You really should...
I explain why getting married, being antisocial and viewing art in the dark are actually all GOOD ideas
Peeking out through a small hole I have nibbled from inside my cocoon to say hi and share what I’ve been writing and thinking about in the last month.
Most significantly in my personal life, I got married in October. It was a real nice time. We had a tiny, immediate-family-only legal ceremony at the restaurant where we had our first date, followed by a blowout bash with 120 of our closest friends at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
I highly recommend organizing an event focused exclusively on how much you are loved and supported by everyone you care about, where everyone looks amazing and gets to gorge on croquembouche and dance the night away. We just got our photos back, taken by our friend Vuk Dragojevic, and they’re helping me to process, frame by frame, what at the time felt like being at the centre of one big, bright, beautiful, glittering firework.
While planning our wedding, I crowd-sourced, asking every married couple I knew to share one thing they considered a must-do, and one thing they would do differently. I got some tremendous tips. One was to tell guests not to say goodbye to you. When it’s time to leave, just go! Otherwise, you’re pulling the bride and groom away from enjoying themselves to essentially say, “Your party is coming to an end, just as all joy will eventually fade and wither, for death remains undefeated and we must all meet our inevitable mortal fates.” Just text me from the cab, ya harbinger of doom!
Admittedly, I didn’t do this as it felt rather antisocial, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind the next time I’m a guest at someone else’s party.
In the spirit of sharing good advice, I’m going to list an assortment of directives below that might feel random at first, until you realize that I’ve subtly interwoven links to four recent articles I’ve written :)
Hire an artist to take your wedding photos
I really love these portraits of comic-con attendees that Vuk did in 2021, called No Costume is No Costume. All of his work is very good and worth checking out, but with Halloween just behind us, this series feels like the best place to start.
I Really think you should go to MOCA Toronto
If you are in Toronto, saunter over to the Jeff Wall exhibition at MOCA Toronto. Man’s a ledge. I wrote about the three-floor show for NUVO, here.
MOCA’s programming of sound-based art in its stairwell continues to be stellar: right now it’s I Really, by Amsterdam DJ and music producer Sandrien featuring Toronto-based conceptual artist Kelly Mark, who died earlier this year. (For a poignant list of remembrances, see this Momus piece.) The track sets Mark’s 2002 work I Really Should… to a techno beat:
Always on the pulse, Tatum Dooley of must-follow Substack Art Forecast wrote a fantastic two-minute review (a great idea in and of itself) of another MOCA stairwell installation I adored, Ceal Floyer’s ‘Til I Get it Right. I can’t wait to hear what Tatum thinks of I Really, too.
By the way, there are six sites you can still visit to experience Everything and Nothing, a multi-venue survey exhibition of Mark’s work on view across Toronto. Click here for a PDF map of those projects to see what’s still running.
Look at art in the dark
Last month I wrote two stories about artists using the night sky as their canvas. For CBC Arts, I interviewed US-based Canadian performance artist Cassils about their new durational work, Undersight, which projects words deemed suspect by the Trump administration into the darkness using Morse code and powerful lights. This excerpt from my article provides a quick cheat sheet for some of Cassils’ most memorable works:
The artist frequently employs light as a medium, as well as their own body. They set their torso alight in Inextinguishable Fire (2007–15), underwent a rigorous bodybuilding regimen in Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2011–13), pummelled a mound of clay in strobe-lit darkness in Becoming an Image (2012–ongoing) and displayed gallons of their own urine in PISSED (2017).
For NUVO, I wrote about Toronto artist Jon Sasaki’s recent solo exhibition at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Making Do With The Photons That Linger After The Sun Has Set, which consisted of paintings that capture landscapes at the moment day turns to night. I love people who choose to do things the hard way.
For his new exhibition, Sasaki spent 10 months painting en plein air—in the dark. Using a 3D-printed black paintbox of his own design (“the readymade ones were too beige,” he quips) and a palette limited to green, umber, navy, and grey, he worked outdoors through frostbite, mosquitoes, and the watchful eyes of coyotes and deer. Each of the 35 small panels captures the fragile half-hour of nautical twilight, when light dissolves, forms flatten, and the horizon disappears.
If you can’t be an Arte Povera sculpture, dress like one
Speaking of good newsletters, Odessa Paloma Parker of Opaloma recently sent out an excellent missive rounding up style highlights from Art Toronto’s opening night. My dress in the photo above (worn as a jacket) is by Luna del Pinal, a small fashion designer that works with artisans from marginalized and Indigenous communities in Guatemala.
The dress is a work of art itself and I’ve never received more compliments on an article of clothing (except at my wedding, naturally). It’s held together by these slim peekaboo panels stitched with tiny glass beads. I bought it at 100% Silk because it reminded me of the monumental Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass by one of my favourite artists, Jannis Kounellis.
Another reason the dress felt like an appropriate choice for this year’s Art Toronto was that the fair introduced Arte Sur, an exhibition curated by Mexico City gallerist Karen Huber that spotlighted Latin American artists from 11 galleries. When I interviewed Art Toronto director Mia Nielsen for S Magazine, she told me that half of participating galleries this year featured Indigenous artists — a landmark milestone for the fair.
Now I just need someone to invite me to their wedding so I can wear the dress again. I promise I won’t say goodbye when I leave.