that bee that stung me
in the morning, at 4 AM?
i thought it was you
09 October 2008
20 September 2008
Homesick
Homesick - October 2 - October 31, 2008
The Cousins (2007) 30.5 x 35.5cm
Rockonski is happy as a pair of boobs to present Homesick, Tonik Wojtyra's first solo exhibit ever. The show opens October 2 and runs to October 31. Please join the artist for the opening the morning of October 2 at 8 am - 11 am. The show takes place at 71 Havelock St. Toronto, ON - M6H3B3 KANADA
In Homesick, Tonik presents a multifarious chronicle culminating 30 months of painting at 71 Havelock Street in Toronto. Produced and presented in situ, the works on exhibit explore painting's relationship to architecture, abstraction, genealogy, dreams, promises, lies and it's ability to affect. Tonik explains:
>"It sucks ass but I have to move. Man, I learned to cook here. I wrote a book here. I mastered paint here. What haven't I done here? I have the best balcony, to boot. And although the tide has turned for the better and all? I feel sick about it. I really love this place, man. I don't wanna go but I can't stay either. The best way for me to talk about it is to show my Art within its first frame as Daniel Buren calls the studio. Let's have a cup of tea, a cookie, a chat, a smoothie, some eggs, oatmeal, sausages, yogurt, let's get high or whatever. I'm inviting you. I miss you."
A book will be published to accompany the show.
About the artist
Tonik Wojtyra is probably taller than you are... but maybe not as smart. Mos def maybe.
or 416-879-5077
xxx
The Cousins (2007) 30.5 x 35.5cm
Rockonski is happy as a pair of boobs to present Homesick, Tonik Wojtyra's first solo exhibit ever. The show opens October 2 and runs to October 31. Please join the artist for the opening the morning of October 2 at 8 am - 11 am. The show takes place at 71 Havelock St. Toronto, ON - M6H3B3 KANADA
In Homesick, Tonik presents a multifarious chronicle culminating 30 months of painting at 71 Havelock Street in Toronto. Produced and presented in situ, the works on exhibit explore painting's relationship to architecture, abstraction, genealogy, dreams, promises, lies and it's ability to affect. Tonik explains:
>"It sucks ass but I have to move. Man, I learned to cook here. I wrote a book here. I mastered paint here. What haven't I done here? I have the best balcony, to boot. And although the tide has turned for the better and all? I feel sick about it. I really love this place, man. I don't wanna go but I can't stay either. The best way for me to talk about it is to show my Art within its first frame as Daniel Buren calls the studio. Let's have a cup of tea, a cookie, a chat, a smoothie, some eggs, oatmeal, sausages, yogurt, let's get high or whatever. I'm inviting you. I miss you."
A book will be published to accompany the show.
About the artist
Tonik Wojtyra is probably taller than you are... but maybe not as smart. Mos def maybe.
or 416-879-5077xxx
10 September 2008
14 August 2008
09 August 2008
Maurizio Cattelan's Good versus Evil
A 2003 chess set by the Italian contemporary master where the artist posits "the figures of Adolf Hitler as the Black King against Martin Luther King, Jr. as the White King. I like.
08 August 2008
05 August 2008
01 August 2008
15 July 2008
09 July 2008
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
01 July 2008
26 June 2008
24 June 2008
14 June 2008
12 June 2008
05 June 2008
Steely Dan – Peg (Live)
On my route home yesterday I started whistling de la soul's Eye Know; I don't know how or why it got in my head. After whistling the loop once or twice, a gentlemen named Will Strickland of UMAC elucidated to me that the sample de la used comes from a song called Peg, by Steely Dan.
Honey, I'm home.
14 May 2008
13 May 2008
A couple paragraphs about Katie Bethune-Leamen
Rem Koolhaas: The typical pizza restaurant in Germany, for instance, is run by Turks, and yet, the discussion among politicians is that these people should know about German history and should have a minimal sense of belonging to an identity, etc., so it is a completely counterproductive and reactionary idea and also part of this nostalgia. It would be really interesting to locate that moment when nostalgia started to become the dominant mode.
Hans Ulrich-Obrist: And when would you locate it? Would you say it was postmodernism?
Rem Koolhaas: I think it was probably earlier, no?*
Maybe, (I'm not sure, hear me? But here I go panning, speculating, for gold) just maybe, Katie Bethune-Leamen's long-titled "Tupac" piece is some sort of attempt to locate a moment for nostalgia's rise to a dominant mode. Probably not, Rem and Hans might have nothing to do with it. The piece whose long title is missing here, whose memory is fogging off in this memory, whose composition should probably be considered in relation to the body of the group show it hung with ,is composed (and decomposed) by 3 links: mushrooms, Tupac and modernism's throne: a chair. (The exact name escapes me... Eames' design, originally issued in fiberglass by Herman Miller, ubiquitous. You've seen them. If you saw one it would be so obvious.)
There are 3 framed digital drawings works on the wall which read left to right. They dissolve linearly like a birth to death narrative: the image dissolves literally; the far right work is nearly black and white, and unlike the others is subtitled. Katie, in her hand writing, has scrawled a nearly decipherable sentence (or maybe it's my memory now) about Tupac Shakur and his ghost; an epitaph of sorts. Looking at the piece, one deciphers that the image of Tupac in the digital drawings is lifted from the blanket on the floor. A mink blanket, I'm told, it's called. It lies there before us, before the wall, below the drawings; it covers what one discovers is an Eames chair, you know the kind, this one is fancier than the kind bought en masse by universities in the 70s, fancier because it has what are known as an Eiffel base for legs (mimicking that shape of that industrial, romantic, French tower) and doubly fancier because it's white. That colorless, pale, white chair lies on it's side, toppled, dead; covered by that Tupac blanket like a cadaver. Sculpted, life-size, mushrooms sprout both from what's visible of the chair and from the blanket. Tupac dead, Eames chair dead, and mushrooms growing upon this substrate demanding our consideration. And as considerate I am, I consider, and all my thoughts return Hans and Rem. Sentimentality, homesickness, youth and oooh it was all so simple then...
Katie's "Tupac" ciphers nostalgia as a dominant mode but it doesn't pin-point nostalgia's rise; honestly, I'm lost here, help, hold me, I have no idea; then again, wait, wait, wait --- maybe it does pin-point a moment.
If it does, then the date lies with Tupac dying in the mid-late 90's, or does the moment rest when Eames chairs were being re-issued in fibreglass-free plastic editions? Probably in the 90s too. Same thing. But wait, Rem has given us a hint: it was probably earlier, no? And he's right, it lies much earlier, probably in the original issue of that Eames chair; somewhere in the midst of American post-WWII revelry; sometime when JD Salinger's Holden is loathing phonies; sometime when Martin Luther King Jr. was dreaming; sometime when a de Kooning was fresh in William Rubin's loft; sometimes when humans hadn't been to the moon yet; sometimes when Russians were warring the west with their cold; sometime when the future was still something look forward to... The exact moment nostalgia arose as a dominant mode is at modernism's peak and simultaneous collapse. And what of Tupac there? Why can't he rest in peace? This is where hip-hop kills us softly and directs us: mushrooms are the remix. Regardless how culture grows and flows and attempts to ascertain its highness through conflation of colors, times and rhymes, down below nature wants to (and of course eventually will) topple it, grow over it like weeds popping through cracked concrete, like books breeding dust, like meanings amplified by ambiguities, like mushrooms growing, rising, out of invisible mold; just add moisture and a bit of willing ghost. Within the remix, shiitake, magic, or otherwise, it's what Tupac Shakur instinctively knew when he rhymed to his mum: "tell my homies, I'm in heaven." What Tupac's premonition points at, and what Katie clarifies with her installation is a contemporary riddle: Never before have we lived in such material wealth and simultaneous spiritual poverty; a condition that obfuscates the present and keeps makes the mass nostalgic for the past; the politicians, on all sides in regards to the present, teach us to die. The riddle Katie leads me to is like a Borgesian labyrinth and I find myself trapped in it and even though it answers nothing, I have to rephrase Hans to ask it differently, to clarify... why did the future become something to be afraid of?
Hans Ulrich-Obrist: And when would you locate it? Would you say it was postmodernism?
Rem Koolhaas: I think it was probably earlier, no?*
Maybe, (I'm not sure, hear me? But here I go panning, speculating, for gold) just maybe, Katie Bethune-Leamen's long-titled "Tupac" piece is some sort of attempt to locate a moment for nostalgia's rise to a dominant mode. Probably not, Rem and Hans might have nothing to do with it. The piece whose long title is missing here, whose memory is fogging off in this memory, whose composition should probably be considered in relation to the body of the group show it hung with ,is composed (and decomposed) by 3 links: mushrooms, Tupac and modernism's throne: a chair. (The exact name escapes me... Eames' design, originally issued in fiberglass by Herman Miller, ubiquitous. You've seen them. If you saw one it would be so obvious.)
There are 3 framed digital drawings works on the wall which read left to right. They dissolve linearly like a birth to death narrative: the image dissolves literally; the far right work is nearly black and white, and unlike the others is subtitled. Katie, in her hand writing, has scrawled a nearly decipherable sentence (or maybe it's my memory now) about Tupac Shakur and his ghost; an epitaph of sorts. Looking at the piece, one deciphers that the image of Tupac in the digital drawings is lifted from the blanket on the floor. A mink blanket, I'm told, it's called. It lies there before us, before the wall, below the drawings; it covers what one discovers is an Eames chair, you know the kind, this one is fancier than the kind bought en masse by universities in the 70s, fancier because it has what are known as an Eiffel base for legs (mimicking that shape of that industrial, romantic, French tower) and doubly fancier because it's white. That colorless, pale, white chair lies on it's side, toppled, dead; covered by that Tupac blanket like a cadaver. Sculpted, life-size, mushrooms sprout both from what's visible of the chair and from the blanket. Tupac dead, Eames chair dead, and mushrooms growing upon this substrate demanding our consideration. And as considerate I am, I consider, and all my thoughts return Hans and Rem. Sentimentality, homesickness, youth and oooh it was all so simple then...
Katie's "Tupac" ciphers nostalgia as a dominant mode but it doesn't pin-point nostalgia's rise; honestly, I'm lost here, help, hold me, I have no idea; then again, wait, wait, wait --- maybe it does pin-point a moment.
If it does, then the date lies with Tupac dying in the mid-late 90's, or does the moment rest when Eames chairs were being re-issued in fibreglass-free plastic editions? Probably in the 90s too. Same thing. But wait, Rem has given us a hint: it was probably earlier, no? And he's right, it lies much earlier, probably in the original issue of that Eames chair; somewhere in the midst of American post-WWII revelry; sometime when JD Salinger's Holden is loathing phonies; sometime when Martin Luther King Jr. was dreaming; sometime when a de Kooning was fresh in William Rubin's loft; sometimes when humans hadn't been to the moon yet; sometimes when Russians were warring the west with their cold; sometime when the future was still something look forward to... The exact moment nostalgia arose as a dominant mode is at modernism's peak and simultaneous collapse. And what of Tupac there? Why can't he rest in peace? This is where hip-hop kills us softly and directs us: mushrooms are the remix. Regardless how culture grows and flows and attempts to ascertain its highness through conflation of colors, times and rhymes, down below nature wants to (and of course eventually will) topple it, grow over it like weeds popping through cracked concrete, like books breeding dust, like meanings amplified by ambiguities, like mushrooms growing, rising, out of invisible mold; just add moisture and a bit of willing ghost. Within the remix, shiitake, magic, or otherwise, it's what Tupac Shakur instinctively knew when he rhymed to his mum: "tell my homies, I'm in heaven." What Tupac's premonition points at, and what Katie clarifies with her installation is a contemporary riddle: Never before have we lived in such material wealth and simultaneous spiritual poverty; a condition that obfuscates the present and keeps makes the mass nostalgic for the past; the politicians, on all sides in regards to the present, teach us to die. The riddle Katie leads me to is like a Borgesian labyrinth and I find myself trapped in it and even though it answers nothing, I have to rephrase Hans to ask it differently, to clarify... why did the future become something to be afraid of?
08 May 2008
Martino Gamper
Martino Gamper is doing a project with Wright in Chicago. Look it up, it's worth it; his work is marked by alchemy, punk and a slight twist garage sale. Lovely.
Images courtesy of: www.gampermartino.com
30 April 2008
Cacao supply, children...
"Childhood is both a construct and a luxury good, available only to children of adults who earn sufficient livelihoods for their families as a whole." Read more.
27 April 2008
How My Family is and How to be more successful in 2 paragraphs or so, for Angela Nardiello
First of all, I had a great nap today. It was dreamy... so nice. I woke up to soup on the table.
You ask, I tell. Dancing is like art and dancing is an art and dancing is art but not if you're smoking and drinking on a Saturday night for just so. Drunk art isn't art, fuck that. But it can be. Don't let me be the arbiter on this one. What I do really know is this: If you like it, if it feels good, and it feels right, adopt a corporate catch phrase and just do it. Ahem, My family is so beautiful. I hung out today with mum and dad and my sister, Urszula, and her exceptionally wonderful son, my nephew, Tyrus. Tyrus has deep blue eyes from my father, I think. His brown hair is light brown, a glowing dark blonde, nothing dirty about it. He is deeply interested in all things with big wheels and painted yellow: diggers, excavators, trucks; his favourite are cranes. I credit his preference to his exceeding intelligence because he obviously has an affinity for ideas beyond brute force. He seems to understand lifting, as the surpassing of this primordial law that makes even flesh fall, and stretching towards the heaven is one step from flying and one stair step from being angelic. He doesn't pronounce the R in crane very well and when he sees one (and he sees many because Toronto is constantly under construction) he yells out KWAYNE! You can't help but smile at his budding wit when he points at the cranes and says "I wanna see dat!" He's a great joy to play with. I tease him a lot about what is his and what isn't, to his mother's dismay, but he laughs when I do it and I like it and oh, you'd love him Angela, you would, because he's so easy to fall in love with.
The second part of this much delayed response addresses your second question:
1. Read "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Louis Borges and from it...
2. Decide that you can't know everything and focus on what success is for you and let it be your new modus operandi. Obsess on it. And then realize that...
3. You have this thing inside you called "joy". Bring it to any table you may have the pleasure pulling up a chair to, resting your elbows upon, tapping your finger tips on, eating food from, dancing on top of and let joy unfold it's warm magic... voila.
I hope that helps.
I'm happy to have the chance to share this with you, you've asked great questions. I would have loved to share this with you over brunch. I miss you lots and lots, send me your mailing address, okay? Until then, I am
yours affectionately,
tonik
You ask, I tell. Dancing is like art and dancing is an art and dancing is art but not if you're smoking and drinking on a Saturday night for just so. Drunk art isn't art, fuck that. But it can be. Don't let me be the arbiter on this one. What I do really know is this: If you like it, if it feels good, and it feels right, adopt a corporate catch phrase and just do it. Ahem, My family is so beautiful. I hung out today with mum and dad and my sister, Urszula, and her exceptionally wonderful son, my nephew, Tyrus. Tyrus has deep blue eyes from my father, I think. His brown hair is light brown, a glowing dark blonde, nothing dirty about it. He is deeply interested in all things with big wheels and painted yellow: diggers, excavators, trucks; his favourite are cranes. I credit his preference to his exceeding intelligence because he obviously has an affinity for ideas beyond brute force. He seems to understand lifting, as the surpassing of this primordial law that makes even flesh fall, and stretching towards the heaven is one step from flying and one stair step from being angelic. He doesn't pronounce the R in crane very well and when he sees one (and he sees many because Toronto is constantly under construction) he yells out KWAYNE! You can't help but smile at his budding wit when he points at the cranes and says "I wanna see dat!" He's a great joy to play with. I tease him a lot about what is his and what isn't, to his mother's dismay, but he laughs when I do it and I like it and oh, you'd love him Angela, you would, because he's so easy to fall in love with.
The second part of this much delayed response addresses your second question:
1. Read "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Louis Borges and from it...
2. Decide that you can't know everything and focus on what success is for you and let it be your new modus operandi. Obsess on it. And then realize that...
3. You have this thing inside you called "joy". Bring it to any table you may have the pleasure pulling up a chair to, resting your elbows upon, tapping your finger tips on, eating food from, dancing on top of and let joy unfold it's warm magic... voila.
I hope that helps.
I'm happy to have the chance to share this with you, you've asked great questions. I would have loved to share this with you over brunch. I miss you lots and lots, send me your mailing address, okay? Until then, I am
yours affectionately,
tonik
14 April 2008
Tino Sehgal
I could write a whole thesis paper on Tino Sehgal but it's better to let him talk about it.Image: ICA
02 April 2008
31 March 2008
Toronto
keyword: grey. toronto is waaaaaay ____. ____ pale and ashy but the most beautiful ____ you can imagine. ____. i drove out to my parents house today and the route out to their place in the burbs takes us along a highway through what's known as the Don valley. the valley is ____... ____ and peppered brown with last years leaves. ____, and still, with a coat of this winter's relentless snow. the once-in-a-while willow trees provide a bit of color as their weeping branches and their tiny buds glow a yellow that seems almost neon amidst the, you got it, ____. 3 of my mum's crocuses broke their brilliant purple through the ____ ground. i wake up recently wondering if there is still snow to be witnessed. i wake up and the window over my head usually exposes a blue sky above; later in the afternoon it usually goes ____ but if it doesn't it's brilliantly sunny like today. i then look out over the ____ roads, the ____ sidewalks as they compliment the ____ish brown lawns and the nearly budding but still bald trees. snow. almost no sign of spring snow. snow, white sometimes, and sometimes ____ and snow aged to ice over the months near the sides of the roads, ice that has picked up dirt from the vehicles, absorbed the filth from the traffic, melted from salting, melted together with sand, ice that was once white, has now in places gone black. it's beguiling but you can revel in it, if you know how to look at it, touch it. it's so ____, beautiful. it's not april yet, but sometimes it snows in april. i wonder if you know that song?
21 March 2008
Everything around me.
Geoff McFetridge has made some new wallpaper I learned, and then I bumped into a place in California that makes an amazingly beautiful selection of fine wallpapers available.
11 March 2008
04 March 2008
It's rather gray...
I'd love to go to NYC today and be tickled by a visit to a great show at the MOMA. The NY Times has a great article about all it's hues and tones and MOMA's website has all the works to see online... And if that's not your bag of tea, then this just might be... a spoonful of honey.
Image: Purl Bee
28 February 2008
21 February 2008
Musings
Hans Ulrich Obrist with Stefano Boeri and Barbara Vanderlinden describe today's citizenship in terms of "bands of perception" - "less about belonging to a single and fixed geography but more about constructing a personal collage inflected by the various place one travers, travels to, lives in, emigrates to" etc. -- I had a conversation last weekend with Tejpal Ajji and he was telling me about his research about airport cities, outside major cities, like Heathrow, Queens, and Malton (which happens to be Tejpal's city of residence) + a conversation with Will Kwan led us into speculating about sharing a studio in Berlin or New York in the future, an outpost for our careers. I started to think about outposts and hubs and extensions this week. Sometime during the week i've been hypothesizing about the idea of a "Little Canada" --- I wonder how that could transpire in the fabric of a city like Berlin or Beijing, for instance; in Toronto we have China town, Korea town, Little Italy, Little India et al. and I'm thinking it would be interesting (and fun) to flip the idea back around and let immigrant culture come full circle - I bet there's a word for it... but what do you call an immigrant who goes back to where the hell he came from?
My father, who travels much between Canada and Poland has recently lamented to me about the migration of Polish, and now EU, citizens out of Poland to try and earn better money; many have ended up in England, Ireland, Germany etc + he says that the country has "lost" about 5 million inhabitants. I ask him if that's bad, and he says that it is, of course it is. And when I ask: How do you know? We both smile.
Image: Yesterday's Queen Street W. fire.
18 February 2008
Johnny Chung Lee's paint balloon slingshot etc.
Johnny Chung Lee is a renaissance man. Nevermind the slingshot linked up above but also check out what he's doing with the wii remote and his other projects. I wish more people were like Johnny Chung Lee, embraced their awesome nerd powers and put it good use. I'm inspired.
16 February 2008
15 February 2008
Make Shows
""When I lived in Vancouver, I had nothing, I made shows in my apartment. You can make a show in your shoe if you want. Shows can happen anywhere: it can happen on the telephone, it can happen in your computer, it can happen anywhere. It's, just like, a force of your imagination willing to take place. So I just say: make exhibitions. Get them out there. However, what it is, whatever technology you need, you know? Make them in the back of that truck over there, I don't care, doyouknowhatimean? Make shows." – Kitty Scott
14 February 2008
13 February 2008
07 February 2008
Stardate Feb 7, 08
A couple weeks ago my friend told me that about weather engineering in China. I thought it was amazing. In a whole other China factoid, China is now planet Earth's third largest Art market behind leaders US & UK. The above video has nothing to do with China but it is awesome, even if you're not big time into electronic music like I'm not. Laura told me about it.
31 January 2008
28 January 2008
12 January 2008
09 January 2008
07 January 2008
04 January 2008
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