Hector Guimard and the Place Victoria Metro

The Polaroid has, for many, allowed an image to be viewed a minute after it was captured. Polaroids are the basis of the work of photographer, Alex Park, whose altered Polaroid of the Paris metro is the subject here. His technique aims to rearrange and reveal what the original images.

To modify his Polaroid photos, he uses a sharp object to impress and accentuate different aspects of the image. The result is like an image submerged in water or viewed through a kaleidoscope.

In Paris, Park has found an ideal playground to express his vision.

One of the finest pieces of the metro’s art collection, this graceful Art Nouveau portico was donated by the Parisian transit authority, to the Montreal metro in 1967 to commemorate their collaboration in designing the metro. Its instantly recognizable green cast iron form, with its shield-shaped medallions, delicately curved sign holders, and lily-of-the-valley light standards with orange tear drop-shaped lamps are a centrepiece of Place Victoria and the Quartier International.

Montreal’s Guimard is the only authentic example of these world-famous works in use on a metro station outside Paris. Since the entrances are modular, it was composed of pieces of demolished Guimards from Paris metro stations. However, the holders for the Métropolitain sign, the neighbourhood map on the entrance’s rear, and the light globes are reproductions added during the entrance’s complete restoration in 2001-2003.

The Place Victoria metro is the inspiration for my realization of an art nouveau necklace designed by Kathy Domokos.

More about the Montreal Metro

Mirvish Books Leaves the Village

David Mirvish Books is closing its doors after more than three decades as one of Toronto’s premier spots for art, design and photography books.

The bookstore has been stitched into the fabric of the Bloor and Markham Sts. area since 1974. David Mirvish opened the store as a part of the Mirvish Gallery, which showcased the work of colour field sculptors, painters and abstract artists. In the heart of one of Toronto’s Victorian-style neighbourhoods, the establishment became a landmark in the Mirvish Village.

Store manager Eleanor Johnston said the doors will close Feb. 28.

“We are moving all of the inventory online. We’re not going to be like Amazon, that just lists everything. We will only list things that we have. It’s just another part of the world of selling retail. This is the transition that we’re taking. We’re not doing it with an aim of saying this is a better business concept.”

Frances Wood, the co-owner of Southern Accent, a restaurant across from the bookstore, said losing the 34-year-old establishment will change the face of the Village forever.

Mirvish Books is not the first independent bookstore to close in the area recently. Ballenford Books, specializing in books on architecture, on Markham St. just two doors away from Mirvish, closed last year after 29 years.

Mirvish’s closing has left some customers asking what will happen to the 50-foot-long painting by Frank Stella that dominates the store’s interior. “We don’t have any plans to do anything with it,” said Johnston.

For customers like Tracy Dalglish, who has been coming to the store since it opened, losing the building will end the romantic experience of visiting the store. Dalglish remembers visiting with her father as a 13-year-old in the late ’70s.

“I would come down with my dad for the Boxing Day sales,” she said about her trips from Rosedale to the store. “I found my love of books in this store with my dad. It’s sad when you see places you love disappear.”

Susan Warner Keene was a curious student in her mid 20s at the Ontario College of Art when she discovered the store in 1974. She has been coming ever since. She said it was the most beautiful physical space any bookstore in Toronto had to offer back then. She finds inspiration for her work with hand papermaking from reading a variety of books the store offers.

“I’ve found books here that have been tremendously helpful in my own work,” she said at the store yesterday.

“It’s probably my favourite bookstore, so it will be very sad to lose it.”

In Pursuit of Happiness

There are people who feel compelled to leave the place where they were born and the culture in which they were raised and go to Paris, where they find themselves.

The mere act of going through the motions in another city, in another language, can be a distraction from the mundane. In Paris, every errand requires a new vocabulary, words one would never come across in Molière or Baudelaire: tournevis, crochet, marteau for a trip to the hardware store; tache, doublure, before heading off to the dry cleaner.

But the truth is, Paris also takes one’s mind off troubles in unforeseen ways. Everywhere, something urges you to pay attention: a taste, a smell, some subtle flourish that a person trudging through life might otherwise miss.

From a walk-up apartment half a block from the Seine, you might listen through open windows on a summer night to the chamber-music concerts across the street at the Musée de la Monnaie, with Mozart’s ripe harmonies carried upward on the dense, warm air. Going on midnight, the noise of the traffic might be interrupted by lurching, bleating oom-pah-pah renditions of popular standards as the Fanfare des Beaux-Arts, a marching band of students from the school of architecture, snaked its way through the narrow streets, its gusto fueled by wine.

Shopping for groceries, you might bring home fraises des bois, plump figs from Turkey, and yogurt made from goat’s milk. At the bakery on the corner, you might discover congolais—haystacks of pure, intense coconut or, if it is Christmastime, crystalline marrons glacés. In the Luxembourg Gardens, you might see children sailing their boats in the fountain or, in October, watch a parade of citrus trees in their jardinières, being taken to the Orangerie, where they will sit out the winter.

Many of us in North America share the middle-class values instilled in our parents by their parents: diligence, discipline, thrift, and a particularly Calvinist delight in the virtues of self-denial. Work is every upstanding person’s reason for being, and pleasure and leisure are the rewards for a job well done. From this austere outlook, we might conclude that the self is to be constantly policed and kept in check.

Spending time with the French allows us to loosen our iron grip. We envy their capacity for moderation, and realize for the first time that pleasure makes moderation possible. We begin to build little treats into the day: a walk along a street we love, 20 minutes with a book in the Tuileries on the way to an appointment; a late-night glass of Champagne at a café; Poilâne’s walnut bread for breakfast. Where we might consider flowers a reckless indulgence, except for Mother’s Day, in Paris, no vase ever goes empty.

The French know that pleasure is something to be discovered, there for the taking, and something to be cultivated. Its pursuit, as it turns out, is not a mindless slide into debauchery but a science, rigorous and exacting, discriminating between the merely good and the sublime. The thing about pleasure is that it immerses you in the moment. The present becomes more compelling than the future or the past. There is no better cure for heartache.

Having spent time there, could one ever be happy living anywhere else? That’s not the lesson.

Because in the course of learning to love the city and its inhabitants,  one also learns to savour the texture of everyday life, in Paris or anywhere.

Adapted from Holly Bruback, Gourmet, September 2008

Image: Arnaud Frich, Montmartre

Image: Eglise St Pierre et Sacré-Coeur par Jean Dufy

The Glasgow Art Club

We in the colonies are delighted to discover, via the Intertubes, that there really is a Glasgow Art Club in the European City of Culture, 1990, akin to the famous Willow Tea Rooms but with artists who lunch…

Glasgow Art Club, which has occupied its existing Bath Street premises since 1893, was founded in 1867 by William Dennistoun, a young amateur artist who had been forced by ill health to leave the city. His friends who used to sketch with him at his cottage in rural Old Kilpatrick and Dennistoun proposed that they should form an art club. He and 10 others, all amateur artists, held preliminary discussions in a tearoom above a Candleriggs baker’s shop before launching the club in the Waverley Temperance Hotel in Buchanan Street.

At their monthly meetings each member would bring a painting, usually a watercolour, and the others would comment. At times there could be fiery disputes.

Membership grew in the 1870s, professional artists began to join, and exhibitions were held. Not surprisingly, the limitations of a temperance hotel began to be felt and in 1875 the club moved to a Sauchiehall Street hotel, also called Waverley, where something stronger than tea was to be had and annual dinners could be held in suitable style.

“The Art Club is my sanctuary, paradise in the middle of bubbling Hell of businesses, trendy bars, killer traffic, over priced restaurants and horribly crass shopping malls.”
~ Peter Howson

The continuing need for cash  helped to propel the club towards a critical move – the admission of lay members, which in any case was in tune with Glasgow’s awakening interest in the arts. This proposal was strenuously resisted at first but by the mid-1880s the painter James Guthrie was among influential members arguing successfully for change and male lay members began to be admitted, although women had to wait until 1983.

Two adjacent town houses were bought in Bath Street. There is recent evidence that the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh had a hand in some of the gallery’s ornamental details.The scene was thus set for countless dinners, dances, concerts, lectures and not least, exhibitions.

More at Glasgow Art Club

The Architecture of Memory

This September 11, an exhibition of memorial architecture has opened at The Centre for Architecture in New York City.

Memorial Sites: New York to Nairobi Photographs by Julie Dermansky includes images from Hangar 17, at  New York’s JFK Airport where the Port Authority  of NY & NJ is storing artifacts from the World Trade Center that have been cleaned and archived. These images have never been shown before. Many of the pieces saved will go to different museums, including the one planned to open at Ground Zero.

There is a photograph of the memorial for those lost in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina at St. Bernard Parish’s Shell Beach. The memorial was meant to be unveiled on Katrina’s 3rd anniversary but was postponed because of the impending arrival of Gustav and subsequent evacuation. Dermanksy drove there to photograph it the day before Gustav hit.

The exhibition reflects on the meaning and history of memorials while addressing site specificity and the culture of place.

“History belongs to all of us, but it is the memorial site commemorating a particular historical moment and connecting it to the present that infiltrates our being and transcends history.”

Dermansky is documenting memorials in diverse locations, from the site of the destroyed US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, to the Valhalla, New York 9/11 memorial by Frederic Schwartz. Her global perspective explores the range of realized memorial design solutions. With photos selected by curator Tracey Hummer, the distinguished writer and critic, the New York to Nairobi memorial exhibition captures the irony of sacred sites converted to tourist destinations.

Dermansky’s photographs capture traces of mankind’s unthinkable acts strewn across the planet in the form of monuments and residual artifacts. By presenting a global record of architectural structures, her work engages people in addressing issues of injustice and genocide that they might otherwise avoid when presented in the form of current events. Rick Bell noted that “the photos of Julie Dermansky record the remembrance of horrific events through a lens that makes them immediate and palpable – you do not walk away from these images indifferent or unmoved.” Dermansky’s images tie the past to the present and start a dialogue about society’s obligation to honor and preserve unspoken history through the architecture of memorials.

A photographer who began her career as s sculptor, Julie Dermansky has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times. Her background in fine arts adds to her compelling vision. Julie’s photographs make us ask if the words “never again” are just a slogan. This fall, the artist will be named as an Affiliate Scholar at the Rutgers University Center for the Study of Genocide & Human Rights.

The exhibition runs from September 11 until October 3, 2008.

Photographs of Dermansky’s work at her website

Her blog

Images:
Copper footsteps of the righteous in Nanjing, China
Katrina Memorial at Shell Beach in St. Bernard Parish
Identity photos at Manzanar Museum

Stairway to Heaven

The Apartment Therapy website features a closeup of a London apartment with a Stairway To Heaven. If you’re a booklover, that is!

Austrian expats who’ve lived in London for several years, Veronika and Sebastian have always been shocked by the state of London rental apartments, with their drafty rooms and faulty plumbing. So they were thrilled when they found a top-floor flat in a 1898 building that had just been remodeled from head to toe, modernizing it without ruining its Victorian charms.

When Leonie and Rhodri (the previous inhabitants) added the upstairs, the architect proposed a handsome and clever book-lined staircase to house their formidable combined libraries in one streamlined space.

“The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a ’secret’ staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to access a new loft bedroom lit by roof lights. Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome. The stair structure was designed as an upside down ’sedan chair’ structure that carries the whole weight of the stair and books back to the main structural walls of the building. It dangles from the upper floor thereby avoiding any complicated neighbour issues with the floors below.”

“It’s just brilliant because the way it’s conceived, you can walk by it and not even notice it,” Leonie says. “So it’s like this fabulous surprise.” The rather treacherous staircase hangs from steel beams, so as not to put any pressure on the Victorian floor, and the staircase has the air of a steep mountain climb from the bottom. “At first I was terrified! Every time!” says Veronika. “Soon, though, it becomes a mechanism and even in the dark one manages to make it downstairs.”

Apartment Therapy

The Environmental Art of Andy Goldsworthy

“I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and “found” tools–a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn.”

A Yorkshire farm was where, from the age of 13, British artist Andy Goldsworthy first learned his trade: how to use a shovel, skin a hare, build a dry-stone wall. It’s also where he saw a painting in the lines of a plow on the land, a sculpture in a haystack, and where he realized that the idyllic landscape of rural England is one fashioned by sweat and privilege and kept green by death and dung.

Goldsworthy is a sculptor, photographer and environmentalist living in Scotland who produces site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. His art involves the use of natural and found objects to create both temporary and permanent sculptures which draw out the character of their environment.

The materials used in Goldsworthy’s art often include brightly-coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, “I think it’s incredibly brave to be working flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.” Goldsworthy is generally considered the founder of modern rock balancing. For his ephemeral works, Goldsworthy often uses only his bare hands, teeth, and found tools to prepare and arrange the materials.

Photography plays a crucial role in his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. According to Goldsworthy, “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.”[

“Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.”

Rivers and Tides is a 2001 documentary about the artist, directed by filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer. The film received a number of awards, including the San Diego Film Critics Society and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle awards for best documentary. Now with this deeply moving film, shot in four countries and across four seasons, and the first major film he has allowed to be made, the elusive element of time adheres to his sculpture.

The director worked with Goldsworthy for over a year to shoot this film. What he found was a profound sense of breathless discovery and uncertainty in Goldsworthy’s work, in contrast to the stability of conventional sculpture.

There is risk in everything that Goldsworthy does. He takes his fragile work – and it can be as fragile in stone as in ice or twigs – right to the edge of its collapse, a very beautiful balance and a very dramatic edge within the film. The film captures the essential unpredictability of working with rivers and with tides, feels into a sense of liquidity in stone, travels with Goldsworthy underneath the skin of the earth and reveals colour and energy flowing through all things.

Rivers and Tides

Andy Goldsworthy Portfolio

Artist/naturalists

Review at Yorkshire Sculpture Park website

Earth Art Exhibit at Royal Botanical Gardens

If you enjoy Andy Goldsworthy’s work, check out Devon-based environmental artist Linda Gordon: The Art of Place and her blog Opening Spaces

For more amazing environmental art, visit the Green Museum and its blog. This is an online museum. They do not have a physical space filled with a bulky art collection. Instead, as an online museum, their strategy for sharing environmental art reflects their values. They have a very small ecological footprint and can display a wide range of art works from around the globe and include directions so you can visit exhibitions and events first-hand. They are like a traditional museum turned inside out. Instead of visiting one big box filled with art they are many tiny boxes (monitors) encouraging visitors to go out to experience art in the context of their communities and ecosystems.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~~ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

There is no city that does not dream

Canadian literature has largely centred on rural and wild spaces. Cities are often viewed as a blight on the landscape, encroaching on its imagined pristineness.

Toronto writer, Anne Michaels has documented the intersection of Canada’s largest city, and time, memory and imagination in her poem, “There is no city that does not dream.” This poem is the centerpiece of her third book of poetry, Skin Divers.

I first came across this poem one day on the subway, possibly as we were crossing Shaw Street. It was hidden among the subway car’s advertising, and it was part of the “Poetry on the Way” series which made my commute bearable. I had no notepad with me at the time, and I was afraid that I might not come across it again, so I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I arrived home.

In the poem, the city unfolds, not in its brick and mortar sprawl this time, but as real and imagined remembrances over millions of years.

In a city so familiar that we hardly notice it, we read rumours of lost lakes such as glacial Lake Iroquois whose shores define the Niagara Escarpment; ravines which conceal lost rivers, long paved over, such as Taddle Creek, which still runs under Philosopher’s Walk; and dinosaur bones unearthed with the building of the subway – all part of our city’s geologic garden.

Our present day experience of the spring air and the ferry ride in the rain intertwines with this unread page of love charting where we came from, drifting away from us on the wind.

The line, “The lost lake/crumbling in the hands of brickmakers/the floor of the ravine where light lies broken/with the memory of rivers” transports me into a past where I no longer hear the quotidian hum of the city, but walk through the wild and secret marshes from another time.