Eric Fensler

Revisiting Eric Fensler's re-works of the classic G. I. Joe PSA adverts. Totally hilarious stuff. Find them here.
More on his site: http://www.fenslerfilm.com/

Work In Progress

Just west of Spadina Ave. along Richmond (Toronto) is this small, two-story building that was sold to a condo developer. It's slated to be removed in August. Until then, I get to play.

Kim Adams

Shown above are works by Canadian artist Kim Adams. These were produced in the mid to late 90s from H- and O-scale model bits. Awkwardly funny stuff. Plenty more here.

From top to bottom: Cranberry Juicer (1995); Street Bar (1995); Sky Scratch (1995); Cheese Eaters (1998); Tanker Viewer I (1998).

Dorian FitzGerald

Dorian opens a show this Friday, March 12, 7pm at Clint Roenisch's Gallery. If you happen to be in Toronto, pass by to see it. Runs until April 17. More details here.

Allan Ryan

Allan passed by the studio a few weeks back and painted the sub wall. Here are some details. Find his site here.

Water Cut Tag

"Chou 1" brushed aluminum tag, edition of 10.

André and Neckface

Found these shots I took a while back of a few works we caught last time in NY. They're by French artist André (the pink face) and by NY's Neckface (in black and white).

Click on an image for a larger view. Press the back arrow on your browser to return.

At 52 McCaul

New works of mine are at 52 McCaul (Toronto) starting Wednesday, March 3rd. In the main gallery is work by Nick Kozak.

Bodies

The most-used subject in visual arts was forever the human figure. We all know how painting came about and how it was used to record history, mainly human history. Sculpture also illustrated the human figure, recounting glorious moments of human-hood.

In contemporary art, the figure-as-subject moves on somewhat from the hierarchy defining and lets the makers put themselves in positions not yet achievable by the living; death. In other works, events that were only tales for the media are revisited and turned into historically important artworks. Here are a few examples of this phenomenon. Click bellow on any artist's name for more on them and their work.

From top to bottom: Gregor Schneider's Man With Cock (2004); Robert Barta's Sleep Installation (that's him asleep. He performed this piece in 2009); Maurizio Cattelan's All (2008); Cao Fei's Game Over (2004).

Robert Longo

Shown above are large charcoal drawings by the American artist Robert Longo. His site can be found here.

From top to bottom: Untitled (Rita, reversed) 1997; Untitled (Ping) 1997; Untitled (Isabella) 1997; Untitled (Daniel) 1997.

Mad C

The works shown above are by Mad C, one of Germany's finest graffiti artist. Instead of discarding all of her used-up spray cans—a fair bit, rest assured—she carefully encrusts them with rhinestones, gems and crystals making up top-shelf references to the culture-of-bling. They are all unique, handmade and more on them can be found here. Find Mad C's website here. I advise you dig deep—lots of great work up there.

From top to bottom: From the series Parallel Kingdom (2009). Images courtesy of Mad C.

Mike Bray's 24 Frames

From time to time I come across an artwork that in my opinion, takes the cake. In this case, it's Mike Bray's piece entitled 24 Frames. Perhaps it's because it has—for me—all the makings of a great artwork: replication and falsities, historic references, Jeff Beck, smashed guitars...

The work is an homage to Jeff Beck's guitar smashing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow Up. In the scene, the Yardbirds are playing to a packed modish nightclub audience when Beck's guitar amp fails him. Tired at tinkering with it, he starts hitting the amp with his guitar before throwing it to the ground. He continues trampling the instrument on the stage floor with his crisp suede shoes. Here's the clip from YouTube.

Reading more about the film, I found out that The Who was supposed to be the band playing that stage as Antonioni was quite taken by Pete Townsend's guitar smashings at the time. The guitar used (a Gibson hollow body) is a bit misleading too, Beck was playing almost only Fender. Turns out that second to The Who, Antonioni chose The In Crowd to play in the film. They were later replaced by The Yardbirds as they were more popular. So Beck played a replica of Steve Howe's Gibson ES125 built for the performance.

Anyway, back to Mike Bray. Find more of his work here.

From top to bottom: Details from the installation 24 Frames (2009).

Work In Progress v8.1

Back to these now. Seven canvases in total, to be shown in one full length of approx. 35' wide. Here's a few detail shots.

From top top bottom: TTYL, detail (2009); WTF, detail (2009); IDK, detail (2009); BTW, detail (2009). Click any image for a larger view, hit back to return to the blog.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

I'm spending a few hours today researching artists that have used the gallery space as a living environment as opposed to a place for showing stuff. One of my stops was spent looking at the work of Buenos Aires-born, NY-based, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. In the early 90's he would turn galleries into living kitchens and cook Thai food for visitors. Since then, he created installations that offered special places for people either to play, read, eat or rest. Really cool stuff. Follow this link for an article by Jerry Saltz. It's totally on-point.

From top to bottom: Untitled, Still (1992); Untitled, the raw and the cooked (2002, photo: Kioku Keizo); La salle de jeux (1998, photo: Florian Kleinefenn); East Village Apartment [replica] (2009).

Swet

Here's an interesting one: Swet, the Danish graffiti artist, started a project that would see him paint 100 graffiti pieces over 100 days. Sponsored by the German paint makers Molotow, he started December 1st 2009 and is now somewhere producing his 40th piece. You can follow his quest here.

From top to bottom: Swet, reversed (Day 1) 2009; Swet (Day 7) 2009; Swet (Day 30) 2009; Swet One (Day 35) 2010.