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Design trends: A new push for public art
Design trends: A new push for public art

National Post

time18 hours ago

  • Entertainment
  • National Post

Design trends: A new push for public art

A thought-provoking new sculpture by British artist Ryan Gander — The Cat, the Clock and the Rock — was unveiled on April 29 in the pedestrian walkway between Toronto's Simcoe and St. Patrick streets, near OCAD University. It's an eye-catching piece, a four-foot stainless-steel clock leaning against a rock modelled after one of the oldest rock samples on Earth, with a life-sized cat curled up in its shadow. But it's the artwork's backstory that reveals a side of Toronto's Percent for Public Art Program that often isn't talked about. Article content Article content The sculpture sits between three new towers in the Artists' Alley condo project. The piece was funded by the condos' developer, Lanterra, a participant in the City of Toronto's voluntary Percent for Public Art Program, a 40-year-old arrangement in which participating developers reserve one percent of a project's gross construction cost to fund a public artwork, either on the site itself or nearby, in exchange for concessions like additional storeys or an increase in building density. In the case of Artists' Alley, both of those were granted in exchange for community benefits that included the sculpture; a 6,000-square-foot community space to be operated by the City; a publicly accessible open space; and a monetary contribution to new affordable housing units in the area, according to a spokesperson in the City's Media Relations department. Article content Some artist mentorship is encouraged in the program's guidelines, but these components have generally been limited to interactions between the commissioned artist and a single mentee, often an artist local to the area where a piece will be installed. For example, developer Concord Adex facilitated several one-on-one mentorships at its Concord CityPlace and Concord Park Place communities with local artists, led by their public art consultant. Mentees learned about public art commissioning and delivery through hands-on experience and coaching. Article content Article content 'With OCAD right next door, we really wanted to create an opportunity for art students to get involved, to learn from this incredible international artist, and to see first-hand what goes into making a piece of art like this happen,' says Lanterra chairman and co-founder Mark Mandelbaum. Article content Lanterra's first installation, in 2007, was a roly-poly bronze sculpture by the controversial American artist Tom Otterness titled Immigrant Family at Yonge Street and Lakeshore Boulevard. Article content This time, working closely with OCAD U, Lanterra funded a mentorship bursary and supported the creation of a new minor in public art at the school. In 2022, six upper-year students and alumni were selected to participate in a week-long paid intensive with Gander titled 'A Melted Snowman,' which explored public space and artistic intervention around the OCAD U campus. Article content 'I still think about the work that I made for that workshop. It informs what I'm doing now,' says Abby Kettner, one of the OCAD U students involved. It culminated in the group creation of a piece — a magic eight ball containing a die with all of the students' works depicted titled Oscillation and Tension Between the Natural and the Conventional — that Gander gifted to OCAD U's permanent collection.

The RA's Summer Exhibition: Britain's most ridiculed show is back with a vengeance
The RA's Summer Exhibition: Britain's most ridiculed show is back with a vengeance

Telegraph

time10-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Telegraph

The RA's Summer Exhibition: Britain's most ridiculed show is back with a vengeance

In the clammy heights of June, London's art critics curl their toes in anticipation of an invitation to review the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition. Over the past decade it has been written about as the object of ridicule, scorn, and pity, and has been used, intermittently, as a vessel for questionable political mission creep. While this year's show, which has been curated by Farshid Moussavi, is worthy of the Summer Exhibition's mission to celebrate the individual's right to an aesthetic sensibility, it is still as frenzied as ever. I think it's safe to say that the 257th edition hasn't unearthed the next big star of the British art market. The core of the Exhibition since 1769 has been and continues to be an offering of works by members of the Royal Academy, their protégés, and artistically inclined members of the public, most of which are up for sale. This set-up demands very little from the viewer beyond casual immersion into the 1,729 works on show and a sense of humour as one's guide through the bizarre backwaters of the contemporary art complex. This year huge, inflated black balls with banal questions pasted on them in white font lie strewn across the Annenberg Courtyard, as if a very large child had just cast them out of a Burlington House window. 'What do animals dream of?', 'Does abstraction have rules?', 'Will time tell?'; these are some of the questions British artist Ryan Gander's balls pose to the unsuspecting public. The only question I could ask myself is, if I managed to unchain one of these giant balls and roll it in front of a bus on Piccadilly, how loud a POP would it make? The usual artistic smorgasbord awaits entrants to the main galleries: Tamara Kostianovsky's suspended carcasses embroidered out of fabrics fit for Little House on the Prairie, Tony Brook's ultra-depressing still life of AirPods, Juergen Teller's raunchy shot of former porn star Mia Khalifa hiding her face behind a nondescript mounted mammal and Lena Krenokova's vase which resembles a mass of molten breasts with multi-coloured nipples. There are also some unexpected guests at this feast, namely 101 gold-lined taxidermied rats, perched up on their hind legs and arranged in concentric circles on a platform in the final room of the exhibition. I (the name of this installation) by the collaborative duo Zatorski + Zatorksi is supposedly meant to prompt the viewer to ask themselves whether, in an age of artificial intelligence, we have become the experiment. But again I found myself battling with a different question: if I were to spend £85,000 on fur and bullion, would it be in the form of 101 rat pelts lined with 24-carat gold? At last, acknowledgement must be given to the Academicians and their annual offerings onto the sacrificial pyre: Marlene Dumas, who set the new record for a living female artist last month when her painting Miss January (1997) sold at Christie's for $13.6 million, contributed her print and ink drawing Let's Talk to the Dead; Tracey Emin made a double donation, her interpretation of The Crucifixion (2025) the more impressive of the two; and Grayson Perry coughed up his usual votive urn. Although Emin's Crucifixion is strikingly harrowing and could even be, dare I say, quite good, seeing some of these masters in the wilderness of the contemporary art collective, looking sheepishly unremarkable, makes you wonder who, deeming them to be worthier (literally) objects of artistic expression than their amateur counterparts, has elevated them to the illustrious white cubes of the elitist contemporary art scene.

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