All the places I've applied since July.....

Junction Arts Festival

Art Gallery of Ontario

Petroff Gallery (twice)

Powerplant (twice)

TPW Gallery

Media Experts

Gallery 1313 (Director and Board Member)

Canadian Art Residency

Royal Ontario Museum

Artscape – Wychwood Barns

Ontario College of Art and Design (administrative, three times)

Documentary Organization of Canada

New Photography Gallery (Bau Xi)

St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts

Blue Dot Gallery

Lord Cultural Resources (twice)

Jessica Bradley

Harbourfront Centre

ARCCO

Stephen Bulger Gallery (twice)

Birch Libralato

C Magazine

Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

City of Toronto

CONTACT Festival

Lonsdale Gallery

Ontario Association of Art Galleries

Pride Toronto

Open Studio

1000 Acts of Art

City of Mississauga, Cultural Division

BookNet Canada

ReelWorld

Ontario Art Council

Sock that Doesn’t Suck

Superframe

Toronto Arts Council

Thrush Holmes Empire

Toronto International Film Festival

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (twice)

Canadian Art Gallery Hop (event volunteer)

The Banff Centre

Art Gallery of York University

Progressive Fine Art

Verno International Art Studios

Corkin Gallery

Museum Pros

Royal Conservatory of Music

Beverly Owens Project

Western Front Society

Susan Hobbs

Jessica Bradley

Oakville Galleries

Above Ground Art Supply

DeSerres

Curry’s

Resulting in three interviews; one contract employment; some still pending; two volunteer opportunities

Canadian Art Magazine/Business

Canadian Art magazine doesn’t always get a good review among members of the Canadian art community – with criticisms for being too commercial, for operating more as a business than a responsive art journal, and for bolstering its own ego. This is a distinct and purposeful strategy that places it on par with many other glossy art and culture publications and it shouldn’t necessarily incite negative reaction. In presenting itself as a commercial venture full of gallery, artist, and university studio programme advertisements, it's constructing an image of the large lucrative network of the Canadian art market (or reflecting it?). I think what's easy to criticize about Canadian Art’s strategy is that is seems somehow un-Canadian to submit to commercialization and skimming (if not informative) content. An attempting to place the Canadian art business on the same tier as the American art business should be a welcomed advance, although a successful comparison is still debatable.

When browsing through Artforum or Art in America, you can tell they are more like business platforms than critical journals (although Art Forum has its moments). This mixture, however, is a crucial and valuable component for these internationally circulating magazines. Canadian Art has been making a stand as a trend predictor, supporting the formation of a network of cultural-funders, art-makers and curators – it’s an obvious move by the magazine to establish itself as more important than previously assumed – no one asked for a top ten list of Canadian artists to watch or for a list of who’s who in the Toronto curatorial circuit, but Canadian Art took up the responsibility for making these decisions, establishing a hierarchy with high glossy fashion-esque spreads to boot. So why does it feel so awkward? Maybe because the self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing message of these sorts of articles indeed appear as expressions of a palpably un-Canadian sentiment. Canadian cultural identity seems to have a lot to do with laying claims on any individual - dancer, artists, actor playwright etc. - who has ever spent any time living or working in Canada through which to build a significant cultural identity. Listening to CBC radio on any sort of regular basis, you notice that any one who's interviewed is readily identified by his/her Canadian connection (however small). Sometimes it seems like we're bashfully grasping at any degree of association through which to build up our country's cultural credentials.

Paul Butler’s work entitled Toronto Now Suite (2008), in Sitting Pretty: The Enduring Role of Portraiture in Contemporary Art (5 Nov – 5 Dec 2009) at Redbull 381 Projects, is not pointing to the potentially ‘un-Canadian’ aspects of Canadian Art magazine, but it surely comments on the awkward creation of the magazine's recent spreads such as “Ten to Watch’ (Fall 2009) and the ‘Spotlight: Toronto Now’ (Winter 2007). The 'Toronto Now' article was composed as a presentation of different categories of art and culture contributors that were subsequently gathered together for group photos in such categories as “Partners, Friends, Travellers,” “The Directors,” “Sources” and “To Watch” – which seems like a precursor to the larger section in Fall 2009 that lists another group of young artists to pay attention to, if you care to be savvy. Butler’s project includes the pages of the Canadian Art 'Toronto Now' photo shoot excised from its original binding with each figure blocked out by tiny mosaic pieces of black archival tape – precisely and completely. Also, the descriptive text listing the who’s-who were cut out, leaving empty rectangular spaces.

With the erasure of information and identity, essayist Julia Lum in the accompanying exhibition essay notes that Butler’s “work invites viewers to imaginatively insert other bodies into the scene, running parallel to Butler’s call to arms for more artist-run initiatives in the wake of the recent economic crisis: ‘We have an exciting opportunity as artists, to reclaim control and reinvent our art world.’” This is absolutely true, as I’m sure there were water cooler discussions here and there about who should have been included and who shouldn’t have been. What interests me about Butler’s work is the obvious identification of a constructed scene existing in the Toronto community. This is not only a ‘call to arms’ for artists to take charge of the scene, but also a call for support by anyone who perceives a need for the identification, definition and hierarchization of that scene within the structure of artist, dealer, critic that we see played out in places like Artforum. A gesture that bolsters the Toronto art scene as being comparable with other international cities is tantamount to what this work is addressing.

Through negating the hierarchy, Butler also points to its current construction through the format of an art magazine with aspirations for international clout - one that operates as a corporation to a certain extent through huge fundraisers (29 Sept blog post), a foundation, considerable donations and corporate sponsorships. As an artist who has contributed writing to this magazine and who is also exhibiting at Redbull (yes, a gallery and the brand name energy drink), for Butler to be criticizing the construction of a polished art scene adds another level to the work. I do not want to insinuate hypocriticracy, because that's useless. I'm instead pointing to the conscious participation by all of us: writers, artists, dealers, young professionals, non-profit administrators; we're all caught in a hierarchical art scene which Canadian Art magazine is perhaps only attempting to make shamelessly explicit.

In Defense of [Insert medium of choice]

First image to come up from a Google Image Search for "painting"
http://www.keithgarrow.com/

A panel talk about drawing and a panel talk about painting in the course of two days is a treat as it seems peculiar for artists to come together and discuss their media and what it means. These events were not positioned in a defensive way, but instead as a chance to take advantage of the public dialogue space where they can work through the changing conditions and considerations of their media. These talks seemed to be about defining a medium, drawing and painting, as both 'still important' and 'newly important.' Painting will always be painting and drawing will always be drawing, but the works in both the drawing show at XPACE and the painting show at the University of Toronto Art Centre (Art Lounge) allow for a lot of bending and reconsideration.

Accompanying XPACE's current exhibition, ORDER/CHAOS (16 Oct - 13 Nov) was a delightfully relaxed panel discussion moderated by XPACE Director Derek Liddington that included Sarah Kernohan (ORDER/CHAOS artist), Dan Rocca (the curator) and Luke Painter (OCAD Faculty). The panelists briefly discussed their own work, pointing to it along the gallery walls when applicable, and quickly moved into a discussion about the history of drawing practice, the material quality of a drawing, and about the economic value of their work (in the sense of how drawing is considered or not considered as a commodity object within the art market). My own opinion about drawing is that its history describes it as preliminary intercessory kind of work; drawing is a planning and layout tool and doesn't stand alone as a end, but only as a means. I always wanted drawing to be an end-all-be-all and although I explored other avenues in art school (painting, printmaking, photography, metal work and sculpture) all of those things just led back to drawing, as I always assumed that drawing was its own project, and not in support of others. These artists in the panel were also proponents of drawing as a stand-alone practice in that exhibitions can be composed of finished drawings not intended to be anything more than what they are.

The issue of marketability did come up, from a member of the audience who (although asserting to the rest of the audience that she did not necessarily believe in this opinion, voiced it anyway...making me think that she did believe it). She stated that drawing is not considered as an independent and valuable practice because we all did it as kids and so it is therefore considered as elemental and primitive. She said that every artist wants to make work that can sell, and associations with drawing's primitive and childish qualities prevent people from taking it seriously. I can innumerate the web of problems in statements like this (like people claiming that their kid could replicate a Paul Klee or Barnett Newman), but really, all that needs to be parsed from this kind of statement is that, yeah, art practice can be easily dismissed by objective and outsider positions when it cannot be reduced to commodity exchange and capital growth (or the 'Recession').

In a recent job interview I got a peculiar question from the gallery curator/interviewer as a sort of wrap up: "I'm interested in why people work within the art field, I mean, why did you go into Art when there's no money in it?" This was at a commercial gallery, which is maybe even more confusing than addressing this same issue in a panel discussion in an artist-run centre.

First image to come up from a Google Image Search of 'drawing'
http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/minitext/escher/big.asp?IMAGE=drawing_hands

The panel discussion at UTAC coincides with the exhibition Facing the Screen (4 Nov - 19 Dec) in the art lounge, curated by MVS student Bogdan Luca. Its panelists included the existing mid-career generation of Canadian painters in the GTA Monica Tap (Associate Professor, U of Guelph), Michel Daigneault (Associate Professor, York U) and Joanne Tod (Professor, U of T) with moderator Vladimir Spicanovic (Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts, OCAD). The panel addressed the role of digital imagery and the computer in the lives of artists and how they currently influence artistic practice. This relationship was addressed during the XPACE drawing talk as well. Both panels agreed that the influence of digital technologies on artistic practice has been heavy and is almost fully integrated into much of their creative processes, from the use of digital cameras, to internet research, to google image searches - and of course, the internet in turn is used as a medium through which to talk about art too (re: blog).

Talks that exist to figure out how the art world and artists' practices are changing are valuable investigations, if only because they can be revisited again and again. Within the city, there are many lectures by individual artists about their work, many talks from curators relating what they think is important in art today, and from theorists and writers talking about what is being talked about. There was high attendance at both the XPACE and UTAC events, more at UTAC, possibly because of the venue's general appeal for both young and old, maybe because painting is considered more important than drawing (stretching), or maybe because UTAC is directly attached to a university on site (with XPACE once removed from OCAD). Both the curator and the moderator at the UTAC event expressed surprise at the level of attendance to almost an embarrassing degree, surprised that anyone would care and thanking everyone numerous times for expressing that care.

However few, within a city of 2.5 million, there remain some people who give a damn about what is being done and what is being said about art, regardless of whether there's no money in it (and only some free snacks). Funny that it's a surprise, even within the community itself.

Reiteration:

Remain a cultural producer. Make stuff. Do stuff. Keep thinking.

John Baldessari, "I will not make any more boring Art", 1971. Can be found in the entrance foyer of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The performance and subsequent lithographic print was made by students working from directions sent to the college by Baldessari.

Not that I don’t do this already, and it’s absolutely possible that people reading this blog do this too, but for anyone who starts to wane, convincing themselves that conceptual and theoretical exploration doesn’t play out in the real world, in the work-place, in your ideal job, then you should straighten up and re-realise that it’s as important as developing those basic database skills, those promotional skills, those budgeting skills.

Both the ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ operate in tandem with one another (they’re close enough to be making out when no one’s looking), if only because they exist as a perpetual dichotomy; throughout my time in art school, to my time in-between schools in the working world, to my time in my masters degree, and especially now, as a recent graduate, tempted to throw out all conceptual endeavours in order to learn HTML and earn certificates in fundraising.

What do you want to do? There’s a place for you, but as I’ve been recently advised: “You’ll have to pay your due in the mean time.” Exhaust yourself within the scene, go to events, talk to people – not necessarily about needing work, but about what work you already do as a method through which to collaborate with people, with ideas, with projects – it’s all there to be mined, but you certainly have to do some digging and make sure that people can see the dirt on your knees and the pick axe in your back pocket.

I see curation and writing as processes that make ideas live in the world through thoughtful development and an interest to provoke. Learning HTML and how to hang a painting can help you get into a comfortable position through which to pursue these processes. With aspirations to be a curator, I see administrative skills as a practical asset: the skills I chose to learn and develop are an act of curation (why not?); they are the result of clever considerations over the composition of elements with the goal of creating a larger message, or indication of a message. There was a recent article in the New York Times by Alex Williams (2 October 2009) about the co-option of the term ‘curating’ by bicycle assemblage shops and clothing boutiques. I don’t disagree with this new development, as the term never had a definitive life in the art world to begin with – I still don’t know what curating is as a single practice, so why can’t other people make sense of it while the art world fumbles? Figuring out how curation operates as a skill and a practice in my life is a way of determining my own distinct path towards it – that includes working through different paths, such as visual arts practice, administration, fine-art framing, database management with a spattering of barista service. It will all add up, as long as the deep thinking doesn't get thrown by the wayside.