For local art obsessives, Art Toronto is the undisputed event of the year—a buzzy nexus of artists, gallerists and buyers, where collectors and museums drop big money to snap up pieces by established and emerging names. This year, the festival has moved to a digital model that runs until November 8, with a a few socially distanced in-person events held at some of the 100-plus participating galleries. For wannabe collectors bit by the Covid nesting bug, there are tons of striking pieces available, including affordable paintings from up-and-comers and blue-chip sculptures that cost as much as a down payment. Here are 13 works that could be gracing your living room this winter.
A wayward commuter
“Walking Woman in the Subway.” Photograph by Michael Snow, $9,200, Michael Gibson Gallery
The 91-year-old Toronto artist Michael Snow is known for his Walking Woman, a mirrored silhouette that he used to produce and place in conspicuous spots all over the city back in the ’60s. This photograph appeared in Snow’s book Biographie of the Walking Woman, which recorded many public interactions with the silhouette. The image is up for sale for the first time.
A tornado of limbs
“Best of Us.” Painting by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, $4,800, Gallery Jones
The Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an award-winning contemporary painter whose large-scale works are fixtures at the Vancouver airport and UBC. He’s known as the father of “Haida-manga,” creating work influenced by the tradition of Haida iconography and Asian visual culture. This abstract watercolour hypnotizes viewers with its looping swirls and faces.
In this piece, the Nairobi-born Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes examines how museums serve as cultural gatekeepers: for example, when African masks were first exhibited in French museums, they were stripped of their context in traditional ceremonies, depicted instead as primitive and uncivilized. Here, a graceful ballet dancer interacts with an African mask from a French museum, playing off the power struggle between different cultures.
In this series, Canadian-Congolese artist Moridja Kitenge Banza reproduces Christian iconography—except he replaces Christ’s face with African masks. It links the spread of Catholicism in the Democratic Republic of Congo with masks displayed in Western art museums devoid of context. The mask shown here is used among the Dan and neighbouring cultures to connect the wearer with the spirit world. Normally, it’s kept hidden, only brought out during special rituals.
A day in the life of a Whitehorsian
“Tenuous Balance of Hope and Meaning.” Painting by Joseph Tisiga, $4,800, Bradley Ertaskiran
This painting by Joseph Tisiga is both fantastical and banal at the same time, showing a surrealistic mix of mundane nature juxtaposed with mystic elements. Tisiga’s work explores the complex psychological, social, economic and cultural challenges facing Indigenous people today, all underscored by a “sublime nothingness” he experienced in Whitehorse, where he lived while working at a community youth organization.
A token of forgiveness
“Apology Flower #1.” Collage and painting by Christian Butterfield, $1,800, Corkin Gallery
Toronto mixed-media artist Christian Butterfield originally began making his pieces as apology gifts to friends, lovers and acquaintances. In this collage, he paints an abstract flower over a seemingly random assortment of clippings and images cut out from issues of Time magazine—his preferred source material.
This photograph comes from the estate of Will Munro, a queer icon in Toronto who worked as a visual artist, restaurateur and social activist until he died from cancer in 2010. As an artist, he was known for fashioning pieces made from men’s underwear, and this image, produced in 2004 shows a model sporting a delicately stitched and beaded pair.
A constellation of beads
“Boundaries.”Photograph by Nadia Myre, $12,500, Art Mûr
Nadia Myre is a multidisciplinary artist of Algonquin heritage living in Montreal. In her previous work “Indian Act,” she recreated all 56 pages of that legislation with beadwork, using white beads to represent the words and red ones to represent white space. In this large-scale photograph, she returns to the material and zooms in on the texture and intricate patterns of the beads—which were used as decorative jewellery in Europe and as currency in the Atlantic slave trade—to help the viewer examine their cultural history.
For this piece, multidisciplinary Montreal artist Karilee Fuglem created a device that reflects rays of light wherever it’s installed. She thinks of her work as drawings made with space, air and light. The materials—in this case polyester, steel and thread—are meant to disappear into the space so as to represent the non-visible world. Says Fuglem: “They testify to the wonder that can be glimpsed anywhere—how a random bit of anything can light up and come alive.”
Montreal-based painter Nicolas Grenier places recognizable diagrammatic shapes in colourful gradients to mimic political affiliation graphs and charts. While viewing the artwork, visitors are provided with an Approval Matrix sheet—via PDF for online visits—to map their positions on the current state of the world and where it’s headed.
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.
