1. Second Annual First Day of Snow Contest

It's time once again for the First Day of Snow Contest.

With all this cold weather, this one might be overwith sooner rather than later.

Last year's winning day was December 14th.

And by the first day of snow, we're talking centimetres, transformed landscape, etc, not 7am flurries which flirt with the concept and entice you through your layers with the promise of the snowboard slopes. If it records your footprints and causes fenderbenders then that snowfall is the winning one.

It's also important to add, you don't have to be from Toronto to participate (our version of 'no purchase necessary') but you have to guess Toronto's day.

This year's prize includes a copy of Caffeine Screens; The Instant Coffee Screensaver Show, a CD-ROM featuring the screensaver concoctions of over 40 artists, which we'll be launching locally in November. (Heck, if it snows before the launch, you'll get a sneak peak). Also included is a mystery prize by Jon Sasaki.

Email in your day to everyone@instantcoffee.org

2. Some Notes toward an essay about Chris Dorosz' eyelevelgallery show | Cliff Eyland

Chris Dorosz' is a young Canadian artist whose "Staple" paintings (I said vis-a-vis a Plug In show in a 1999 unpublished piece) were made by gluing thousands of loose industrial-sized staples onto a blank canvas, and then pouring paint inside each staple compartment. This technique gives the finished work a pixilated look. Dorosz recreated stills, babes from exercise TV or a frame from a Puff Daddy music video, in this laborious way. Some canvasses, however, consisted in a filigreed grid pattern of staples on a white-primed surface without poured paint, as if to represent not only a blank canvas but also a blank television or movie screen.

Dorosz' slow working method -- the sweat-shop-like hand work -- is reminiscent of the work of process painters such as Canada's Eric Cameron, Jeffrey Spalding, and Garry Neill Kennedy, artists to whom a 'layering' of paint resulted in a cumulative record of hand work. Like Dorosz, these artists had found a reason to reintroduce hand painting into a discourse that was about to exclude it in favour of new media. But in the older artists' classic layer paintings there is usually no imagery at all except for paint layers. (There are more recent examples of these artists using charged imagery, of course.) Dorosz, being twenty to thirty years younger than the Camerons and Kennedys, combined and combines an innovative process technique with spectacular imagery, perhaps to offset a viewer's identification of his work with the older process artists while acknowledging the precedents.

Unlike the older artists Dorosz grew up not only in the era of television, but also in the era of the computer monitor. His Plug In show followed an exhibition there called "Monitor Goo," (curated by myself and Peter Dykhuis) that examined abstract painting in the age of video and included artists of Dorosz' age and sensibility. Most surprisingly, these young artists, Shannon Finley, Dell Sala, Dan Rushton, Kym Greeley and Rachel Beach shared a disdain for the traditional dichotomy between "abstract" and "representational" painting. For them the old debates are stale and making an abstract painting is little different from making art about other kinds of popular culture. We so often forget, they seemed to be saying, that there is an image -- many images, in fact -- of abstract painting in popular culture.

Dorosz characterizes his painting practice as being about philosophy rather than the medium. For the 1960s and 1970s process artists, the basic stuff of a painting was paint, but for Dorosz and his "Monitor Goo" peers, the ground zero of a painting is not paint but an image. Dorosz' creates a tension between the material processes of painting and the immateriality of images.

More recently, Dorosz has spoken about his work as having always developed out of a material discovery, and that he likens paint drops with pixels. His most striking recent innovation is his move to three dimensionality using plastic rods to create a grid-like illusion of suspended paint in the form of bodies.

For a couple of years since writing about Dorosz' Plug In show I have had the pleasure of living with his work in the Winnipeg studio I inherited from him after he moved to San Francisco. Dorosz' staple and rubber band paintings (the latter made by pouring paint into rubber bands that have been glued to canvas) are now stored within a few feet of where I make my own paintings, and I look at them frequently: sometimes I even show studio visitors his work. Every time I look at these works the colour seems to get brighter, as if back-lit.

Although we lived in Halifax at the same time, I was barely aware of who Dorosz was during his stint as an MFA student. The MFAers kept to themselves, mostly, as if incubating.

I will not be able to see whether or not Dorosz exhibits some of his sex works in Halifax, but I hope he does. Expressions of sexuality have long been discouraged in Halifax, as if Victorian edicts against sexual explicitness had transmuted themselves into fitting Conceptualist versions sometime around 1967. Dorosz's sex work will not initiate Halifax's long delayed sexual revolution by itself, but I can hope...

Dorosz' laptop works are yet another way he has of turning wispy pixels into sensuous paint and of reminding the viewer that, as the physicists say, a photon can be a particle or a wave depending on how an observer initiates a quantum system's collapse. In other words, paint is made of the same material as the world, however you look at it.

The Toronto International Art Fair happened. None of us attended.

Actually, Tim was there, but he was sitting a booth, so that doesn't count. Jo Cook went and wrote the following in a letter to Tim:

"Went to the art fair yesterday before flying back here. Heard a woman on her cell phone outside the booth that had the David Urban paintings say, 'I wanted the blue one but it was untitled so I'm going to get the red one'."

instant coffee coffee link
http://www.firesidecoffee.com/

selected links
1. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/finch/finch9-20-02.asp
Charlie Finch tells us why New York sucks. Oh, this is such a good read, I can't tell ya'. The art students cracking open the theory anthologies in fifty years should find this at the very beginning.

2. www.tim.instantcoffee.org
Tim's got a new site

3. http://www.novica.com/region/elephantartists.cfm?from=home
Komar & Melamid's cross-species collaboration

submitted links
1.http://www.pixieland.com
So funny it made Andrew Harwood cry.

2. http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/
It's galleries are better than Yorkville's

3. http://www.aldaily.com
Arts and Letters Daily, "an updated report of news and reviews"

Review - The covers of the books nominated for the Booker Prize (British Editions) | Timothy Comeau

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The cover features an aerial shot of a tiger at one end of a boat, while a figure in the fetal position is at the other end. The view is from directly overhead, and one sees a school of sharks with a couple of turtles swimming beneath. The colours are muted, and it almost has the feel of a medieval fresco.

This cover would not make me want to pick up the book, let alone read it. The art is somewhat crude. The fetal position silhouette screams some kind of philosophical sentimentality, and the presence of the tiger makes no sense. The fact that these are details that the text takes care of seems beside the point. I wouldn't want to read a story about a tiger lost at sea, but that's just me. Rating: 5/10

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
I find this to be a very attractive cover. The title text is in a purple or a blue (scanning usually distorts colours right?) and the author's name is in red. It is a photograph of someone looking out over the sea; the allusions to Freidrich's paintings are obvious. The fellow is wearing a gray hat and a matching coat, and is holding an umbrella. We see him from behind. He is also wearing white pants that are short and we can see his bare ankles. The details of his shoes are lost in the darkness at the bottom of the photo. Overall, you have a composition divided into three: the sky/water, the top of the concrete, and its side. The man straddles all three and dominates.

With the hat and the umbrella combo, an anachronism today, the picture is evoking a 20th Century romance and the aesthetics of Beckett, with his tramps in bowler hats. Beckett had said that Freidrich's paintings helped inspire his work, especially "Waiting for Godot". This image brings the 19th Century romantic and the 20th Century existentialist together under Mistry's theme of emigration (Mistry emigrated to Canada from India when he was 20) which seems to embody the existentialist doctrine of determining one's fate while at the same time alluding to the romance of travel and adventure. Freidrich's characters confront nature with their independence, while Beckett's are crushed by nature's indifference. The 20th Century wrestled with those two concepts in wars that proved man could control nature, but which also showed that nature couldn't care less about our pettiness. In uniting these two disparate philosophies, this cover is excellent. I'd pick up the book and want to read it. Rating: 10/10

Unless by Carol Shields
This image at first glance evokes nothing of what the potential contents could be. It is a black & white photograph of mostly tree, but then you notice a girl in the lower right, stooping to pick up (?) or push (?) a ball. She has a bag at her waist, but it looks old as if it could be made of leather. You can also see that her hair is tied in a pony tail, and that she is wearing a white shirt with a skirt. The message conveyed is that she is either on her way or coming from school. Has she found this ball? Is she picking it up to toss it back to an afterschool soccer game?

The tree is an oak, and by it's size one can see that it is very old. A creature of endless centuries next to one so delicately young. A picture from the 1930's or something. I wouldn't be inclined to pick up this book. The image is a sentimental evocation, and the author's name is bigger than the title. At the bottom one reads that she won the Pulitzer Prize: obviously now the author is a literary Midas and if she wants to bore us with some sentimental memoir cast as fiction, than the publishing industry isn't going to stop her, because, hey, it might get nominated for the Booker Prize or something.

The fact that the novel isn't a sentimental memoir set in the 30s is why this cover ultimately fails semiotically. The image is a nice enough photograph and it would look nice in a hallway I guess (the hallway of some dreary bourgeois). In the way it freezes the dynamics of the scene it leaves me uncomfortable, which creates a dynamic nonetheless. Rating: 7/10

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
For some reason, amazon.co.uk doesn't have a "see larger photo" for this title, so I have to work from the unclear image provided on it's sales page. At first glance it looks like the stone markers of some prehistoric Stonehenge-like ring, though through squinty eyes, one can make out the ripples of sand on a beach. This image then is perhaps the weathered and eroded wooden stumps of on old pier at low tide. Both the initialy percieved image and the one actually present convey age, and the handwritten title, white against the gray-blue sky, also implies a story set in an era before typing was so common.

The sea sure is popular with these cover designers. The use of handwriting points to an historical story. The book begins in the 1920s, so this is effective. But the use of the sea image is so generic, and in the context of the other nominated books, cliché (it's cliché anyway but worse when next to 3 other books with the same subject matter) but the designer cannot be faulted for that. I'm bored by this cover and wouldn't pick it up off the shelf. Rating: 4/10

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Is the text set in the 19th Century, or are these the gloves of an archivist? They have buttons, so I doubt it. Perhaps these are servant's gloves? The title's font features an elaborate "f" and the rest of the word is a little shaky, like something that came from an oldschool press with a metal typeface.

This cover would entice me to pick up the text, though, I must say at this point, reviews always reflect the bias and predilections of the reviewer, and just because I have a thing for old documents and the dust of archives can't necessarily translate into your wanting to pick it up too. I'm just sayin'...that because of my interests, this text featuring an image of white gloves on an old table top lying next to a patterned something or other which looks like some book from the 19th Century, would pique my interest.

The online review at amazon.co.uk describes the text as "engrossing lesbian Victoriana". In communicating the era, this image is effective semiotically, though it still looks a little prissy, and the author's name is printed too large and with too much kerning. Rating: 8/10

Dirt Music by Tim Winton
This image conveys a youthfulness that comes across in somehow framing another sentimental sea image (it's like a rule in book design or something: all novels must have sentimental covers to tug at the heart strings of nostalgia...but then again, I shouldn't talk, considering the covers of some of my bookworks...). It conveys this youthfulness through the use of the title fonts and the framing. If they'd used a more standard "Times New Roman"-esque serif font, this would have been sentimental. But the use of a sans-serif font speaks to younger folk, and in the way the title is italicized gives it sarcasm. The youth, afterall, are dripping with sarcasm and irony.

Ugh. I thought post 9-11 irony was dead. I was thankful for that, but no, it's like aspirin, (a cheap and simple miracle drug): there is no better defense against the bewildering stupidity of the status quo than the roll of the eyes. The humor-irony formula is what gets us through the CNN days. That, and turning off the TV to read books with covers of beached boats, seen from the front, with waves gently in the background, the text hovering above the horizon line sans serif, simply conveying author's name and title.

I'm attracted to the subversion of what could have been another sentimental image. But gawd, another fucking sea cover. I'm in the bookstore browsing and I'm getting seasick. This is absurd... Rating: 7/10

1. A reply to your Saturday Edition Feature titled , "Honey, I Shrunk the Art" By Liz Wylie | Otino Corsano

I currently have a show up in a gallery that is listed on the Queen West circuit. My paintings in this show are small (7" x 7"). I made them while I was in L.A. where I could not afford a large studio; however I did not make small paintings for this reason. I do not see my work as related to interior design or decoration. I guess they found themselves in a Queen West space because I did not have the opportunity to show them elsewhere. I am sure that people would spend more time viewing them and thinking about them if they were in a larger space. I had proposed to show my work in larger (established?) spaces with little luck. I did not see the need to make larger work as my intentions were well suited to the scale of the finished works. I did not make small paintings because I thought they would have a better chance of being sold. I don't see my work as solely an economic investment so I don't usually consider risk as a factor in my decisions to make my work.

I was hoping that people viewing my work would receive the work in complicated ways and that the work would not be lumped into formalistic, generational or regional groupings. I guess that is why I eventually avoided placing the work in more traditional spaces and contexts. I recall being really excited when I first saw Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise because I thought that he was reconsidering the space of art's existence. I assume that he eventually wanted to sell them but I don't think that was his only reason for making them. If galleries and museums take down some of their larger paintings there would be more room for emerging artists to show their work. Some young artists may need more physical space than others; still I would imagine they would wish for their work to be received with consideration for their independent intentions.

- Otino Corsano

2. Tastebud Requiem | Jon Sasaki