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High-end lowbrow
UDDERLY ADORABLE : Cathy Cowgirl & Bullfriend
There’s something immediately familiar and disturbing about the work of Ron English and Van Arno. Like most lowbrow artists, Arno and English use contemporary visual culture as a language to be manipulated, appropriated and reconstructed.
Once the outsiders of the high-end art world, the lowbrow art movement has come into its own in the last half-decade, a trend that outspoken agit-pop artist Ron English sees as logical, “we make things that people can understand,” he explains over the phone. “It’s not so abstract and so esoteric that people can’t really get it. You just need to have lived in the same generation as us.”
“Right now Guggenheim is probably working on a show for Cy Twombly,” he continues, “which means nothing to us, it just looks like scribbles—we couldn’t care less, it just seems vacuous. An artist is supposed to make art for their generation, he was the artist of their generation and we are the artists of our generation. We’re making art for them, we’re making art that they love and want. We’re at their service.”
With Arno’s both masterful and humorous cartoonish twist on religious and heroic iconography, and English’s irreverent play with pop culture imagery (one work ponders the resurrectional correlation between Jesus and Frankenstein), their Canadian debut at Yves Laroche l’Autre Galerie (4 St-Paul E.), Autres Bizarreries, promises to be a playful, thought-provoking carnivalesque show. Vernissage on Wednesday, May 30, show runs until June 12.
by Raf Katigbak
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Neon rider
SEEING THE LIGHT: Nauman
The Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain, though a title of one of his videos, could well speak for Bruce Nauman himself. He’s the type who gets into magazines’ “most significant people” lists, a man who sits high atop the Greatest Living Artists scale and about whom the term influential is an understatement. More literally though, Nauman is perhaps best known for his neon creations, from which simple symbols and loaded wordplay stream forth in beams of brightly-coloured light.
Add sculptures, holograms, interactive environments, photographs, prints and performance to the mix and you’ve got a scope of Nauman’s 40 years of artistic output. This weekend, the Musée d’art contemporain opens the first-ever Canadian exhibition of the American artist with a two-sided show of his works. The first, Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, brings in 15 neon sculptures and light creations made between 1965–’85, in all their ironic glory. The second section features four decades of films and videos, as well as his recent sculpture “One Hundred Fish Fountain,” Nauman’s tribute to childhood fishing trips with his father, brought to life by 97 bronze fish suspended over a basin with water pumping through them. The exhibition runs from May 26–Sept. 3.
by MATTHEW WOODLEY
Robot bunny style
Spring is here and love is in the air. Well-respected artists Max Dean and nichola feldman-kiss expose their own amorous relationship in the exhibition Runaway Bunny at Projex–Mtl Galerie (1000 Amherst #103). Dean lives in Toronto and is a pioneer of robotic art. Among the works included in  this show is an image of Dean’s Robotic Chair—a wooden seat that falls apart and then pulls itself back together, as well as his interactive video, I snap. (Though I’m not sure if we should take this to mean he is apt to “fall apart” and “snap”!)
Feldman-kiss lives in Ottawa, where she has been working since 2001 at Canada’s National Research Council on her “mean body database.” This numerical description of her naked body is presented as a 7,662-page book. She turns the data from her body scans into the small figures encountered in a crowd of one self and the very odd composite forms of the chimaera set. This first collaborative exhibition between the two, with its eclectic mix of digital and analog pieces, creates an intimate dialogue worth eavesdropping on. Exhibition runs until June 17, info: (514) 570-9130.
by CHRISTINE REDFERN
Literary launchings
An eclectic weekend of book launches starts Friday with Navigating Customs, edited by Dana Bath and Taien Ng-Chan. It features a dozen unconventional travel stories by writers under 25, covering the globe from Great Barrier Island to Ground Zero. The launch takes place May 25, 8 p.m., at le Cagibi (5490 St-Laurent).
On Saturday, Conundrum Press celebrates four new titles. Cat Kidd  performs an excerpt from her new novel, Missing The Ark; Line Gamache and English translator KerryAnn Cochrane narrate a projection of Gamache’s graphic novel Hello, Me Pretty; there’s a screening of nine-year-old ballet students performing a choreography from Emily Holton’s Little Lessons in Safety; and Elisabeth Belliveau shows animated pieces from a new DVD/zine, The Great Hopeful Someday.
“There’s something for film buffs, art buffs, literary buffs, comic buffs, everybody’s covered,” says Conundrum publisher Andy Brown. May 26, 8 p.m., at MainLine Theatre (3997 St–Laurent). Both events are free.
by VINCENT TINGUELY
Is it art?
COO COO FOR COCOA: Some studies claim eating enough chocolate can cause a feeling akin to an orgasm, something to do with the phenylethylamine chemical, which supposedly stimulates the pleasure centres of the brain. Other, less sensually inclined studies tout  chocolate’s potential health benefits; it contains tryptophan, which increases seratonin; flavinoids, which thin the blood; and magnesium, said to ease PMS symptoms.
The validity of those studies is questionable, but if you’re inclined to test the theories yourself, this is the weekend to do it. Bromont is celebrating its cocoa-themed culinary festival with an open house at the Chocolate Museum, chocolate sculptures, painting and, of course, tastings. Although the event is likely to lack the splendour and eeriness of a trip to Wonka’s factory, it will nonetheless satisfy your sweet tooth, and if you eat enough, may even provide for other happy endings. Admission is $6. (www.feteduchocolat.ca, (514) 389-3856.)
Arts
hole
MUSEUM MANIA: On May 27, visit over 30 Montreal museums at no cost for the 21st Museum Day. Info: www.museesmontreal.org. FREE FOR ALL: Whet your Fringe appetite at the Fringe-for-All, a sampling event of two-minute previews of over 40 of the 90-plus acts scheduled for this year’s Festival. 8 p.m., Monday, May 28, at Café Campus (57 Prince Arthur E.), free. AND NOW FOR DESSERT: Pointe-à-Callière continues its 15th anniversary celebrations with Sweet Stories, Montreal Delicacies, an outdoor sugar-fest celebrating our gastronomic history. There will also be a carousel, a pie cook-off, a tea party and delectable storytelling. May 26–27,11 a.m.–6 p.m, 350 Place Royal.
Artistat
Number of international exhibitors and local designers showcasing furniture, fashion, green architecture and more alongside a series of conferences and workshops at the three-day Salon international du design d’interieur de Montréal (Place Bonaventure, May 24–26): 300+ |
