Kuitca’s paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s explore human interaction and migration through architectural and topographical renderings. His Puro Teatro series represents the interiors of theatres, the seating map "becomes a powerful metaphor for individual and shared experience` a theme that is carried into works of maps on mattress type cushions and canvas. From W magazine - the mattress works are described as speaking "hauntingly of isolation, dislocation, loneliness" and his maps alluding "to homes past and present and the journeys in between."
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Also at The Knox, contributions to art history from Canada in The Automatiste Revolution. "The Automatists were the first artists to bring modernist painting to Canada and the first Canadian artists to embrace avant-garde gestural abstraction." The AGO currently has a room of Francoise Sullivan who was a core member of Les Automatistes. http://tinyurl.com/yg4f3yt

Both Albright Knox Gallery shows until May 30th.

Francoise Sullivan AGO work shown here.

Robert Smithson's Corner Piece

Robert Smithson of Spiral Jetty fame. His work at the AGO is called Gravel Mirror Corner Piece. In the french philosophy book "The Poetics of Space", the home is considered our corner of the universe and archetypal protective space.

XSPACE IN JANUARY: INNER LANDSCAPES

Joshua Barndt’s Limbo at XPACE on Ossington has a just a little of Altmejd’s The Index at the AGO. In so far as the work’s creation of a place as an expression of human experience and inner myth.

The low ceiling’d basement space – a cellar – is mostly covered by mounds of tires, plywood structures, earth, growing grass and full garbage bags. A takeaway about Barndt’s installation reads “...details hold poetic potential. ‘We collect our garbage in plastic bags to be forgotten’. Though forgotten, garbage does not disappear. Instead it is stored in the metaphorical basement of our consciousness...”

Its worth a visit just to see the large scale knitted characters in the ground floor show Static and Loss (shown below) because, well, they're wierd-cool.

Jan 8th to Feb 6th, 2010, 58 Ossington Ave Toronto www.xpace.info