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Toronto International Art Fair 2011


Installation view including works by Derek Sullivan and Luis Jacob from the special onsite projects “Everything Must Go” at last year’s Toronto International Art Fair 2010. Image via BlogTO.

The 12th edition of Toronto International Art Fair (TIAF) kicks off on 28 October, showcasing over 100 galleries across Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe. Compared to the rising scale of mega fairs like Art Basel and Armory, TIAF weighs into a somewhat modest division, even frugal in terms of the international hype generated. Mind you, an effort was made to spark up some glamour last year, in laying out their red carpet entrance. Seriously though, TIAF has slowly but surely grown in reputation over the last few years, firstly for the quality of the works on offer. Various new programs are being designed this year to survey contemporary Canadian art, including a talk with Denise Markonish, curator of the much anticipated exhibition “Oh, Canada” at MASS MoCA in May 2012. Other activities include theme-based guided tours such as Quebec galleries, photography galleries, and so on. Furthermore, the audience can explore onsite projects such as “The Art Game” by Toronto based artist Kent Monkman, a performative event “Collage Party” by Winnipeg based Paul Butler and many more.
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Review: The Fox

The Fox
at G Gallery, Toronto
14 July – 20 August 2011
Artists: Oskar Hüber (Germany), Yam Lau (Canada), Sophie Nys (Belgium) and Kevin Rodgers (Canada). Organized by Kevin Rodgers

“The Fox” Installation view at G Gallery, Toronto 2011.

In 1924 began a romantic liaison between 35-year-old husband, father and Marburg University philosophy teacher Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, his 18 year-old student. By 1933, Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party and Arendt, a jew, fled to France to escape religious persecution. Utilizing these accounts and more as premise, G Gallery in Toronto exhibited last month the work of four artists. Oskar Hüber, Yam Lau, Sophie Nys and Kevin Rodgers sparsely filled the brightly lit white space of G Gallery with emblematic objects, videos and installation works.
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Review: With the Void

With the Void
Stephen Andrews, Pierre Dorion, Dara Gellman
at Diaz Contemporary, Toronto
14 July – 27 August 2011

Dara Gellman “Reaching Out” Single channel video projection with stereo sound, 8mins loop, four MDF projection screens. Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary

“We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” * This month Diaz Contemporary adorned its walls with works that, at first glance, echo ghostly epitaphs from the glorious manifestos of American abstract painters. On closer inspection the three-person show, made up of Stephen Andrews, Pierre Dorion and Dara Gellman, rises beyond the oppositions between figurative and non, into velvety sensory aesthetics. Similarly, when Color Field painters favored abstraction in the 1950’s, their focus, according to Clement Greenberg, was on illumination and openness: they elevated the potential of color to its apex via painterly techniques, large-scale formats, and thus rendered barren and featureless pictures to keep an open-ended subject matter. While clearly in continuation with this visual vocabulary, the works of With the Void journey to the limits of the representational tableau, and even reach out to confer with other media.
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