A few holiday cards

 

Diane Borsato, Kelsey Oseid | Mushrooming

Diane Borsato, Kelsey Oseid

Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt – An Illustrated Guide to the Fascinating, the Delicious, the Deadly and the Strange

New York City, USA: The Experiment, 2022

240 pp., 6.75 x 8.75", hardcover

Edition size unknown

One of the first friends to visit after we moved to New Brunswick was Diane Borsato, who was flown in to give a talk to students at Mount Alison University. Afterwards, we walked together into town with her while she conveying her shock that we were comfortable living somewhere so small. She asked about access to groceries and we said that we had two stores in town and several larger options in Nova Scotia, ten minutes away. 

She asked if there were any foods we just couldn't find. Roula answered that we missed oyster mushrooms. Diane said "You mean like those?" and pointed to a tree by the side of the road - not ten feet away - that was covered in them. She crouched down and collected some, wrapping them in a napkin and storing them in her purse. Later she advised that we try a small amount to ensure that they were safe. 

Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt is the result of many years of  intensive (often hands-on) research by Borsato. The book is filled with insights, anecdotes and details about more than 120 fungi from across the northern hemisphere, in forests, parks and grocery stores. 

Borsato examines Mushrooms as food, hallucinogenic, aphrodisiac and event and her charming stories are accompanied by illustrations by Kelsey Oseid.

"Fungi are an order so mysterious they push our wonder and horror buttons simultaneously. In Mushrooming, Diane Borsato uses her radical curiosity to consider what they have to teach us about interconnection, the diversity of life, and the wildly creative possibilities of risk and attention."

– Shary Boyle

Dave Dyment/Roula Partheniou | We Love

The Sweetest Little Thing is an event held annually on Valentine’s Day, which features an in-person and online auction to benefit Struts and the Owens Art Gallery. 

This year includes affordably priced works by Shary Boyle, Micah Lexier, Andrea Mortson, Graeme Patterson, Kerri Reid, Jon Sasaki, Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky and others who have appeared on this site numerous times. 

Roula and I donated this collaborative work, made last month. It is a plexiglass sculpture painted with acrylic paint and features a wooden gravity bar on the verso. 

100% of the proceeds from the auction go towards programming costs of the two galleries. 

Bid here: 

https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/78578/auctions/175799?r=1&t=all

Halifax Art Book Fair

 

The above is our modest haul from the Halifax Art Book Fair last month, including titles by Sonja Ahlers, Nic Wilson, Serena McCarroll, Micah Lexier, Lenka Clayton, Sharyl Boyle, and Lucy Pauker & Mark Cruz. I’ll try to get to all of them shortly, once the last of the identity-theft administrative nightmare is over. 

Dave Dyment | Untitled [Fan Labour #2]

Dave Dyment

Untitled [Fan Labour #2], 2015 

Graphite on vellum 

41 x 33 x 4 cm.

Edition of 8 signed and numbered copies, each unique

From a series of works involving convoluted and complex ‘conspiracy theory’ readings of popular films, this piece is currently part of The Sweetest Little Thing, an annual auction and event to raise funds for the two galleries in town. The Owens Art Gallery is the country’s oldest University gallery and Struts is an Artist-Run-Centre with a reputation for punching above it’s weight bringing artists to town as part of it’s renowned residency program. 

The auction’s MO is smaller, affordable artworks and this year includes work by many artists who have featured on this site, see hashtags below. 

Dave Dyment | Mondegreen for Yoko Ono

Dave Dyment

Mondegreen for Yoko Ono

5 x 7" plexiglass

acrylic on laser cut plexiglass

For their annual fundraising event Struts and the Owens Art Gallery invite artists to donate a postcard-sized artwork which they auction off at a gala titled The Sweetest Little Thing. Until a few years ago they would mail out wooden 5 x 7 boards to participants, something which Jon Sasaki & Micah Lexier always put to good use. 

In the fall I ran a series of posts here that could serve as an almost comprehensive overview of Yoko Ono's various iterations of her 1971 postcard A Hole To See The Sky Through. These were followed with a few variations by other artists (Dieter Roth, Alex Snukal, David Bellingham, etc). 

My Sweetest Little Thing entry is another variation: a plexiglass postcard called Mondegreen for Yoko Ono, with the text reading "A Hole To See This Guy Through". 

The term 'mondegreen' was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, who recalled a memory from her childhood of mishearing a line from the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray". She mistook the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen". I first heard of the term in the first grade. My teacher recounted that she always felt the Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas was a very sad song, because she mistook the line "Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen" as "Good King Wences last looked out."

Famous song lyric examples include "Hold me closer, Tony Danza", "Then I saw her face, now I'm gonna leave her", "You've been outright offensive, for so long now" and "I want to rock and roll all night, and part of every day". Perhaps the most infamous misreading is from the song Blinded By The Light: "Revved up like a deuce". 

As a child, Roula and her sister thought the Beatles' "Get Back" included the line "Jojo was a dog who thought he was an owner", which is better than anything in the actual song. 

Bidding began a couple of hours ago and continues until the 14th of February (Valentines Day and four days before Yoko Ono's 90th birthday), here: 

https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/78578/auctions/137633/auction_items/4318507

Before Covid the auction was only in person, with most of the works selling locally, and typically for not much money. Artists participating this year who have previously appeared on this blog include: Jon Sasaki & Micah Lexier (collaboratively, as always), Bridget Moser, Graeme Patterson, Kerri Reid, Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky, Joshua Schwebel and Roula Partheniou. 

Shary Boyle | 15 Things to Do with a Sculpture

Shary Boyle

15 Things to Do with a Sculpture

Zürich, Switzerland: Nieves, 2022

16 pp., 14 x 20 cm., staple-bound

First Edition of 100 copies

Fifteen uses for a small sculpture, including gifting it, trashing it, selling it, worshipping it, masturbating with it and bludgeoning someone to death with it. This b/w 'zine recalls some of Boyle's earliest self-published bookworks, like Witness My Shame. 

Released last year, the title has sold out and is currently unavailable. 

The Rubber Stamp Project: Shary Boyle

Shary Boyle, 2000, for

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

(see previous posts)

The Rubber Stamp Project

[Various Artists]
The Rubber Stamp Project
Sackville, Canada: Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, 2003
[68 pp.], 24 x 10 cm., soft cover
Edition size unknown

The Rubber Stamp Project began in 1996 when then-Director of Struts Gallery Gregory Elgstrand began commissioning artists to create works which could be stamped onto all outgoing mail from the centre for three months. The only stipulation was that the work had to fit on the back of a standard #10 envelope.

The series began with a somewhat incendiary text by Michael Fernandes that tackled the context directly: THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST RUN CENTRE IS TO BRING DOWN THE GOVERNMENT. It was soon followed by a similarly forthright work by Barbara Sternberg that read BUSINESS IS BUSINESS, CULTURE IS NOT BUSINESS.

While many of the initial works were text-based, artists such as The Royal Art Lodge, Jon Claytor, Daniel Barrow, Shary Boyle, Erik Edson and others contributed illustrative work to the series.

It's unclear when the project ended, but this hand-stamped (right down to the funding body acknowledgement) volume collects 8 years worth of stamps, by 31 different artists, including Cliff Eyland, Shawna Dempsey & Lori Millan, John Murchie, Annie Dunning, Jason Logan, Lucie Chan, Andrea Mortson, Anthea Black, Jen Budney and others.

It's available from the publisher, here, for $10 CDN. The following dozen or so posts will feature stamps from the book.

Nuit Blanche Tonight

The 11th annual Nuit Blanche is held tonight in the streets of Toronto, beginning at 7pm and running until early tomorrow morning. This year features projects by David Hammons, Arturo Duclos, Santiago Sierra, Shary Boyle, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, John Akomfrah, Bill Viola, and countless others. Below is a quick selection of some book-related projects:

Kelly Jazvac
Browsing 
David Mirvish Books, 596 Markham Street

David Mirvish Books closed its doors after more than three decades in early 2009. It was the city's largest bookstore dedicated to art, design and photography. The two-story round building (once a gallery) housed a 50-foot-long Frank Stella painting and the store often employed artists as sales staff. London-based artist Kelly Jazvac worked there in the store's final years, and returns tonight with a collage of salvaged billboards, animated by industrial fans.

Luzinterruptus
Literature vs. Traffic
Old City Hall

In a project curated by Camille Hong Xin, the anonymous collective from Madrid will present a river of open books illuminated by individual lanterns. Thousands of used books were donated by the Salvation Army and visitors are encouraged to take one home with them tonight.

John Shipman
100 Libraries. 99 Books
St. Matthew's United Church, 729 St. Clair Avenue West

Each of the 100 libraries consists of a desk structure, a reading light, an illuminated sign, and a tethered book. The miniature libraries stand in for public or private libraries and bookstores from across Canada, North America and beyond. The event is child-friendly, with ten of the libraries dedicated to children's books on a carpeted platform and workshops on bookmaking and calligraphy.

Bruce Nauman
Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)
Union Station, West Wing, 65 Front Street West

A single-channel fixed camera video from 1968, Slow Angle Walk, captures Nauman repeating a laborious sequence of body movements for nearly an hour. The work was inspired by passages in books by Samuel Beckett, where characters walk with stiffened legs or an unbalanced and awkward gait. Nauman recorded the video with the camera on its side so that he appears to be walking up a wall.


Nuit Blanche takes place from sunset to sunrise tomorrow morning. Visit the website, where projects are organized by artist name, project title or venue, here, or use the mobile guide tonight, here.

Shary Boyle announced to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2013

Read Murray Whyte's account at the Toronto Star, here.