Left: Anders Zorn, Omnibus, 1892.
Right: Patti Smith, Ghent Altarpiece (The Backside of the Mystical Lamb), Ghent, Belgium, 2005. © Patti Smith. Courtesy the artist and Robert Miller Gallery

Secret sculpture in the public realm: The BBC reports on a series of ten meticulous book-based sculptures that have been left in various Edinburgh museums over recent months by an unknown artist. From a dragon hatching in a nest to a dark Jekyll and Hyde tableau, these are beautiful gestures mindful of their medium, striking even closer to their fairy tale origins through the generous anonymity of these works as gifts set loose in public space to be discovered by chance.

Patti Smith: Camera Solo: Patti Smith’s first U.S. solo exhibition has been ongoing at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut since October. For those of us unlikely to make it over there before the show wraps next month, however, the dedicated website complete with image gallery is a thoughtful alternative.

Anders Zorn: I love the moment when a not-terribly-obscure historical artist has the capacity to surprise me. This time, it’s Swedish painter Anders Zorn on the occasion of an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. As Sharon Butler points out in her overview of the artist, there are elements in Zorn’s work much like John Singer Sargent, but there’s also something stark, more prescient of modernity’s advance, that really grips me in these paintings.

A Shattering Slow Motion: This could be saying something about the general condition of the art world, but I have seen my share of contemporary art that takes a shattered beer bottle as its subject (Simon Starling’s early work Plecnik, Union (2000) comes to mind) yet few of those works match the cyclical wonder of Jonathan Schipper’s Measuring Angst - and hell, I’m just going off the video documentation here. Using robotics and computer programming, Schipper’s beer bottle endures a 12 minute loop of being slowly hurtled across space
and exploding against a wall before the robotic arms pull the bottle back to its beginning. A beautiful work well worth watching.

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Dave Hind, Aluminum, Quilting and Society, recycled aluminum siding (photo: Stephanie Vegh)

Also included this month are two of the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s new exhibitions for 2012. Both Mark Lewis and Kristin Bjornerud didn’t open until the same day as my Akimblog deadline so I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude to Melissa Bennett and Steve Denyes at the AGH for arranging a cheeky preview while installation was still in progress.

Kristin Bjornerud, When you look at the night sky, what do you see?, 2009, Watercolour and gouache on paper (photo: Mike Lalich)

I should probably also thank Melissa twice for tolerating my giddy exuberance over Kristin Bjornerud’s Safe Harbour in particular, though I’m pretty sure she fully understood my reaction. In case the Akimblog post didn’t make this obvious, I was utterly blown away by her drawings; the tight miniaturist precision is impressive enough, but to see it employed with such smart restraint is something else entirely. This is one that will definitely be worth a second (and third… fourth?) visit once the Kurulek show is up and running at the end of the month - it’s the sort of show that appeals to my inner technician and has me itching to get back to the studio even after last month’s hand-breaking marathon. If only I weren’t vacating my studio at the end of this month… but that’s another matter entirely.

From the Ground Up at b Contemporary continues until January 28.

Jeff Nye, Abandon, by the Old Dirt Road continues until February 4.

Aluminum Quilting Bee at the Mulberry continues until… well, I’m pretty sure it’s the end of the month.

Mark Lewis & Kristin Bjornerud continue at the AGH until May 21.

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Illumination (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The official version:

Stephanie Vegh
The Fisher King & Other Mythologies
January 5-31, 2012
Gallery on 4, Hamilton Public Library

Vegh’s book-based drawings respond to the peculiarities of illustrated histories, creating a tension between the book’s status as inalienable fact and the reader’s imagination. In a new series of drawings, scenes of medieval Europe conspire with displaced marine life to evoke the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King and that story’s condemnation of the knight Perceval’s failure to ask questions of the marvels he beheld there.

Mont-Saint-Michel: The Soaring Spirit of an Era (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The story of the Fisher King has much to offer within the wider concerns that have attracted me to the most overlooked elements of civilizations under threat, from the rats of The Plagues to the vanishing honeybees of our own time. When the fledgling knight Perceval arrives at the castle of the Fisher King, he finds an ailing realm ruled by a crippled king whose sole pleasure comes of fishing the river nearby. The Fisher King can be cured, but only if one arrives with a willingness to inquire into the strange ritual that takes place in the castle every evening - the procession of a bowl and a ceaselessly bleeding lance, relics of the crucifixion. Perceval, while deeply curious, refuses to question the meaning of the ritual for fear of appearing foolish; the Fisher King’s suffering, therefore, continues unrelieved by the critical inquiry that might have saved him and him kingdom both.

Deliberations in the Chapter Hall (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

From a technical standpoint, The Fisher King presented unique challenges apart from those of Age of Enlightenment (excerpts of which are also included in this installation). It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve now drawn hundreds of honeybees - variations in form aside, inserting them into the printed fabric of a book page was eased by practice. The Fisher King tackles a wider diversity of aquatic life (I’d simply say “fish” if it weren’t for that beached whale) even more alien than bees. This also represented my first foray into manipulating greyscale images - while they lend a sombre mood to the medieval character of the series compared to the lavish colours of Age of Enlightenment, the palette is also staunchly unforgiving of error. Where erasing into the book page was previously a technique to establish the drawing’s footprint, in works such as Deliberations in the Chapter Hall, the majority of the drawing is done by erasure with limited use of black pencil to define forms - more than ever, the slim margin for error in these works is laid bare.

A World Under Siege by Demons and Tempters (detail), 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

The Fisher King & Other Mythologies continues at Gallery on 4 until January 31 - please refer to the Hamilton Public Library’s website for their exceptionally generous opening hours.

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Case in point: the opening reception for Named Spaces, a group exhibition at Earls Court Gallery in which my work is included, took place nearly two weeks ago and I’m only getting around to mentioning it now - note to any student readers, this is not how it’s done. But the show is running until January 7th so anyone with an interest in certain of my bee-focused works might want to have a look.

More importantly, I found myself in excellent company with an unexpected array of works that loosely take the lived environment as their theme. Both Bill Schwarz and Brian Harvey take on the modest underside of built dwellings with a rich density of colour - the blue depths of Harvey’s shadows are also Yves Klein-ish in their intensity - while Randy Hryhorczuk enters more nebulous territory with abstract horizons that were among my favourite works. I was also drawn to the meticulous whimsy of Michelle Purchases’s intimate etchings of tree houses, and beyond impressed by the two fine craft artists who rounded out the exhibition. Christopher Reid Flock’s non-functional raku teapots push the limits of the medium with the appearance of a seductively crumbling beauty that is echoed in the visual disintegration and distressed copper of Silvia Taylor’s glass pieces. The interactions between the works selected by Earls Court curator Andrea Skelly are subtle but undeniably present, leaving a lot of room for personal exploration and interpretation.

Detail from Mont-Saint-Michel: The Soaring Spirit of an Era, 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

A few days before Named Spaces wraps up, I will also be installing a solo project at Gallery on 4 for the month of January. The Fisher King will premiere a new series of book-based drawings that take a departure from honeybee extinction and instead insert forms of aquatic life into scenes of medieval Europe. The themes that have evolved from this project - sustainability of life, the tension between blind faith and critical questioning - bear a relationship to my last body of work on Colony Collapse Disorder, but drawing something apart from bees already feels like a refreshing change of pace.

And once that last show is done and dusted, I look forward to enjoying a somewhat manageable workload where studio research can unfold at a more gradual pace - months in which to digest the Bronte sisters is exactly what’s in order. Who knows, I might even have time to blog in 2012 - hope does prevail.

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As you’ll note by the exhibition dates - upArt closes tomorrow on Sunday October 30 - I’m doing this whole self-promotion thing wrong by not having shared this sooner. But in the likely event that you aren’t able to make it to Toronto at such short notice, I’d like to share a few views and thoughts on A Vanishing of Bees, my installation of new and existing works in Room 205.

The first thing you’ll note is that, content aside, the title is a bit of a misnomer as there isn’t so much a vanishing of bees as an insane profusion thereof.

Stephanie Vegh, Rapture, 2011. Water-soluble pencil on paper, 150 x 340 cm.

I’m starting with the work that reveals itself last when entering the space, but Rapture is the focal point of the installation and a work that takes my previous bee drawings to a larger scale that gets that much closer to the apocalyptic dimensions to which I had been aspiring. The creases of opened books that were made more literal in the earlier stages of this series are more ambiguous now that they tilt on a diagonal axis away from the horizon of the implied Earth. Furthermore, the larger scale of the drawing allows for the bees themselves to swell to greater monstrosity with the addition of two massive bees; they’re slightly smaller than my dog, but not by much.

In-progress detail of Rapture, 2011.

Of course, jumping to this scale also pushed the limits of my media of choice for these works. I’ve been a loyal adherent to Staedtler’s water-soluble pencils and have long found their combined depth of colour and softness of touch are well suited to rendering bees. When taken to a larger scale, however, the labour intensifies with the greater quantity and variety of marks needed to describe more detail.

I tend to run through the pencils quickly enough at the best of times. But Rapture pushed my supplies to the limit, especially at a time when my local art supplier stopped carrying open stock in this line of pencils (only years of thankless retail work kept me from losing my shit in the store - I could tell those young artists/retail slaves were just as annoyed by that Head Office decision as I was). As I worked away with what could have been the last fresh Karat Aquarell 175-76 I would have in hand for who knows how long (until I find a new pusher supplier, at least), I was suddenly grateful for my weird, hoarding side that had kept the stubs of all my previous pencils - those extra millimetres of buttery, water-soluble goodness were a lifesaver.

Those scarce pencils were also applied to the creation of further bees on a more familiar scale that also allowed me to take a further step beyond the barriers of the traditional framed drawing. Applied to the walls of the room to imply a swarming retreat, they complete the movement implied in Rapture and activate the otherwise neutral space occupied by both the viewer and the work.

I’ve also been enjoying these individual bees as objects that create a tension between the illusionistic treatment of the drawing and the paper-thin fragility that gives the game away. The work of hand-drawing each bee limited my capacity to create as many as I’d have liked - otherwise, the installation would have likely featured piles such as these in addition to those placed on the wall. I might well need to think about a return to printmaking (haven’t been there since undergrad) if this series is going to grow past what’s been done here for upArt.

As said earlier, upArt is open for viewing until Sunday October 30 at 5pm, and features a curator’s talk on that final day (i.e. tomorrow) at 2pm.

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Takashi Murakami as action figure by Mike Leavitt (Source: artinfo.com)

Are critics the best thing for art since artists?: I think the reason I keep reading Jonathan Jones at the Guardian is precisely because of his ability to have me both humming happily in agreement and grinding my teeth at his uniquely English elitism. In this case, I can get behind Jones’ belief that the critic is uniquely able to speak to art’s value through the joining of academic knowledge, experience and opinion, but claiming that “critics are the only real art writers” is a statement that was clearly designed solely to raise my ire. “We are the only ones,” he continues, “who acknowledge, as a basic principle, that art is an unstable category – it lives or dies according to rules that cannot ever be systematised.” The only ones, really? Surely there are many artists who possess that same knowledge, critical context and if anything, a more direct experience of art’s instability - one need only read the writings of Rothko or Richter to see how artists can also be “real art writers.”

Solidarity against Sotheby’s: As Sotheby’s continues to employ untrained workers to carry on its auctions despite the striking professional art handlers outside their doors, the cause is given support inside the auction from Occupy Wall Street protesters. It’s easy to see the commonality behind these causes as protesters stand up during five and six-figure auctions to call out the facts of Sotheby’s reprehensible move to strip its workers of job security and health benefits in the wake of $680 million profits and a 125% raise to their CEO. The video footage embedded at the Hyperallergic post is fascinating, not only for the orderly actions of the protesters as they are swiftly escorted out one by one but also for the unnerving lack of visible response in the auction’s audience.

Money, its myths and meanings: Toronto art critic Leah Sandals was asked to contribute to Instant Coffee’s current edition of Good News with a response to the question, “Do you believe money has succeeded in devaluing art?” Money and art are often entangled in thoughts about art, but Sandals brings a refreshingly honest response to the table by delicately dismantling the power infused into the concept of money and pointing out the obvious fact that the majority of artists practicing today don’t have the luxury of sufficient money for it to have any impact on their work. Another triumph of the common sense of the 99 percent over the preoccupations of the slim minority, if you ask me.

Money doesn’t devalue art, stupid commercials do: I don’t watch television often enough to have seen this insipid, insidious Marshall’s commercial as often as I have. But that 30-second spot of vacuous women dismissing “modern art” in favour of handbags has been spoiling my Coronation Street viewing this past week and turns out I’m not the only one seething at the anti-art, anti-intellectual message at work (and it’s not just artists who are annoyed). Ed Winkleman explains the ugly ideas at work in this ad far better than my snarling disdain ever could, not just once but twice.

Hilariously, the same commercial just ran on the CBC during the Corrie rewatch while I’m pulling together this post and Marshall’s must have heard some of this outrage because the script is totally changed now. Rock on, blogosphere.

Saturday morning cartoon and breakfast cereal not included… yet: To shift gears to a far more fun-tastic commodification of art, Mike Leavitt has designed a line of contemporary art star action figures. Naturally, some of them are gross-out creepy (Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close) but others are primed for a comic book (Claes Oldenberg) and the Kara Walker figure is simply amazing.

8-bit Abramovic: It might be one departure too far off the primary theme here, but without having made it to MoMA myself, going to see Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present via an 8-bit video game is the next best thing. Note that the game will only let you enter MoMA during its opening hours in real time, but once you do you can reap the rewards of 8-bit renditions of the permanent collection and, of course, the unmoving line of spectators waiting to engage in a staring contest with Marina (spoiler alert: the line never moves).

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The most recent issue of C Magazine looks an absolute treat to my love of printed matter with its thematic focus on libraries. While taking the time to enjoy the in-depth articles on the Whole Earth Catalog and Dexter Sinister, I would also not-so-humbly recommend a read of my review of The Birds and the Bees, an outstanding group exhibition curated by Marnie Fleming at Oakville Galleries’ Gairloch Gardens.

Aganetha Dyck, The Promise and The Whisper. From the Masked Ball Series. Beework on figurine, both 2008.

Anyone who is even passingly familiar with my studio research and work in recent times will understand exactly why I latched onto this show as a subject of review. There are gorgeous works on the ever-admirable works of bees, not least of which are excerpts from Aganetha Dyck’s Masked Ball Series of figurines. To paraphrase myself in the review, this exhibition would have been unthinkable without her.

Kristiina Lahde, Hive. Altered telephone books, 2009/2011 (Source: www.kristiinalahde.com)

The greater strength in The Birds and the Bees is in Fleming’s knack for bringing well-known names like Dyck and Liz Magor together with artists whose works were rather new to me. Kristiina’s Lahde’s Hive was a strikingly concise addition to the conversation, and I even warmed to art that was all birds and no bees, such as Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s entrancing filmed footage of a habitat for zebra finches with electric guitars installed at London’s Barbican Art Centre.

My review, in preview of its first two paragraphs:

Nested amid manicured grounds on one of Lake Ontario’s more pristine shorelines, Oakville Galleries’ Gairloch Gardens is an artificial adaptation that has forged a garden from what was once a wild shore and a gallery from what was once a home. Groundskeepers clad in an unnatural shade of orange keep the grass trimmed to orderly precision alongside Canadian geese grazing beyond the former mansion’s walls; these iconic birds are unperturbed by the roar of leaf blowers and the curiosity of tourists, as placidly domesticated as the grass they eat.

Gairloch Gardens’ tamed wilderness provides an inescapable context for The Birds and the Bees, a group exhibition curated by Marnie Fleming that rapidly wings itself away from the naïve courtships implied by such a title. With so many gallery windows offering views of those carefully kept gardens, the exhibition invites that element inside as part of a sometimes delicate, but more often strictly human negotiation for space alongside the birds and bees that also seek a home on this tenuous planet.

Pick up an issue of C Magazine 111 to read the rest.

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Before I came into this job, I was a visual artist and a freelance critical writer with a history of publishing essays and reviews, both of which have fed into the evolving shape of this blog since I first started nearly four years ago now. Adding my role with the Hamilton Arts Council to that mix will no doubt bring yet another shift in the local scenery, one that is difficult to define this early in the job - though I predict that whatever gets written here, it will happen less frequently than it did in my unemployed heydays.

With less time to devote to this space, I also think it’s fair to say that what manages to break its way through the rush of my commitments to the Hamilton Arts Council and manifest itself in written form on this blog will have come from the heart as much as the head - whether whimsical or serious, whether sharing from my studio or reflecting on Canada’s cultural landscape as a whole, I will continue to speak from my passion for the arts. It’s the same passion I possessed as a solitary creature unattached to any cause or constituency, a concern that comes from being an artist and writer trying to make her way through this world.

I firmly believe that this perspective is part of what will guide me through my work with the Hamilton Arts Council; that said, Hamilton Arts Council does not guide my work as an artist or writer. The exhibitions I will participate in over the coming months (more on those later) will reflect the same views I held as an artist prior to taking on my current role; likewise, this blog will continue to express the same views I hold as an individual who lives a creative life beyond the bounds of any organization. For this reason, I trust to the intelligence of my readers to be able to acknowledge and accept that what I write here - in the past, present, and future - are my words alone, and not those of the Hamilton Arts Council.

Mervyn Peake’s sketches of Fuchsia Groan and Steerpike for ‘Titus Groan’ (Source: lateralaction.com)

Being the sort of artist I was to begin with and remain to this day, approaching the challenge of redefining the Hamilton Arts Council puts me in mind of one among many stirring passages Mervyn Peake wrote in The Gormenghast Trilogy’s first book, Titus Groan:

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across to dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.

One of many visions I have for my half-born is that the redesigned website of the Hamilton Arts Council will include its own blog, for which I will be but one contributor among many voices that can and should speak for our organization. It’s not a task fit for a singular ego, and certainly not one I would presume to undertake in this space - like the flawed, romantic heroine whose experience Peake relates here, this home is mine, and mine alone.

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The desolate melancholy of the U.S.S. Enterprise sickbay (Source: spacetrek.tumblr.com)

Space: The Empty Frontier: Touching off from Marc Auge’s concept of transitory spaces as markers of time’s passage, Joanne McNeil at Rhizome shares a hauntingly fascinating selection of images sourced from Space Trek, a Tumblr dedicated to capturing “the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise.” I’ve always been drawn to the mix of sterility and style that went into the set design of Star Trek, but these details of the Enterprise largely devoid of its crew take that visual interest into amazingly creepy territory.

Reading Istanbul: Art21 has introduced a new series to their already impressive roster of recurring columns that will no doubt exacerbate my impulsive book-buying tendencies. Every month, Inspired Reading will feature an artist or cultural producer sharing the reading list that informed a particular project. Jens Hoffmann’s selection in relation to the 12th Istanbul Biennale demonstrates the broad appeal of this exercise with a list that blends fiction with critical theory.

Bountiful Siberia: Linking in turn from a recent New York Times Travel article, Art Fag City reports on the emergence of Perm, a Siberian city with a population of less than a million people, as a cultural hotspot. In an effort to curtail an exodus of its young citizens, Perm contributes an unheard-of three percent of the city’s annual budget to the arts, and the results are astounding. City councils the world over who cringe from dedicating even one percent to their cultural sector should sit up and take note.

A “Yankee Hipster” in Denmark: Context counts in public art, a point that seems to have gone adrift when Shepherd Fairey installed a mural extolling peace on a contentious site in Copenhagen where a left-wing youth group’s club was demolished by city council in 2007; that Fairey received a 250,000 kroner subsidy from city council does little to diminish its propagandist undertones. While the beating Fairey sustained outside a Danish nightclub is unfortunate, the graffiti that appeared on the mural shortly after its completion seems a more than appropriate response to the under thought interventions of a self-identified street artist.

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That’s right: it’s time for Matthew Barney and video games.

Still from Cremaster 3 (The Order) (Source: filmexperience.blogspot.com)

The Art Newspaper opened my eyes to what has to be the best-ever tribute to Matthew Barney’s enigmatic Cremaster cycle of films. To quote their introduction, “like other cycles – Ring, laundry – it runs a bit long” so Flux Lasers on YouTube has helpfully condensed the ponderous, laborious feats of the films as game levels from Little Big Planet.

So far you can watch game play for Cremaster 1 and Cremaster 4, as well as The Order from Cremaster 3 (which let’s face it, was already a contemporary art version of Donkey Kong played out in the Guggenheim’s rotunda), but I’ve opted to embed Cremaster 2 because it’s always been my favourite in the cycle and the custom-designed avatar of Gary Gilmore is simply too freakin’ adorable for words.

Now, if only someone would license full-length video games for the entire Cremaster Cycle, I would totally get back into the Playstation addiction I harboured during my undergrad years. Also makes me wonder what other moments in modern art need reinterpretation as video games…

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