at a return to “truth to materials.”

Something called a gantry (which is a bridge-like overhead structure with a platform supporting equipment such as a crane) pulls the whole thing together. This gadget gives the installation an overarching absurdist twang which is very appealing.

The mirror has an amusing quality. It’s like one of those magnifying mirrors, sometimes screwed into the bathroom wall, except the”accordian” attachments are oversized which means the whole thing can be pulled out and adjusted as required to get the right view.

Detail of installation by Susan for Susan

My favourite is the vase, evidently created from a medical device used to set extreme fractures.

Ouch.

April 9, 2022

Many years ago I visited the Venice Biennale and stood around under the hot, white, Venetian sun examining the paintings of Agnes Martin.

I remembered that long ago trip as I downloaded the absolutely free pass to the second occurence of the Toronto Biennale. And later, visiting some of the exhibitions, things felt almost normal.

The Biennale is a breath of fresh air! Wandering around in the early spring sunshine, mask free, I forgot for a short while that we are in the midst of a sixth wave.

The exhibition is spread out around the city, but largely clustered in the west end, in an area dotted with construction cranes and debris. 72 Perth Avenue, the site of a future condo complex, now slated for demolition, functioned as a church before it was snagged to host the Biennale. The visitor can appreciate the raised, oratory platform and the long, vertical, stained-glass windows as evidence of its former incarnation as the Praise Sanctuary Ministry, Church of the Firstborn Apostolic and consider the connection between houses of worship throughout history and today’s grand museums; austere, white cube galleries; and newly minted biennales seeking an affordable venue.

Installation titled “Holdings” by Nadia Belerique

Nadia Belerique‘s installation, made of white plastic cargo barrels, anchors the space at 72 Perth, where it functions almost like an alter. The apparent lightness of the materials, their translucent, glowing, jewel-like coloured surfaces, which capture daylight flowing from behind, create the rooms’s focal point with an original sense of monumentality: lightfilled, colourful, airy. Within each barrel Nadia Belerique creates assemblages of found materials which may or may not refer to their original purpose.

Detail of “Hoildings” by Nadia Belerique

What Water Knows, The Land Remember , is the title of the “curatorial vision” of the Biennale. This vision is highly idealistic, referencing the Toronto region i.e. the Great Lakes and their tributaries, and tying together ideas about ecology and the environment, inheritance and ancestry, relationships and collaboration. I did have a jarring sense of dislocation, faced with these touchingly utopian ideals and scrupulous political correctness, after a steady media diet of fear and despair: brutal war in Europe, global rise of authoritarian leaders, rage of white males, mass extinction and climate meltdown, endless Covid waves of misery. It was great to step away from all that for a few hours!

I was excited to be introduced to the work of Paul Pfeiffer. He did a fascinating, multi-media piece about a pop-star and his billions of fans around the world. In this case: Justin Bieber. He used this utterly contemporary phenomenon to explore the encarnacion-style of woodworking, which originated in sixteenth century Spain, and continues to this day in the Philippines, as a way to produce lifelike icons of religious figures.

Detail of “Incarnator” by Paul Pfeiffer

The artist named Aki Onda created a piece that had an uncanny resemblance to so much work that went on in the seventies. I really like looking at outdated technology, particularly from the seventies and eighties, so his piece called “Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking To Me,” was a hit for me. The text that accompanies the piece, an oversized booklet, describes the artist’s ongoing attempts to channel Nam June Paik through various garbled radio broadcasts he chances upon.

“Nam June’s Spirit was Speaking to Me” by Aki Onda

Scanning through the station, I stumbled upon what sounded like a submerged voice, and began recording. I concluded this was Paik’s spirit reaching out to me.
Aki Onda, from the booklet “Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking to Me”

It’s hard to know if Aki Onda is just relating his experiences earnestly, or not. I too have heard strange, submerged voices on the radio, from time to time.

In the gallery. the sound was very low, almost inaudible, but you can listen to Aki Onda’s piece on You Tube.

Lingering at the exhibition made me think that the fact that it takes place in a former church possibly influenced the curators decisions. Many of the pieces referenced spirituality, liturgical items or connections with deceased beings or those of distant generations.

For example, Andrea Carlson shows a sculpture and huge painting, referencing “Man Mound,” which is a 214-foot-tall earthwork in Wisconsin, dating back to between 600 and 900 BC, when it functioned as a burial and ceremonial site.

Detail of Painting titled “Cast a Shadow” by Andrea Carlson

The painting, which is immense, composed of numerous panels, and painted in a joyful mash-up of styles, appears to contain many messages, laments, pleas and warnings from the beyond, or the distant past, or just elsewhere.

Detail of sculpture by Tanya Lukin Linklater titled “Held in the air I never fell (spring lightness sweetgrass song”

Tanya Lukin Linklater‘s sculptural piece has many components. I was very attracted to the drapped scarves that hung from the ceiling, which in keeping with the theme of this show at 72 Perth Avenue, appears to reference liturgical garments, tapestries and shamanistic cloaks.

Kohkom is Cree for grandmother, and for Tanya, the scarves are a way to evoke “women’s intergenerational, embodied, experiential (and sometimes land-based) knowledge.
from Toronto Biennale of Art Website

I dashed over to MOCA — apparently my free pass entitles me to a discount on coffee at the MOCA cafe — which is around the corner on Sterling. The main floor of MOCA is part of the Biennale.

It was very enjoyable to look at the installation by Maria Qamar. This artist strikes me as completely of the moment, freely moving between the worlds of fashion, art and digital stardom.

Strolling into MOCA, and Maria Qamar’s installation, I had left the spiritual realm behind at 72 Perth, and was into a version of the material now: young, glamourous and Desi!

More Maria Qamar

October 8, 2021

GTA2021

The title of the big, new exhibition at MOCA is GTA2021. This title “plays on the name of the city’s broad metropolitan area” we are earnestly informed, on the MOCA home page. It wasn’t until I looked at the biographies of the participating artists that I understood why a definition of GTA would be required. Many of these artists have deep connections elsewhere. Places — around the world — are named, where the artists currently live, where they were raised or educated, where they exhibit or find influence and inspiration. Other places and a sense of otherness, are core to many of these artist’s identities and overtly manifest in their work. “GTA” wouldn’t mean much back in their far-flung communities and too, there is the possibility of confusion with a certain popular video game.

What then, does the show say about the GTA? Yes: Toronto is the most diverse city the world! But beyond that cliche, in this context, Toronto doesn’t really exist at all. Instead it has a sort of airport status, bland, meaningless, a place from which to participate in a “global discourse.” A characterless point converged upon rather than a vital place from which art emerges.

21 Greater Toronto artists and collectives address the most pressing issues of our time — and our city.
MOCA GTA2021 brochure

The idea of addressing city issues was not really in evidence. But does that matter? Could be it’s just a marketing glitch. The important thing is there are many interesting things to look at and think about in the GTA2021 show! Here are a few:

On the main floor of MOCA, inserted into the exterior wall, is a sculpture by Ghazaleh Avarzamani. Referencing Islamic screens and patterns, Catholic confessionals and some undefined utilitarian object, the work plays with daylight and shadow and with ideas about private and public, outward and inward and seeing and being seen. Encountering this object upon entering the exhibition sets the viewer up perfectly. This piece is beautiful and thought provoking.

Detail of The Parade of All Feels by Common Accounts

Also on the main floor, displayed in a hard plastic bubble, is a model for a parade float by the collective Common Acccounts.

The Parade of All Feels by Common Accounts

I wish this artwork was bigger! It’s packed with tiny details and shimmering mini-video displays, but it’s so small that it becomes toylike, hard to look at and to take seriously.

I’m still on the main floor! Walter Scott could not ignore the pillars in MOCA. He half-dressed them and created a complicated installation with a raw, youthful, shambolic appeal.

In the background are hung big, bold, voluptuous, painted curtains by Julia Dault, one of the most well-known artists at GTA2021.

I wandered upstairs and was startled and impressed to encounter the sound installation by Sahar Te, which consists of a massive SUV, a Toyota Tacoma from 2003, this one draped in stretchy black nylon and emitting a deep, throaty, menacing breath. It made me wonder how many incel creeps are roaming the streets of the GTA in their oversized potential weapons of mass murder!

The artist indicates the vehicle beneath the drapery is a 2003 Toyota Tacoma: truly a beast!

Also upstairs, is work by Tony Romano, a Toronto native who is drawn to the imagery and culture of Southern Italy, his ancestral home. Here, Tony Romano fuses fragments of found objects to create a romantic sense of yearning for another place and time. All these pieces have a soft, dreamy, tenderness about them.

Personal ethnic heritage is more often the subject of the art in GTA2021 than Toronto and its problems. Maybe the artists have to look back first, and only then, can they look ahead.

Installation by Azza El Siddique

The artist Azza El Siddique used the “architectural plan of a Nubian burial chamber” to create an atmosphere of decay and abandonement. Cultural artefacts and heirlooms lie scattered, looted, broken and water streams down to further erode and destory. Here there evocation of a cultural past feels sorrowful and bitter.

I kept going.

At the back of the third floor I found a screening room. Here are the results of a collaboration. Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko worked together to create a truly original, witty and engaging video titled Surface Rights. I was so happy that I made the effort and rounded the corner of the third floor at MOCA to find this wonderful video tucked away in the most distant part of the exhibition.

This is what it’s all about: The city of Markham has an illustrious past as a leading breeder of dairy cows. A work of public art, in the form of a chrome cow, by the artist Ron Baird, was gifted to the city. From there, everything unfolds.

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko have two pieces in the show. Charity, which you can watch here, is an interactive documentary (jointly produced by the NFB and MOCA) in something called 360 video. “Surface Rights,” a related video, you have to see at the Museum. It’s worth the trip.

I hope one of Toronto’s most celebrated cultural ambassadors makes his way down to MOCA to check it out.

May 9, 2015

….More Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

There are CONTACT exhibitions everywhere in Toronto this month; a coffee shop around the corner from me on Dundas West, the local organic supermarket even! Hard to get a good look at them through the vegetable misters, but they are there.

Bau-Xi Photo – Chris Shepherd

Kennedy Station Platform by Chris Shepherd

Is the essential character of a city reflected in its transportation systems or do the systems help to create the character? Think of the glamour of Montreal’s metro; its bold graphic styling and silently approaching trains, or the romance of New York’s subway, permanently embedded like its famous black and white, art deco tiles. Relatively, Toronto’s underground transportation has seemed somewhat mundane, workaday and all about function.

Pape Exit by Chris Shepherd

Chris Shepherd gets at the heart of the form and function connection in his exhibition at Bau Xi Photo. (I am actually the owner of some subway shots Chris Shepherd and I think it is because of looking at these photographs that I began to appreciate the aesthetic of Toronto’s subway.) Sadly, it is not glamour or romance that is at the core of Toronto; it is work. And the Toronto subway is in total harmony. The photographs of Chris Shepherd show us the modest pathways to our daily grind and reveal their perfection.

From BlogTO I learned the following:

The colours were chosen to discourage rowdy behaviour and loitering rather than for aesthetic reasons. Consequently, they have that institutional quality of hospital or penitentiary walls. For many years, Torontonians grumbled that their subway stations looked like public washrooms. But now, decades later, the remaining designs have become Modernist classics.

There has been a recent flurry of TTC projects to improve and concurrently embellish the existing underground system. It’s exciting to see a little civic preening going on in this city so focused on dogged achievement.

At Dufferin Station, Winnipeg artists Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shaski (of spmb) add blooms of pure colour, and big pixilated images to transform one of the most heavily used and rundown station of the Bloor line. Chris Shepherd documents this unrestrained use of colour so well. We can only hope it does not lead to loitering or rowdiness.

Dufferin Station by Chris Shepherd

And finally the hoardings have come down at Union Station. Big, messy, sketchbook style line drawings by Stuart Reid are revealed. The drawings, depicting TTC riders, have been blown up and transposed onto glass panels. They are fresh, unexpected, thoughtful, sensitive and kind of a shock relative to the relentless TTC grids and tiles.

Union Station panels by Stuart Reid

My current work address is near the Ferry terminal at the bottom of Bay Street. Wandering around the area at lunch time gives me the feeling the plastic wrap is coming off. Everything is shiny, clean and has that new car smell.

Across the street from me, draping the exterior of the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Center at 11 Bay Street is a public installation (also part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival) titled Best Beach by Sarah Anne Johnson. The piece is particularly stunning when seen from within the Waterpark food court at mid-day. At that time the whole place is flooded with light and Sarah Anne Johnson’s piece looms over the oblivious diners, glowing and shimmering in the daylight.

Views of Sarah Anne Johnson’s piece Best Beach from the Waterpark food court at 10 Bay Street

It is a huge photograph and it sweeps across the entire end of the food court’s massive plane of windows like some giant playground graffiti, messy, dripping, flourescent and joyful.

Best Beach by Sarah Anne Johnson

MOCCA – Part Picture

The exhibition at MOCCA, called Part Picture, is also associated with the Scotiabank CONTACT event. On entering the show there is a statement clarifying the curatorial rationale for the pieces included. The artists in this exhibition, declares the statement, must be:

young
reacting against digital photography, and,
combining photographs with another creative medium, like painting or sculpture

Why Jan Groover is included I do not know? She was born in 1943 and became well known in the 1970s for close up, vaguely feminist, domestic interiors. Maybe its because they are truly painterly and reminiscent of a Braque still life in purples, greens and reds? In any case I appreciated seeing these beautiful photos.

Untitled by Jan Groover

Painterly too are the photos by James Welling. It’s interesting that James Welling has worked for Brioni (the Italian fashion conglomerate) because these prints resemble nothing so much as pretty dress fabric.

14Y by James Welling

Works by Ryan Foerster are more in line with the stated intentions of the show and truly take photography into another realm. Eschewing the tradition of pristine craftsmanship in a dust free darkroom, Ryan Foerester uses mangled photo plates, chance and accidents of light, dirt and debris to create wonderfully expressionist pieces with a particular Petri-dish gore appeal that reads as post apocalyptic.

Artwork by Ryan Foerster

Ellen Carey’s Mourning Wall is composed of spent Polaroid plates. They have a dreary, grey, funerary look and are arranged in the finest tradition of minimalist sculpture. This piece made me think about the brief flowering of unique technologies. (How exciting Polaroid once was! Why did I throw my Commodore 64 in the trash?!) Ellen Carey extends the metaphor of obsolescence, death and decay with the Rust Belt aesthetic of this work.

Mourning Wall by Ellen Carey

Slick reams of photo paper tumble in heaps; snapshots sprout cables or have little blanket covers attached; but more typically, in this show, photographs take on a more painterly look, moving away from documentation, the traditional province of photography, and closer to objecthood, and marketability.

68 by Mariah Robertson

November 19, 2014

We are suddenly plunged into Polar Vortex hell, again.

I hurried through the steady snow in mild panic.

Vera Frenkel at MOCCA

Ways of Telling is the name of the MOCCA exhibition of Vera Frenkel’s work. The entirety of the MOCCA plant is packed to overflowing with Vera Frankel art pieces: There’s an early video piece in the lobby, curtained off with black drapes; two different books on Vera Frenkel’s art are prominently displayed and on sale at the reception desk; both of the large exhibition spaces are filled with Vera Frankel’s video projections, installations, numerous large collages and documentation of art pieces from the past. Here and there holes are punched right through walls so the viewer doesn’t have to miss anything.

Installation shots from Ways of Telling

An entire functioning “piano bar”, where you can actually get a drink and which contains everything (and more) that constitutes a real bar, has been constructed in one of the main rooms at MOCCA.

…from the Transit Bar

The hallway is a site for her work and if you leave through the rear exit you are obliged to pass through yet another Vera Frenkel piece.

Installation shot of “The National Art Institute”

Even the bathroom contains an installation by Vera Frenkel.

The most obvious constant in this plethora of output is Vera Frenkel’s voice. Throughout the galleries she can be heard everywhere. Refined, pleasant and carefully modulated this voice tells stories with an almost hypnotic quality. With uncanny intimacy and assurance the voice confides. You the listener and she the teller are well acquainted. She has definitely got your ear and she is going to tell you the whole story.

For me, coming from the West, her voice has a particular Ontario cadence, a certain lilt that is present only east of Kenora. But beneath all this self possessed Upper Canadian palaver there is determination, sometimes sorrow and often a growing rage.

In the large video projection called Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive Vera Frenkel explores long-standing anger directed at the greed that has defined the waterfront landscape in Toronto. Through a complicated shaggy dog narrative she artfully discloses the facts. Money and power win. The lake disappears behind a grid of scaffolding.

Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive

A piece entitled The National Art Institute, Or what we do for love is largely virtual. The posters about the National Art Institute in the exhibition baffled me so I checked it out on the web. The piece seems to have no beginning or end. Like some bureaucratic nightmare it has its own smug logic and lots of deadends. Looking through the website is quite fascinating but maddening in its elusiveness. In trying to get a grip on the dystopic near future Vera Frenkel seems to be asking the viewer to share her anger and start a revolution. Her ambivalence is not so much toward technology as it is toward the gatekeepers of technology. As in Once Near Water, she objects to being cut off.

In The Blue Train – a multi-channel photo-text-video installation – recollections and imaginings are woven together as a fateful journey unfolds. The images and sound have a wistful dreaminess and evoke the disorienting feelings that can overtake the traveller.

The Blue Train

Travel and other kinds of dislocation are also the focus of …from the Transit Bar, originally created in 1992. The lights are low. The piano tinkles softly. There is reading material and video, both in numerous languages. It’s a haven for conversation or solitary reflection and the viewer is invited to indulge on their own terms. …from the Transit Bar gets to the heart of Vera Frenkel’s work which is sometimes trenchant and always warm, human, generous and open to all.

…from the Transit Bar

September 6, 2014

The purpose of this blog is to write about Art in Toronto. What’s going on in art in Toronto right now? I intend to start this project by taking a walk every Saturday, visiting some galleries, taking a few pictures and recording my impressions and thoughts here. I am not sure where this project will take me. Galleries might be just the beginning. I admit I don’t know where the art scene is at this time. I hope to find out.

On Saturday, September 6th, I walked down Ossington Street. It felt like the last breath of a short, cool summer. The street was lively and colorful.

First stop: O’Born Contemporary

Callum Schuster’s exhibition is all about limits: He uses only the sphere and only in black and white. Any evidence of the human hand has been expunged from the work. Numerous spheres were created in various media. Each sphere is divided in half: one half a dense matte black and the other half dazzling matte white. The sphere’s were twirling, white sphere’s becoming black spheres, they were lined up, tilted, embedded in frosted plexiglass, some larger, some smaller, all extremely controlled, modulated, calm. The artist made animated films and sculptures of black and white spheres spinning in the same steady, controlled way. The work had the feel of an architectural or maybe mathematical model; pristine, artfully constructed, and indeed, the artist has stated he is interested in measurement. It is dry, cool, extremely clean – bordering on obsessively clean – work.

The tall, elegant co-director of O’Born Contemporary, Rachel Anne Farquharson, was very gracious. I scanned the artist’s statement and asked her what is the meaning of “praxis.” (The context was the “praxis of painting.”) She told me it means “practice” in Greek. I didn’t know what to make of that. She mentioned the artist’s cleanliness, obsessiveness, tidiness etc. and has also been quite taken with his intelligence.

The overwhelming sense of this show is how removed the work is from the anything that’s going on just outside the white gallery cube. I can relate to that specific focus and can understand that someone might not want to even read a newspaper in the ghastly summer of 2014.

Next up: Angell Gallery

I really like Jamie Angell. He is truly an art enthusiast, and no one can work a room like him.

Jamie’s main artist, i.e. the one that keeps the gallery financially solvent, is Kim Dorland but Jamie takes risks on all kinds of other artists and always has something unusual to look at. The current show in the large gallery is by Daniel Hutchinson. What do you know? This artist is all about limits and is extremely intelligent! This is what the lovely young gallery assistant told me. I’m detecting a trend.

Daniel uses only black, although he under paints in color. The color sometimes bleeds through but the viewer is not quite sure if it’s a hallucination or some kind of afterglow that occurs from staring at the profoundly black paintings. From my perspective they were hard to look at. The black was so shiny and sticky looking, like old liquorice, tar or pumped up rubber, industrial stair treads. The artist added glare by strategically placed neon tubes next to the paintings

Daniel is interested in cosmology, dark matter and various themes from contemporary physics. In the statement heavy hitters like Malevich and Ad Reinhardt are referenced. Clearly Daniel Hutchinson is a serious and ambitious painter.

Incidentally, this morning on CBC a scientist was talking about the Higgs boson particle. I knew it was a big deal to find this particle but I was not really sure why. According to the scientist this is a happy story because it means we are not surrounded by a lonely vacuum as was previously surmised. We are in a soup of matter and the discovery of the Higgs boson proves it. This particle is the building block of everything, hence, it is called the “God Particle.” The details are a little hazy for me but as Daniel Hutchinson seems to suggest aspects of physics such as the Higgs boson are mysterious and compelling and provide rich inspiration for visual art.

Onward… to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)

What would we do without MOCCA? Who would provide a venue for STAG Library’s mugwort recipes and eloquent documentation on “relanding.” (“Relanding” is the word used by Gina Badger and cheyanne turions, the two individuals who make up STAG Library, to describe an attempt to reconcile the violent past of original European settlement in North America.)

Also in the main space was an exhibition called TBD which is focused on reimaging the Museum. It consisted of numerous ideas for exploding the conventional museum and dispersing the contents in inventive, original ways. The ideas are so amusing: Think of the possibility of a temporary museum in the construction hoardings around new buildings.

There was lots of standing around reading at MOCCA, which doesn’t really work for me. A certain amount of reading is okay but maybe this exhibition should have been a magazine or a book?

The prints of Museum floorplans were stylish objects and they would definitely look good in a corporate boardroom.

Sometimes MOCCA’s installations are so subtle that I just miss them totally. Apparently there is a sound installation by Mark Soo currently on display. It’s called “House is a Feeling” but I couldn’t really get a beat on it even though I was wandering in the main gallery for 10 minutes or more. How I missed it I do not know. Maybe that installation had something to do with the intermittent drilling that finally drove me out of there and into the adjoining exhibition.

The highlight of the MOCCA visit for me was the 2013 film entitled “Provenance” by Amie Siegel.

The piece explores the fetishism around certain mid-century modernist furniture. In this case, chairs and other items designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret are documented being packed up, travelling across the ocean, expertly marketed and sold for hefty prices, eventually to take their places in a succession of glamorous contemporary settings. These objects turn up in all the right places and they seem to become more beautiful and desirable as the film progresses, invariably captured in slow tracking shots in a muted palette as the context screams Understatement! Taste! Money!

The back story on these chairs is so interesting. Chandigarh is a city in India designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jenneret in the middle of the last century. This furniture is apparently the everyday office chairs and desks that the inhabitants of this dreamed up city would use.

And finally: Paul Petro Contemporary Art

The downstairs gallery features an exhibition by Morley Shayuk. I would like to get to know this artist and ask him to accompany me to Home Depot or Rona sometime. He seems to really know his way around hardware and building materials. He creates massive wall reliefs incorporating all the latest polymer variants. They have an off-hand grandeur and would have looked great in the (now bulldozed) former Winnipeg International Airport.

Upstairs was an arresting show by Shelagh Keeley. What I really liked about her paintings (on Mylar) was their uncomplicated sophistication. No handout required: It is all there in the paintings. They are lush, meditative, succinct and that works for me.

Clotilda was texting me to meet her at Starbucks. I concluded my first Toronto art blog walk with a feeling of calm and optimism.