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OPENING: Jonathan Hobin’s hyper-realistic photos wow Ottawa’s art royalty

By Paul Gessell

One of the works on display as part of the Jonathan Hobin show Little Lady/Little Man at the City Hall Art Gallery.

Jonathan Hobin’s new exhibition of life-sized photographs of his aged grandparents is, frankly, one of the best shows by a local artist to hit this city in the past year.

But that shouldn’t be surprising. Hobin’s last major body of work, a series of staged photographs of children re-enacting dark scenes from myth and reality, was eye-popping, memorable and, yes, disturbing.

The new exhibition, on view at at Ottawa City Hall Gallery, is called Little Lady/Little Man. A series of photographs on aluminum show how the years have ravaged the bodies of Hobin’s grandparents, William Horace Merrill and the former Marjorie Ann Cory. The old couple wear their scars and sagging flesh with dignity and stoicism.

The showstopper is The Deathbed, a photograph of Hobin’s grandmother literally on her deathbed. The life-sized photograph is presented horizontally upon a flat surface. Visitors look down upon her, as if they were visiting grandma in a hospital.

The Deathbed is reminiscent of a Ron Mueck sculpture Old Woman in Bed that was included in the Australian artist’s solo show in 2007 at the National Gallery of Canada. Mueck’s work goes beyond being realistic to being hyper-realistic. The same could be said for Hobin. Indeed, the entire Hobin show is what Mueck would deliver if he decided to start photographing real people instead of creating them in his studio.

There were compliments all around at the recent vernissage of Hobin’s show, not just for the artist’s work but for the spectacular way the exhibition was arranged and lighted by the city’s Julie Dupont and her crew.

Rest Your Heart by Jonathan Hobin.

There was a sense of magic in the gallery that evening as members of Ottawa’s visual arts royalty oohed and ahhed. They included such artists as Jerry Grey, Michele Provost, and Claude Marquis (who has returned to painting while still leading musical sensation The Peptides), Hobin’s former dealer Dale Smith, Sandra Dyck (curator of the Carleton University Art Gallery), and collectors par extraordinaire Glenn and Barbara McInnes.

There will inevitably be some people unhappy with Hobin’s work, believing it to be voyeuristic, sensationalistic, and exploitative of his own aged kin. But such critics are wrong. This is a work of love.

Old people should not be hidden away. And neither should photographs of them. Hobin and his grandparents were brave to collaborate on this excellent body of work.

Little Lady/Little Man is on view at the City Hall Art Gallery until April 29.

Listen to clip of Hobin’s grandfather singing a lullaby that he used to sing to his girls here. The recordings form part of the exhibition.

REVEALED: Joyce Wieland quilt marks Art Bank anniversary (and proves there’s more to Canadian art than pristine landscapes)

By Paul Gessell

Maple Leaf Forever 2 by Joyce Wieland.

It is rare for someone to use the phrase “quintessentially Canadian” without referring to maple syrup, hockey, or the Mounties. We used to apply that term also to Eaton’s and the Dionne Quintuplets but they have dropped out of sight in recent years.

So, what about artists? Is there such a thing as a quintessential Canadian artist?

Yes. And her name is Joyce Wieland. And thankfully her art is far more interesting and truthful than the fantasyland wilderness landscapes cooked up by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. That gang never even hinted at the fact there were sawmills, mines, and First Nations communities behind each clump of pine trees in their supposedly people-less environments.

“Quintessentially Canadian” is the expression used — and used wisely — by the Canada Council Art Bank to describe the late Wieland, whose paintings, quilts, films, and other artworks from the 1960s and 1970s perfectly captured the forces of feminism, patriotism, politics, kitsch, and good humour prevalent at the time.

Recall Wieland’s 1968 quilt carrying the words “Reason over Passion” — the artwork ushered in perfectly Canada’s long-running love-hate affair with Pierre Trudeau, whose personal motto was Reason over Passion.

Wieland’s quintessential Canadian-ness makes it fitting that her mixed media work, Maple Leaf Forever II, created in 1972, should be used this week to launch 40th anniversary celebrations of the Art Bank. Maple Leaf is a work that, 40 years later, is still relevant, moving, and funny. That’s the mark of a true work of art for the ages.

“Created in 1972, this renowned work by one of Canada’s most celebrated artists features lightly-coloured female lips mouthing a patriotic song, framed in a series that references film and animation, set against a quilted cotton background with intricately stitched maple leaves,” says an Art Bank press release. “It is quintessential Joyce Wieland and is quintessentially Canadian.”

To mark the Art Bank anniversary, 40 signature works have been selected from the bank’s collection of more than 17,000 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures. Each work represents a year of the Art Bank’s existence. These 40 images will be posted every Monday, until October, on the website of the Art Bank and on the Canada Council’s Facebook page.

The online presentation of the 40 works will be followed by a real bricks-and-mortar exhibition of the same 40 works at the Art Bank, on St. Laurent Boulevard. Called Spotlight on 40 Years: Artworks from the Canada Council Art Bank, the exhibition will be held Sept. 28-30 during Culture Days. The public will be invited to view the exhibition and tour the Art Bank facilities.

The Art Bank’s 40 years have been turbulent at times. It was initially formed to help put money into artists’ pockets. Artists could sell work to the Art Bank and then buy back those works when finances permitted. Artworks in the collection were rented out, mainly to federal government offices. Following a near-death experience a decade ago, the Art Bank was recreated to make it run more like a business. Now, it only buys work deemed to be “rentable” to government or private sector clients. Many unrentable works in the collection — including installations, videos, and paintings of nudes — were sold back to artists or donated to museums.

Revenues from the rental of artworks is used to purchase more works each year. A jury of artists and other art professionals decides what works to buy.

Because of the need for artworks to be rentable, certain media and subject matter are excluded from the Art Bank collection. So, it is not a true representation of the artwork being created in Canada each year. But it does help dozens of artists every year to put food on the table and it is still a great entry on an artist’s resume to say he or she has sold work to the Art Bank.

ARTFUL BLOGGER: Hanging out with Vietnamese-Canadian literary sensation Kim Thuy

By Paul Gessell

Kim Thuy. Photo by Benoit Levac.

Kim Thuy is everywhere these days and not just to pick up literary awards from such luminaries as the Governor General and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

One morning at La Sportheque in Hull, as I was doing my daily treadmill run, I happened to look up at the bank of television screens on the wall and, on one channel, spotted Thuy. The restaurateur-turned-author was a guest on the Radio-Canada cooking show, Les Chefs.

I had never met Thuy at that point. But the cook preparing some exotic Vietnamese eggplant dish on national television looked exactly like the glamorous movie-star-style portrait Thuy’s book publisher, Random House, had just sent me.

A few hours after Les Chefs, I met Canada’s skyrocketing literary sensation in person for an interview about her new – newly published in English, anyway – book, simply entitled Ru, a word that means “lullaby” in the author’s native Vietnamese but, in French, means a small stream, as well as a flow of tears, blood, or money.

(Canadian books that sell 5,000 copies are considered bestsellers. Thuy has sold more than 100,000 copies in French of Ru in Canada and abroad. The English version of Ru has just hit stores in Canada.)

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THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: A long overdue tribute to Ottawa art star Pat Durr

Pat Durr, Waiting (War), 1988, acrylic on canvas, 167.6 x 241.3 cm, collection of the City of Ottawa, © CARCC, 2012

By Paul Gessell

There is much to be said against the Ottawa Art Gallery. Its exhibition spaces are too small and placed helter-skelter in the bowels of Arts Court. Its choice of exhibitions, artists, and curators are often perplexing and its relations with the local art community could certainly be better.

But sometimes the OAG gets it right. And the newly opened retrospective Pat Durr: Persistence of Chaos is one of those times.

First of all, Durr has been one of Ottawa’s art stars for half a century. A retrospective at the very gallery she helped found through her decades of arts activism was long overdue.

Born in Kansas City in 1939, Durr came to Ottawa in the 1960s and bravely demonstrated that women, too, could be abstract expressionists, a genre largely considered an all-boys’ club back then.

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Q&A: Sex-obsessed men, what Matthew Firth won’t tell Mom, and how a Spiderman action figure became a sex toy

By Paul Gessell

Matthew Firth’s new book of short stories, Shag Carpet Action, will bowl you over and leave you gobsmacked.

Some of the stories are raunchy. Others are violent. Still others will make you laugh aloud. One is downright sordid. But they are all about very believable people, except perhaps for the one in which a woman turns a Spiderman action figure into a sex toy. Women and Spiderman do not fare well in Firth’s stories.

The Ottawa author of such previous books as Suburban Pornography and Other Stories and Can You Take Me There, Now? recently subjected himself to a quiz from the Artful Blogger.

Q. Have any Spiderman fan clubs threatened violence against you for the sexual abuse inflicted on a Spiderman action figure in the story Action?

A. Well, not yet. But is it really abuse? Seems the Spidey in the story gets off on his role as a makeshift dildo, doesn’t he? The abuse really comes in a more violent form at the hands of the young boy in the story who rips Spiderman’s arms off. But that, as it turns out, opens up new possibilities for the action figure. However, I would agree that there are likely Spiderman fans out there who would be upset at how poor Spidey is portrayed in the story. I have not heard from any, however. Maybe they don’t read a lot of salty CanLit. Who knows?

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INDUSTRY BUZZ: Diana Nemiroff’s enduring legacy garners GG award

By Paul Gessell

Diana Nemiroff, director at the Carleton University Art Gallery, has been awarded a Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts. Photo by Martin Lipman

One of Ottawa’s treasures, Diana Nemiroff, will be presented March 28 with the $25,000 Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award for her “enduring impact on the Canadian art landscape,” the Canada Council for the Arts has announced.

“This is a very big deal for me,” says Nemiroff. “In my field this is the most important award that I could win. And winning a specifically Canadian award that is considered to be the pinnacle of recognition makes it especially meaningful to me.”

Nemiroff is currently the director of the Carleton University Art Gallery and previously worked 20 years at the National Gallery of Canada as a curator, mainly in contemporary art, becoming one of the most influential figures in the contemporary art scene.

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MINI MASTERPIECE: New postage stamp honours an Ottawa landmark

The Canada Post stamp featuring Capillary by Joe Fafard. Photo courtesy Canada Post

By Paul Gessell

Pierre Theberge stood in the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina mesmerized by a new sculpture on exhibit in the Saskatchewan capital. It was September 2007, and Theberge was the director of the National Gallery of Canada. The sculpture in question was Joe Fafard’s Running Horses, a dozen life-sized, brightly painted, laser-cut steel sculptures of galloping horses.

“You look like you want to buy this,” I told Theberge upon encountering the enthralled-looking director.

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THE BIG PICTURE: Why are foreign museums only interested in Group of Seven or Aboriginal art?

By Paul Gessell

This miniature chest, by Skidegate artist Thomas Moody, was modelled after the wooden chests designed to hold ceremonial objects in a chief’s home. 1900-1925 Thomas Moody (about 1877-1947). © McCord Museum, M5922.1-2 Photographer: Marilyn Aitken

The Canadian Museum of Civilization recently announced it is making plans to tour an exhibition of West Coast aboriginal art around several European countries during the next few years.

The exhibition — titled Haida: Life. Spirit. Art — previously appeared at Civilization and at the McCord Museum in Montreal. Most of the artifacts are owned by the McCord Museum but Civilization is spearheading the travelling project because of expertise developed over the years in forging foreign partnerships.

The announcement of this deal raises important questions: Why do foreign museums only seem interested in Canadian aboriginal art? Or is that all we offer them?

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ROADTRIP ALERT: 2012 to see two Frida Kahlo blockbusters within driving distance of Ottawa!

By Paul Gessell

Expect to hear lots about the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in coming months. Kahlo will be starring in two blockbuster exhibitions coming to Canada this year. This is, indeed, a rarity.

This Kahlo portrait has been turned into a poster to promote the Merida exhibitition.

And to help get me (and you) in the mood for this unprecedented year of Kahlomania, I recently visited a Kahlo exhibition in the Yucatan city of Merida. More on that later. First some background.

Kahlo’s paintings are constantly in demand around the world. Some of those paintings, such as the iconic Las Dos Fridas, rarely, if ever, travel outside Mexico. So, getting loans of just a few Kahlos is considered a major coup. Yet, Canada will be getting more than a dozen of her masterworks to savour. Check ads in local media in the coming months for transportation-hotel-museum travel packages from Ottawa to see the exhibitions.

First up will be The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, an exhibition running from June 7 to Sept. 3 at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City. The exhibition covers the period 1930 to 1970. Kahlo will, of course, get top billing.

Then comes Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from Oct. 20 to Jan. 20. Most of the 75 artworks in that exhibition come from the Musee Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City.

Pancho Villa y La Adelita. "Adelita" is a word used to describe a woman of courage. (Kahlo gives herself that role in the painting.)

The fabulously wealthy and devastatingly beautiful Olmedo was Diego Rivera’s greatest patron and, some say, his secret lover, which did not endear her to Kahlo, Rivera’s on-again-off-again wife. Nevertheless, the late Olmedo ended up with the largest collection of Kahlo’s paintings on earth. I have visited the Olmedo museum several times. It is a place that is the closest to heaven Kahlo fans can ever get.

The Merida exhibition, simply called Frida Kahlo, is being held right in the centre of the city – the zocalo – in a building called Centro Cultural de Merida Olimpo. It is a small show touring around Mexico, courtesy of the state government of Tlaxacala. The state’s art museum in the city of Tlaxacala has several of Kahlo’s minor works, including very early drawings and paintings that can only hint at the superb, mainly self-portraits, to come.

A giant poster on the exterior of the Centre Cultural de Merida Olimpo draws visitors.

The best of the paintings in Merida from Tlaxcala is called Pancho Villa y La Adelita from 1927. The Spanish word “Adelita” is usually employed to describe a woman of courage, or even a fierce woman soldier. Kahlo, naturally, gives herself that role in the painting.

The Kahlo drawings and paintings are vastly overshadowed in the exhibition by giant blow-ups of the artist’s many self-portraits. There is also a wall filled with photographs of the Casa Azul, the home in Mexico City where Kahlo was born and died.

Merida is a city very close to some seaside communities, especially Progreso, popular with Canadian snowbirds spending the winter in beach condos. The Centre Cultural Olimpo must have been trying to get those snowbirds in a Kahlo mood before they fly home to see the blockbusters in Quebec City and Toronto. The Kahlo show is in Merida from Jan. 30 to April 1.

ARTFUL BLOGGER: Karen Jordon produces surprising art from old, dismantled cassette tapes

Karen Jordan with one of her sculptures — a wall of empty cassette containers — at the Karsh-Masson Gallery. Photo by Paul Gessell

By Paul Gessell

When big ships are decommissioned, they are often sent to some developing country to be stripped of all salvageable materials. Many outdated computers are likewise dismantled in China, with certain parts recycled. But what about small, cheap, obsolete objects? Where do they go, besides your personal garbage can?

Consider the lowly cassette tape. They started squeezing vinyl LPs out of the market in the 1970s. Then, a decade later, the tapes were muscled out by CDs. So, what ever happened to all those cassette tapes loaded with your favourite tunes? Thousands of them landed on the doorstep of Karen Jordon, the Ottawa artist who has never found any object too lowly to recycle. She even managed to turn human hair found in her shower drain into delicate sculptures.

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