This Week at the AGO - Making Connections

Each week during my volunteer shift at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I try to find something interesting as I float around the galleries - discover new works, stop a little longer in front of an old work , think about new themes for tours.  So I'm going to try posting weekly about whatever catches my fancy at the gallery

This week it's making connections.  I often find myself making connections between works, such as a share aesthetic, or different ways artist grapple with issues of representation (such as, death, bodies in motion, colours, etc.).  Sometimes it's a piece with another artist that inspired it.  Sometime it's two sides to the same story. I'll start with a few this week and add on.  Enjoy!

Here is a piece from Art Rental with detail from a Peter Doig.

Here is Frank Stella with Frank Gehry's serpentine staircase.

Here is Emily Carr and Steven Andrews

GGs rock Angell Gallery

My group of AGO Daytime Gallery Guides visited the Angell Gallery on May 25.  Owner Jeff Angell showed the group works from established and up-and-coming artists, several of which recalled AGO works.

Current show "Exhibition Narrative", featuring photographic work as part of the Contact Photography Festival, features work by Oli Sorenson, who pays homage to Michelangelo Pistoletto's Arte Povera mirror paintings with a series of photos of smashed TV monitors.

Tim Roda's portraits of shrouded men holding children references the Victorian mother and child photos displayed last year in the AGO's Light My Fire show.

Another current show, The Plastic Arts by digital "painter" Rafael Ochoa, features a time-lapse video showing how Ochoa painstakingly creates  his works, first "sculpting" a model with Zbrush software, then "painting" it, and finally adding light and shadow with Photoshop to bring it to life. These pieces may have particular resonance for AGO volunteers, in light of the Pistoletto piece in our permanent collection that our new contemporary curators are keen to get on display, as well the the newly restored Jar of Apricots in which  the play of light  is so crucial.

In addition, the dreamy urethane and pigment-based landscapes of Steve Driscoll simultaneously recall the cosmic panoramas of Patterson Ewen and the oil & latex paintings of Stephen Andrews.  

Another parallel to the AGO collection included collaged treescapes by Gavin Lynch, which create a modern counterpoint to Emily Carr's lush forest scenes.

For more info on the shows, see www.angellgallery.com.

Before Their Time - Death, Art and Trying to Make Sense of Loss

Two friends of mine died this week.  Randy was the husband of Asha, who I met through a new moms group 15 years ago when our kids were babies.  I didn't know him super well, and we socialised only occasionally, but we'd run into each other now and then, his kids went though my kids' school for grades 7 and 8, and he took the time to chat with me during my job search.  But he made an impression because he was one of those rare people you would genuinely call a great guy.   Real, positive and would leave you feeling better for having spent time with him.  He got cancer and died after a long battle,.  He was 58.  We knew it was coming because we were on a mailing list that got updates about the ups and downs of his treatment over three years.  But it still sucked when he was gone.

Two days later  I learned my volunteer colleague Ann died suddenly, alone at home, after a trip to Greece with other volunteer friends.  I knew her from various committees, though I wouldn't say we were really friends.  She would be in her mid-60s, vibrant, impeccably turned out, a retired principal, and someone you felt in good hands with.  It was a shock, in contrast to Randy.    Neither make any sense of course.

I was at the art gallery on both days.  I happened to come across a painting called Heaven the day of Randy's death.  I posted it to Facebook with a terse comment.  It's sort of a maudlin statement and I don't know what reaction I expected.  I hope I didn't disturb the people who are fighting cancer now.  But I had to grasp on to  the thought he is somewhere out of pain.

Today as I walked around I came across images that represented memento mori - reminders of our mortality.  They're supposed to keep us humble, but today they represented not just that our time is finite but that it can come at any time.  One piece by Micah Lexier is a carefully crafted piece showing two cases full of coins, calculated to show a person's lifespan.  Every six months a coin is moved from the ordered set to the jumbled one.  I looked at it and realised life is really like a sack of coins  - you don't know how many there are.  The bag might seem heavy but it can run out any time.   Randy kept reaching in day after day until this week, when he looked in his bag and there were none left.  With Ann it felt like someone had taken the ordered case and just tossed it all in the other one at once.

The other piece is one in a series collected by Ken Thomson that fashionable 17th century Germans would have commissioned to keep themselves grounded.  This one is called Death Triumphant.    I draw no conclusions for living my life any better.   I jut thought it made an interesting if more traditional interpretation of the same theme.

On a final note, here is The Ever Open Door, a corny passage to heaven you-can't-take-it-with-you piece from the European salon, where half the pictures seem to be about death with a romantic sensibility. RIP Randy and Ann.  We'll remember you.