Link to the oficial site http://gallery.tmpp.org/gallery/en/artists/index.jsp

Peak Gallery artist Mel Day in the ishow The Missing Peace - Artists Consider the Dalai Lama

among Participating Artists

Laurie Anderson • Richard Avedon • Christo and Jeanne-Claude • Chuck Close • Mel Day • Anish Kapoor • Bill Viola

MEL DAY
Hummed, whistled, or sung, Mel Day's recent work is preoccupied with the idea that two different states can exist simultaneously. Something is there and not there, is known and not known. Faith and doubt exist at the same time. This radical ambivalence brings with it deepening mystery and unlikely hope.
Mel Day is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and experimental contemplative currently living in Northern California. Her work is shown both nationally and internationally including recent shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and a two-person show in Berlin. Awards include a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts and the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley. She received her Masters in Fine Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen's University, Canada and the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland in 1992. Day is represented by Peak Gallery, Toronto.

Lyn Carter

Untitled 2010 fabric & chair H 31” x W 45.5” x D 206.25”
installation view

installed at Shaw Street School for the exhibition Art School (Dismissed), Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Toronto-based artist Susy Oliveira creates sculptures, paintings and installations that examine human’s preoccupation with controlling and re-producing elements of nature through artificial fabrication. Often using digital images that attempt to capture or reproduce elements of nature, the artist repurposes the images to give new life and form to artificial versions of natural and organic material. As humans continue to manipulate and impose unnatural systems onto otherwise natural elements of the world for personal pleasure and consumption, Oliveira’s work underscores our perpetuated distance from a world that is undisturbed by our existence.

Susy Oliveira is currently presenting an exhibition of new works titled Your Face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round! is currently on view at Platform centre for Photographic and Digital Arts in Winnipeg, Canada. The artist is a graduate of the University of Waterloo and Ontario College of Art and Design. Recent exhibitions include, The Girl and the Bear at Peak Gallery, Toronto, and fOR yOUR pLEASURE at the University of Waterloo. Click here to read a previous feature of Susy Oliveira’s work on DailyServing.com.

ART in AMERICA

Center Stage in Toronto
by daniel fuller 04/16/10

A bewildered Tony Conrad sticks his tongue out and gives two thumbs up. Then suddenly, the avant-garde composer and filmmaker is scowling, and has decided that the ungainly woman perched on his lap is initiating a stupid, poisonous project. Uncomfortably we watch the defeated hostess retreat for the door. On that particular week's webisode of Artstars* there was little chance to bait the unwilling "guest"; she was dismissed guilty before making her charge.

Of late the art world has been lured to the potential for mainstream outreach offered hesitantly by the medium of television; witness Work of Art, the Project Runway for competition-inclined artists soon to premiere on the Bravo network. With a mind to undoing the telegenic (or at least tele-ready) face of the art world, each week the confrontational Toronto-based vlog ArtStars* bring their gonzo art criticism to computer screens worldwide. The project belongs to digital artist Jeremy Bailey, who remains behind the scenes as reporter-provocateur, and Nadja Sayej, whose outfits include a cozy blue snuggie and a Wonder Bread-sponsored NASCAR top, and reports like some kind of deranged newscaster on gallery openings and the local art scene.

Each webisode begins as Sayej explodes onto the screen with a cartwheel, or swimming on the ground, or stomping like a self-parody of a diva, pausing to deliver her cliché campy tagline, "SNAP." A line of percussion summons the show's 3-D digital logo, which mimics Sayej's movements, rains down on her umbrella, or once causes her head to explode. The duo then hit opening night guest lists with a hand-held camera, an a/v closet microphone, and contentious attitude.

Much of the ethic of the show is Oedipal: the artists confront artists and professionals they have decided represent the lackluster nepotism of an old guard, and a younger generation they accuse of complicity. In 1984, critic Philip Monk panned an exhibition by General Idea, only to see them rise in the coming years to international notoriety; to make amends, Monk restages the exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University. The ArtStars* are compelled to call boisterous bullshit towards the flip-flop.

ArtStars* mimic primetime (or even daytime) TV's of misleading fight-dirty mechanics, namely jump-cuts and post-production editing. Clocking in at under three minutes per webisode, they can fashion their particular agendas whether it's a fully plausible critique or not. For instance, when asked if she could explain her work on the next, more complicated level Kriistina Lahde attempts to defend her cut newspaper kaleidoscopes, her words are speed-up beyond recognition, while the word "ArSpeak" digitally flashes before her mouth. The result produces a dilemma: Sayej might be correct in her assessment, but comes off as a tyrant.

Sayej is a former contributor to the Toronto Globe and Mail. But with her theatrically intimidating air, she exudes the bluster of a Greenberg-ian era evaluator willing to throw down rather than allow the repercussions of arts writing that's mostly provincial boosterism.

The series takes place in a Toronto that national and municipal stakeholders have advertised as undergoing a Creative City Renaissance. Over the past decade significant investments have strengthened the major institutions: the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario among them, in an attempt to foster a national cultural capital. Canadian Council on the Arts grants have been primarily allocated to art making, which has benefitted the careers of a minority. Very little of this national money goes to the few monthly glossies, which often produce safe profiles because bluntness burns bridges.

Weary of hospitable generalities the ArtStars* direct themselves to the responsibility of the critic, hoping to overcome stereotypical politeness. ArtStars* is a descendent of GalleryBeat, the pioneer of gotcha arts journalism who took swipes at the Soho gallery landscape in the 1990s. Hosts Paul H-O and Walter Robinson crashed seminal shows (the 1993 Whitney Biennial; Cady Noland at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1994; Tracy Emin at the 1995 Gramercy Hotel Art Fair) and clunkers alike (Beth B.'s "Pussy Pictures" at Deitch Projects), asking strange, simple questions to serious minded people. The series also recalls of New York City's public-access glory days of offbeat productions.

Some artists, like Joseph Drapel or conceptualist Christian Giroux, appear content to play the patsy, happy for any and all recognition. Others offer professional facades, exchanging curt pleasantries with the interviewer. In one recently shot at Mercer Union, the venerable artist-run center, Sayej begins by immediately announcing her distaste for the audience, and then finds some spectators literally running in the opposite direction upon her screaming out their names.

Choosing not to hide behind quasi-anonymity, as is a real possibility on the Internet, the ArtStars*make a potentially anti-careerist gesture against the white cube.

Photography by Mike Ford

YorkU Magazine - page 28
February 2010

Carl Tacon
Sculptor
Off the Old Block

What weighs about 50 tons, is 42 metres long and is made up of 20 individually hand-carved, 133-centimetre-high sections of Vermont Mountain White marble? Answer: Carl Tacon’s public sculpture, Shift, an imposingly beautiful work sited at 1 St. Thomas St. in downtown Toronto near Bay and Bloor.

The sculpture’s marble drapery makes reference to classical imagery while balancing that backward glance with a form-meets-function contemporary experience (the sculpture acts as the property line of its host, One St. Thomas Residences, a luxury condominium building).

Public sculpture hasn’t had a very happy existence in Canada, or in Toronto for that matter, so how did Tacon (BFA Spec. Hons. ’88, MFA ’96) get commissioned to create Shift? “When the city gives developers concessions in the municipal zoning bylaws, the developer gives something beneficial back to the city in exchange. So one per cent of the project’s total building budget goes to funding public art,” says Tacon.

Shift’s drapery imagery stems from the idea of a building’s facade or surface being merely a perceptual skin, he says. “That skin empowers a building with a sense of authority and stature. It has an elusive quality that can be used to suggest the transitional space between the interior and exterior facades of a building.” Tacon says a large part of his work is about “how surfaces, any surface, can be deceptive.”

January 7 to February 13, 2010

Susy Oliveira at The New Gallery, Calgary | review

‘Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round!’