Birch Contemporary gallery might have the perfect exhibition for our times.
A dining table with six chairs is set for an elaborate feast. The settings are neatly arranged, with colourful ceramics and two candelabra centrepieces. On a nearby side table is an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
Yet the candles are unlit; there’s no wine in the goblets, nor food on the plates. We bear witness to the tragedy of a gathering that never happened.
The exhibition, called “Absent Friends,” features work by 10 Canadian artists, and was intended by curator Ross/Hafiz Lalani-Jennings as a symbol of our resilience in this most trying of years.
It became even more symbolic when — wait for it — lockdown measures prevented the Tecumseth Street gallery from opening its doors to visitors.
“I did not intend for it to be so deserted for so long,” Lalani-Jennings says, adding it was meant to have a “festive feel” leading up to the Christmas holidays.
Nearly four months after its intended premiere, “Absent Friends” is finally open to the public from Thursdays to Saturdays, with strict COVID-19 measures in place. Only 10 people will be permitted in the venue at one time, says owner Robert Birch — more than enough guests for a “before times” dinner party.
This tentative reopening is a story that’s playing out at gallery spaces across the city — to the great relief of artists who had been left without walls to display their work, and to the buyers and art enthusiasts who enjoy it. Even as the big cultural institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum remain closed, the smaller, commercial ones have started to welcome visitors again.
“It’s been a great relief for people that have really felt something missing by not being able to go to galleries,” says Stephen Bulger, art dealer and owner of the photography-focused gallery that bears his name on Dundas Street West, which started welcoming visitors again two weeks ago.
“The protocols we have in place have made people feel very comfortable,” he adds.
Two visitors at a time (the gallery has a 180-person capacity). Masks worn, hands sanitized and temperature checked upon entry. Disposable gloves provided for leafing through books for sale in the shop. Prices available by scanning a QR code on the wall.
The experience begins at home, where visitors are encouraged to book an appointment on the website, or they can try their luck by just showing up during gallery hours.
The extra measures are “for our safety as much as everyone else’s,” Bulger says.
“We’ve noticed an uptick in online sales, but galleries remain a business that primarily relies on personal contact.”
The main exhibition that’s now on display, a retrospective of the work of Phil Bergerson, was meant to open a year ago for the gallery’s 25th anniversary. Thanks to the pandemic, it was pushed back to November, when it was open for two weeks before lockdown closed the venue, along with all other non-essential businesses in the city.
The show has now been extended. “With reduced capacity, you have to keep shows up for eight weeks, to allow the same number of people that used to come in a three-week or four-week time span,” Bulger says.
Still, why are independent galleries like Bulger’s allowed to open at all while the bigger ones are not? The answer is price tags. Commercial galleries, which sell the art on their walls, are treated like any other small retail businesses. That means, in the “grey zone” of Ontario’s reopening framework, they are permitted to open with up to 25 per cent of customer capacity. Most public institutions will likely open in the next phase, the red zone.
“We’re just waiting for when the officials allow (Toronto) to move into the red zone,” says Herman Lo, head of visitor experience at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
“When we do reopen, we’re very excited to welcome visitors to our new glamorous and very glitzy special exhibition ‘Studio 54: Night Magic,’ organized by the Brooklyn Museum.”
Lo says the AGO has been working behind the scenes to get everything ready for reopening, whenever that happens. And visitors will be able to book their timed-entry tickets online for the eagerly anticipated “Studio 54” and the rest of the gallery.
Now this is an exhibition you simply can’t experience with a virtual walk-through, since it includes both visual and olfactory elements. Yes, art you can smell. Leo and Surani delve into issues of identity in a photo series, “The Irrefutable Border,” and in two new scents in their ongoing “Heresies” line, “My Baghdad” and “My Barcelona.”
You’ve been warned. There’s pain and sorrow, and body parts, barely hidden beneath the great swirls of paint in Kaur’s first ever solo show, which comes out of “the plethora of indescribable feelings that have come with the absurd times we are living in right now.”
Schofield’s small delicate canvases uncannily mimic the experience of looking at old colour photographs, with backgrounds blurred and foreground objects in focus (a bokeh effect) yet evocative details intact. Indeed, they are based on actual found photographs: a rooster, a highway, a baseball diamond, a family having lunch. Who needs photos when you’ve got Schofield’s photographic brush?
Features new works by Julie Moon, Micah Lexier and Tessar Lo, plus work by Noah Brown, Laura Findlay, Catherine Heard, Mitsuo Kimura, Ness Lee, Martin Pearce and Ed Pien.
Also showing: Andrew McPhail, Textiles
5. Phil Bergerson, Retrospective, In Search Of Meaning
Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1356 Dundas St. W.
The gallery’s sixth solo exhibition of the Toronto-based photographer.
Ariel Teplitsky writes the Toronto Uncultured newsletter. Email him at ariel@unculture.ca.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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