2013’s Best Art Shows in Toronto

 Our annual picks for the best art shows in Toronto.

Dear Friends,

How was your year? At Studio Beat, we started 2013 with a field trip to NYC and ended with journals from Art Basel Miami. We’re getting around, but our hearts are in Toronto. On the search for this year’s best art shows, we ventured from downtown’s Art Gallery of Ontario to the McMichael in Kleinberg. We saw some amazing photography, surprising sculptures and films that creeped us out. Our list includes seasoned veterans, emerging artists and artists hitting their stride. We’ve even had the pleasure of interviewing some of these artists in their studios. Speaking about process and practice, then seeing the work hung in a gallery, is incredible. As we get older, that experience never gets old.

Check out our picks for 2013’s best art shows in Toronto and see you around in 2014!

xo Studio Beat

The quality, thoroughness and strength of Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller’s Lost in the Memory Place should be the standard for future contemporary exhibits at the AGO. Cardiff and Miller produced astounding worlds by creating simulacra in the form of hyper detailed installation rooms of other places. Through this approach to manufacturing fake sites with sound, objects and lighting, their work transports and haunts you. Each installation room speaks about contemporaneous concerns of our changing technological environment and also provides a rich juicy fantasy for us to get muddied and lost in. The viewer becomes participant; your residual memories come flooding back upon walking into a full-fledged simulated environment or simply consuming a soundscape. Studio Beat loved this exhibition and had the pleasure of visiting it twice.

In her unique voice, Georgia Dickie unapologetically continues to produce work that speaks to similar formal and corporeal concerns. When we think about Dickie’s work, we think about those astonishing moments when quotidian objects suddenly amaze us with their ability to become personified and their material weight becomes metaphor. It’s those attributes, balance, weight, and form, Dickie exaggerates and creates with her found materials with concise aptitude that are the real strength of the work. Each structure manifests its own sense of elegance–it requires no extra lift. This prolific exhibition was impressive, every sculpture had its own unique identity and the work spoke well with one another. We’re excited to see how Dickie’s work continues to develop.

David Cronenberg’s Transformation gave us a creepy feeling that was hard to shake. The special effects and gross details provide a tangible, yet fake account that sticks with you like a surreal dreamscape. At the MOCCA exhibit, we gravitated towards Candice Breitz’s film Treatment. Breitz employs people in her personal life to re-perform characters in Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). This performative action recreates the film’s characters into figurative shapeshifters. The video, at its simplest, illustrates how a viewer projects their personal histories on the narratives of the films we watch. Its Kafkaesque dark environment was consuming and hyper disturbing, in the best way.

Kim Adams’ is definitely on our wish list of people to interview. Caboose included a fine array of dioramic scenes and Adams’ is known for his complex kit-bashing of figurative scenes where model train materials become unrealistic scenarios. Through this long-time vernacular he has set a matrix to build expansive detailed worlds providing rich and dense visual fiction. This series focuses on re-imagining caboose cars in a new format now that their purpose in contemporary train systems is obsolete. Adams’ uses the caboose as a catalyst to tell a story. The stories held in these caboose cars have an element of sci-fi misanthropy as people aimlessly participate in the everyday.

Earlier this year, Studio Beat had the privilege of seeing some of Matt Bahen’s new work before it was hung on the walls of Le Gallery. We also saw Matt Bahen’s incredible exhibition of large-scale paintings at the Maclaren Centre for the Arts in Barrie, a space that bathed the work in a swaths of natural light. Both of these installations provided rich bodily crusted and built-up surfaces of paint for the viewer to traverse as cartographer of its surface. Bahen’s works are both specific descriptions of place while also objects of decay through their material properties, simultaneously nodding to both the body and to the earth. A piece such as “The River Coiled Around the Earth” epitomizes the painted surfaces kinship to skin–the barren winter forest trees quickly shares a semblance to scars upon the real skin that oil paint develops. These paintings resonant with sincerity and are subtly poetic without being schmaltzy.

This year, Studio Beat took a closer look at photography. We’ve come to appreciate artists such as Sarah Anne Johnson and Erin Shirreff, the Aimia AGO photography prize winner, for their ability to stretch the attributes of what form photography can take. Sarah Anne Johnson’s work addresses differing themes but consistently stretches photography into poetic fantasy through her personal and physical manipulation of the photograph. In this recent series Wanderlust, Johnson depicts images of people in ecstasy and manifests the image of their pleasure through a material intervention in the photographic image. The image pictured here, “Sparkles,” uses glitter as an additive substance to portray the ephemeral feeling derived from a physical experience. Johnson’s work carefully rides a line between the photorealistic nature of photography and surrealistic devices of fantasy in order to tell unique and poetic stories. In the past, her series have been more expansive narrative stories. Wanderlust is charming and different because each depiction feels like an idiosyncratic event–the event of pleasure–something normally private that she has decidedly exposed. Studio Beat enjoyed the unabashed nature of this work and Johnson’s ability to tell decadent stories through intervention with the media of photography.

Kim Dorland was recently named the Globe Art’s artist of the year, and we think anyone who has viewed his recent exhibition would not be surprised. You Are Here is a culmination of recent work and older paintings that contextualize Dorland’s involvement in the history of Canadian landscape painting. It was a pleasure to see Dorland’s work hung adjacent to his hero Tom Thomson and other Group of Seven works. It’s clear that Dorland’s work is honourably continuing a Canadian legacy of landscape painting, but in way that contemporizes our relationship with the land. In particular, we were impressed with the recent small scale paintings on board with smooth airbrushed backgrounds that marvellously contrasted Dorland’s wielding of thick choreographed and gestural painted forest environments. This contrast achieved a masterful play of push and pull in pictorial space, and emphasized the physicality of the painting. Dorland, who is known for his expressive and liberally applied masses of paint as not only a way to describe image but to become three dimensional form, claims Tom Thomson’s fearless and early use of paint as substance, as a precursor to this process in his own methodology. Studio Beat appreciated how You are Here provided well-deserved visual context and critical understanding of Dorland’s work within a larger Canadian art historical dialogue.

Sasha Pierce’s first solo show with Jessica Bradley was a pleasure to view. Upon entering the gallery space, there are two small collage works with printed tessellating patterns that have been cut up and governed into oscillating and optically charged arrangements. These collages summarize and concisely nod to what the rest of the oil paintings accomplish–a conversation between the physical and the optical. Pierce creates three dimensional paintings with what we have assumed is probably paint applied with a syringe like device – pumping out slithers of shallowly sculptural paint in stringy but controlled undulated lines sharing a semblance to cake decorating, the threads of a tapestry, or fields from a birds eye view. This strange development of mark-making is then arranged into complex and satisfying geometric matrices. Each painting is unique. The paintings provide rich surfaces to inspect up close and desirable optical colour effects to appreciate from a distance. Studio Beat found these paintings especially alluring because they aren’t easy to deconstruct, in that way they’re a little magical. Although their making is not hi-tech, they astonish us in their ability to be handmade yet also completely incomprehensible.