According to Canadian curator Michael Klein, when people think of art in Vancouver, they think of photo-conceptualism. When they think of Winnipeg, it’s the Royal Art Lodge, the drawing collective founded in 1996 that launched the careers of talents like Marcel Dzama. But Toronto, on the other hand, resists such classifications — it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world, says Klein, and the same can be said for its art scene. So why do we automatically associate the city with the kind of clever, minimalist conceptual work that Klein shows at MKG127, the gallery he founded there in 2007? Blame the artist Micah Lexier — we covered his amazing A to B installation on Sight Unseen in 2010, and then proceeded to fall down the MKG rabbit hole, marveling both at the subtle, obsessive-compulsive thrills that characterize many of the works shown there and at the weird cohesiveness of Klein’s vision.
The gallerist, who’s an artist himself, went to school in the ’70s, and has been immersed in the conceptual scene ever since. After putting his own practice on hold for nearly a decade to help raise his family, a friend suggested he kickstart his career again by opening a gallery, and lo and behold he realized that the (sometimes-uncommercial) work he loved wasn’t being properly supported by other Toronto galleries. “There were artists that weren’t represented here that I thought deserved it,” Klein recalls. “I couldn’t understand why. So from the beginning the gallery was getting lots of attention in the press, because I was doing something not too many other galleries were doing — or maybe no other galleries were doing.” That included bringing artists like Michael Dumonthier or Ken Nichol — whose claim to fame is having pressed a single red button one million times — into the spotlight, or letting high conceptualists like Bill Burns conduct an all-day sheep-shearing in the gallery. It worked: Klein cemented his place in the Toronto art scene, and MKG127 became an important platform for more experimental Canadian talents.
Six years into his own experiment, Klein agreed to take a look back at his catalog for us and pick out eight of his favorite MKG127 shows (minus a few in his early years that he neglected to have properly photographed). Take the official curator’s tour in the slideshow at right.
Semicolon Hyphen Bracket, 2013: “For our current summer group show, Semicolon Hyphen Bracket, I decided to feature women who are associated with the gallery, including a few outside artists like Ceal Floyer and Anna Kolodziejska who we’ve invited to show in context with artists we represent. The theme of the show has to do with hidden meanings and reversals, so for example, the first work you see is a wall painting by Kay Rosen called Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing, the title being a reversal of virgin wool. This piece influenced the whole show.”
Semicolon Hyphen Bracket, 2013: “This is the show’s title piece, by Roula Partheniou, which plays with all kinds of illusions where black paint becomes a void, or corners disappear.”
Semicolon Hyphen Bracket, 2013: “The blanket and rack in the foreground are a ‘pool’ by Anna Kolodziejska. The two green pieces on the wall at right are by Liza Eurich; one is a piece of turf and the other is a piece of tarp, and both of them have framed drawings hidden inside. In back is a Ceal Floyer work called Secret consisting of two megaphones placed cone to cone, plus another Kolodziejska piece with two pairs of pants stitched together at the foot to form a vagina shape. And on the left wall is a triptych of Cynthia Daignault paintings made from floorboards and a series of four folded notebook pages by Joy Walker. There are a lot of connections between the works.”
Michael Dumontier, this way/that way, 2009: “Dumonthier is from Winnipeg, and was one of the founders of the Royal Art Lodge, the collective that Marcel Dzama also came from. But Michael on his own is so different from the group — his work is narrative in a way, too, but they do illustrations, dolls, and drawings where Michael’s personal work is reduced and minimal. In this image are four works, from left: a children’s drawing of a rectangle that’s been carefully cut out of a book and held to the wall with a couple of staples; four pieces of masonite painted white with pencil lines that look like two envelopes; a found piece of colored masonite with pencil lines that looks like a manila envelope; and two pieces of masonite, one black and one red, placed together with a tiny gap to make a book.”
Michael Dumontier, this way/that way, 2009: “The three pieces on the left side of this photo are all made entirely from lines that have been cut out of books of childrens’ drawings and glued onto boards. The work on the right side that looks like an open book is just two pieces of board, side by side, mirroring each other, with a little bit of black paint on the top and bottom. Michael’s work is really simple but smart; it’s daring and bold, in a way, to make work that simple. And it’s not easy either — Michael’s not that prolific.”
Michael Dumontier, this way/that way, 2009: “This piece, Untitled (record), consists of a masonite stick that’s painted white at the top and black at the bottom, which spins around on the wall until it makes the image of an LP. It’s inspired by childrens’ books, which is where Michael gets a lot of his ideas.”
Roula Parthenou, Parts and Wholes, 2013: “Roula’s earlier work consisted of pieces she called handmade readymades: She’d buy pre-made canvases from art supply stores, find objects in the same size and shape like books or pieces of lumber, then paint the canvases as replicas. These tables, from her recent third solo show with the gallery, contain objects that look like books or other mysterious things; things that look like holes but aren’t holes, or that look like they’re part of something but you don’t know what. There are blocks of wood that look like sponges, but there’s also part of a rain pipe that’s an actual pipe. Very few of them are found objects, but you start to question that.”
Roula Parthenou, Parts and Wholes, 2013: “On one of the tables is this piece, called Proposal for a Monument #1, which is layers of MDF that are glued together and painted, so it looks like a chocolate cake with slice taken out of it, but in a really reduced way.”
Roula Parthenou, Parts and Wholes, 2013: “More of her objects on a gallery wall. There are things that look like hockey pucks, hot dogs, and rolls of tape, plus something that looks like an old 45 but the middle hole is actually a hole drilled into the wall.”
Ken Nicol, A Room Full of Stuff I Made (And Collected), 2009: “One of the things that really excites me is when there’s a local artist that’s a bit of a recluse, hiding away in his studio working really hard, and few people know about him. Ken was one of those artists; he showed a little here and there before I opened the gallery, but never in the right venue for him. Since he started showing here he’s become a well known local artist and I’ve sold a lot of his work. This is The Button I Pressed a Million Times, which is a button connected to a counter that he literally pressed a million times.”
Ken Nicol, A Room Full of Stuff I Made (And Collected), 2009: “This is a grid made of a thousand bugs that died under the lights of his studio — he counted them and made them into a perfect grid.”
Ken Nicol, A Room Full of Stuff I Made (And Collected), 2009: “Then there’s the companion piece to that piece: a bottle that has a thousand bugs inside it. Ken makes the most amazing, time-consuming work.”
Dave Dyment, Between the Click of the Light and the Start of the Dream, 2010: “Dave is maybe the most conceptual artist I show. His most brilliant artwork he made at a residency at the Glenfiddich distillery, where he buried a barrel full of whiskey in the warehouse floor. He then made 25 boxes with an empty space for a bottle inside, but the barrel won’t be bottled until 2108, so people who bought the edition won’t be there to drink it. So you’re buying an empty box — whiskey futures. This piece is a set of 28 DVD boxes, and inside are hundreds of hours of movie and TV clips featuring dream sequences, like that famous episode of Dallas. He does crazy research for all his work. At one point he was collaborating with another local artist on a piece similar to The Clock, and then Christian Marclay’s came out and that was the end of that.”
Dave Dyment, Between the Click of the Light and the Start of the Dream, 2010: “Apophenia is a ‘record’ made from two records that have been cut up and glued together. The black one is the soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz, while the white one is a white vinyl version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It has to do with that story that if you play the record while you watch the movie, all these weird coincidences happen.”
Dave Dyment, Between the Click of the Light and the Start of the Dream, 2010: “Another record piece: There are white vinyl records with black labels and black vinyl with white labels, sitting inside black cardboard sleeves in such a way that they represent the phases of the moon.”
Dean Drever, Black and White, 2011: “A lot of Dean’s work has to do with power and violence. White Klan is an incredible piece; I took it to NADA in Miami when I showed there in 2011. What you’re looking at here is a stack of thousands of sheets of paper where each sheet has been individually cut to form a 7-foot-tall Klansman. The only thing holding it there is the weight of the paper as it moves up. It was made on a plotter.”
Dean Drever, Black and White, 2011: “This is two hockey goalie masks back to back. Everything in the exhibition was black or white — the show was dealing with extremes. His paintings are also really slick, and he uses auto body paint a lot.”
Dean Drever, Black and White, 2011: “What you’re looking at here are actually blacked-out logos for heavy metal bands: AC/DC, Metallica, Judas Priest, Slayer. Dean has a new show coming up here in September called Black and White Version 2, but not everything he does is achromatic — for his first show at the gallery, he made a giant yellow kodiak bear in styrofoam covered in flocking. He’s done a lot of bears, culminating in a huge aluminum version he made for an office tower.”
Adam David Brown, Infinity Plus One, 2011: “This is a show about smoke and mirrors, so the main piece is called Mirror, Mirror, and what you’re seeing is taken from a Ouija board. It’s dealing with the spirit dimension but also the spatial dimension, because the mirror gives the illusion that you’re seeing into space, then the piece trails off up the wall and creates a sort of receding reflection as well.”
Adam David Brown, Infinity Plus One, 2011: “Across from that is Spell (Light) and Spell (Dark), where the magic word abracadabra is made from carbon taken from the smoke of a candle. So this is smoke on paper.”
Adam David Brown, Infinity Plus One, 2011: “This is a still from a video of smoke rising and billowing. Adam is doing a lot with these ideas of dimension and spirtis and magic. Although, at one point I had collectors interested in the Mirror, Mirror piece who didn’t realize it was a Ouiji board, and when they found out, it creeped them out so much that they decided they didn’t want it.”
Signage, ongoing: “Our signage project started with the A to B show in the summer of 2010, for which we hung a piece outside called HI by Kay Rosen. Since then I’ve changed the sign every summer.”
Signage, ongoing: “2011 was Mountains One (Santa Ana) by Josh Thorpe, which wasn’t part of a show. After the gallery moved locations last summer, we installed a 15-foot lightbox, and the first sign to occupy it was Images by Geoffrey Pugen (pictured), which also wasn’t part of a show.”
Signage, ongoing: “This summer, Roula Partheniou created Florescent Tube for our current show, Semicolon Hyphen Bracket.”
There’s no object too mundane to catch Micah Lexier’s eye. He collects scraps torn off cardboard boxes, envelopes and papers lying in the street, even bathroom-cleaning checklists at restaurants — anything that deals with the passage of time or with systems, the driving forces behind his own work as an artist. “I love garbage day,” he says. “It’s hard for me to walk home and not find things. I keep a knife in my pocket just in case.” It’s not that Lexier necessarily uses these found items in his own pieces, like the 1994 series in which he photographed 75 men from age 1 to 75, all of whom were named David. They’re just another part of his lifelong fascination with the aesthetics of order, a way of seeing the world that was mapped out perfectly in the show he recently curated at Toronto’s MKG127 gallery, where curiosities from his collection sat alongside sequentially themed works by other artists.
Could New York’s best new gallery be in Greenpoint, Brooklyn? We’re beginning — no pun intended — to think it just might be so. Beginnings, a small storefront gallery on a side street off Greenpoint’s main drag, opened earlier this fall, the brainchild of seven like-minded friends and artists (two of whom are erstwhile members of Philadelphia’s artists-for-artists gallery Space 1026). At the outset, the goal was to create a warm, welcoming space that would be a home for emerging artists but also a place where even first-time art buyers might be encouraged to actually make a purchase. In their inaugural exhibition, the curators asked questions like: “What’s art for anymore? How can contemporary art be bought and sold in a healthy, progressive way? How can new artists support/be supported in their community? In the 21st century, what are the most satisfying and effective roles of the gallery? The gallerist? The gallery-goers?” The refreshingly honest answer? “We got no idea, but we’re happy to present this art and these artists.”
Just walking into Bodega Gallery in Philadelphia’s Old City and being greeted by one of its five cool, young founders — or browsing its online archive of past exhibitions, which is peppered with names like Sam Falls and Travess Smalley — you could easily file it alongside similar edgy, high-brow art establishments in cities like L.A., New York, or Paris. And then you find yourself conversing with a few of said cool, young founders (all of them artists themselves and graduates of Hampshire College), and you hear them say things like “stuff is for sale if people want to buy it, but that’s not the driving force,” or “this is just a space — everything happens around it, and nothing happens at it,” and you realize that the economics of a place like Philly can be even more freeing for projects like this than you’d imagined. Bodega really is just a space, one that's run by Elyse Derosia, Ariela Kuh, Lydia Okrent, James Pettengill, and Eric Veit, but where it feels like almost anything could happen.