The Museum of Beauty

Welcome to the Museum of Beauty!

Mississauga Gulag: Start With the Arts

shift CTRL

CURATED BY ANU RADHA VERMA
SEPTEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 21, 2018

Gallery spaces are often conceived of as separate(d) from communities, requiring community members to cross a threshold to enter, engage and be included. shift CTRL is a search for the liminal space, not simply inviting people in, but recognizing the ways in which the institution is always a part of community. Over three months, the XIT-RM is transformed into a multi-use space for shift CTRL with three distinct components that ask questions, celebrate community and challenge barriers.

responding to the city we are in: engagement hub on art, politics and belonging
September 6 – September 30

community collaborations: short-run exhibitions with local groups committed to social change
October 1 – October 31

shift CTRL B(l)ackspace: Kadeem Dunn’s playable showcase examines the past/present of Blacks in gaming
November 1 – December 21

---

From: Mandy Salter
Date: Wed, May 9, 2018 at 12:00 PM
Subject: Kidist Asrat - no longer permitted entry to the AGM premises or events
To: Kidist Paulos Asrat
Cc: Ryerson Maybee , Susan Legge , Sadaf Zuberi

Hello Ms. Asrat,

I had emailed you some months back expressing the AGM’s concern with the nature of your reviews and commentary for the AGM’s programmes, staff, artists and community. I had clearly articulated at the time that if the hateful and insulting tone of many of your blog posts, in regards to AGM content, staff and or community did not cease, you would be no longer welcome at the AGM. While you certainly have the right to freedom of speech, the AGM also has the right to not be defamed and or the recipient of hate propaganda.

As you have continued to criticize, defame and generally create an unsafe space for many at the AGM, you will no longer be permitted to enter the AGM premises under the Trespass to Property Act, RSO 1990, c. T.21 - Ontario.ca

If you are to enter the AGM premises at any time in the future, you will be escorted off the property immediately by City Security.

Mandy Salter
--Mandy Salter MA ISA
---Director/Curator

Beauty and the Musician

Below is a tweet by Kevin Michael Grace on Liszt's musical education and the legacy of tutorship and instruction he left his students. In this world where money rules, Liszt left an immeasurable amount of wealth in beauty and art to our world, giving us a superior legacy of Western Civilization's riches .

The boy Liszt was taught by the great virtuoso Carl Czerny without charge. This was a particular gift, as he otherwise earned a fortune teaching, but Liszt took it as a commandment. He never charged his hundreds of students & introduced them to all that culture had to offer, free

— Kevin Michael Grace🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇮🇪⚜🇳🇴 (@KMGVictoria) December 6, 2018

Activism In The Name of Our God

Ephesians 6:10-17

10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.
11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
16 Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
18 Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;
19 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

---

From: reclaimbeauty@gmail.com
To: nando.iannicca@mississauga.ca, mayor@mississauga.ca, carolyn.parrish@mississauga.ca, 12div.communitystation@peelpolice.ca, john.kovac@mississauga.ca, stan.zigelstein@StanzLaw.ca
May 13 at 6:30 AM

--------------------------------------

To the parties concerned:

This email is concerning my article:
Covert Satanic Imagery in the New Art Gallery of Mississauga Exhibit at the website Reclaiming Beauty.

I recently emailed you (please see below my email) about the difficulties I had in entering the Art Gallery of Mississauga and in viewing their exhibitions in recent months. As I explained in the email, I was perceived a "threat" to the gallery simply for being critical towards some of the gallery's exhibits and artists.

As an artist myself, I have been following contemporary art culture for over a decade, I have written my observations both on my blog and in national and international journals. And I have presented my ideas in prestigious international conferences and groups.

I don't mince words, as I believe direct truth is the best approach. And for this reason, I was given a warning by the Art Gallery of Mississauga's director Mandy Salter that my observations on Reclaiming Beauty are a "threat" to the gallery and to its staff, and that I was no longer to attend its exhibitions and functions. If I do enter the gallery, I would be removed from its premises by the Peel police.

I wasn't concerned by this antagonistic communication since thanks to modern media, I am able to view close to 100% of the AGM's exhibits and other activities online.

And similarly, I am able to make my observations and reach a far wider audience through my own online forum rather than attending the infrequent AGM panels.

It is for this reason that I have posted an article on the approach that the AGM is taking in its current exhibition (and recent exhibitions - dating back about a year and a half).

I find that the AGM has been covertly soliciting and exhibiting material related to Satanic and witchcraft aligned artists, and that perhaps some of its staff are indeed members of such nefarious groups.

The Canadian culture, despite multiculturalism, is based on the Western Christian cultural and societal heritage. Part of the AGM's agenda is to subvert this Judeo Christian heritage and introduce other gods and belief systems into our society.

Art is one of the first platforms where new ideas and subversive belief systems are introduced.

Please pay attention to the AGM's future actives. If they (and you) insist on multiculturalism, then our Christian God and heritage should have equal presence in the AGM's activities.

So far we have none.

Thank you. And God bless you.

Kidist Paulos Asrat
Artist, Activist, and Writer
Reclaiming Beauty

---

On Thursday, May 10, 2018, 4:59:42 AM EDT, reclaimbeauty@gmail.com wrote:


Dear concerned parties,

Please view the email correspondence I had with the Art Gallery of Mississauga after I visited their recent exhibition. have forwarded the emails at the end of this letter.

On Tuesday May 8th around 11am, I went to the Art Gallery of Mississauga to view the exhibition seeping upwards, rupturing the surface by Daniele Dennis, as well as the XIT-RM installation Jahez | Dowery by Mariam Magsi.

I followed all the gallery's basic protocol, and spent about 40 minutes studying the exhibition while taking notes on my notepad. At the end of my tour, I had a couple of questions to ask the staff and I approached the reception desk. Both my questions were on the musical scores which accompanied Daniele Dennis' and Lotte Meret Effinger's videos.

An assistant came over and said she didn't know, and would ask Mandy Salter, the gallery's director and curator. Ms. Salter came through and, after some pleasant greetings, she accompanied me to the back of the gallery to Effinger's video and pointed out to me the music composer (Florian Meyer). She said that she wasn't involved in the curation of Dennis' piece and gave me the email for Kendra Ainsworth, who is the curator for contemporary.

I thanked her, made a brief final tour, and left the gallery, thanking the receptionist on my way out. I went next door to the C-Cafe for a short while before resuming my other activities.

Once home late that afternoon I composed a careful email to Ms. Ainsworth so that my technical question was clearly worded, and I was expectantly waiting her reply. I also left a Facebook message to Daniele Dennis since her website has no way to contact her.

As an artist, I am curious and interested about many aspects of art exhibitions: their subject matter, the methods used, the technical details of the pieces, and the artists' backgrounds and training.

Artists approach and depict difficult topics, such as Dennis covering her face with pink cotton candy, and Meyer videotaping various aspects of bodily fluids. And they often provide little explanation. I understand this, since I prefer that audiences come out their own explanations and thoughts. But I always welcome questions and even opinions, ready to tackle the difficult, technical queries as well as the unpleasant negative feedback. That is par for the course for artists. We come many times critiquing society through our art, but society also has that same right to critique our work (and even us!) especially if we exhibited in public, and in publicly funded organizations like the AGM.

Ms. Salter remarks about "the nature" of my reviews of some (of course not all) of the works exhibited at the AGM are simply a way of silencing what she determines to be unfavourable criticism of the AGM's programs. Any posts I have printed on individual members of her staff are related to the work they present, and the manner in which they present the gallery's work, and are not personal.

She has defamed me without trial or jury, as promoting "hate propaganda," which she has determined to be a criminal act. And with this, arbitrary, judgment, she has criminalized my person, and tainted my citizenship in Mississauga, for simply making educated and expert (I am an artist!) observations about the gallery.

There is some irony in that!

But that is the least of my worries. What concerns me is that artistic progress cannot occur if open discussion and observation, presented boldly and honestly, and in person, before all the parties involved is curtailed. If artists cannot critique each other within their own communities, and those who are critiqued cannot accept these critiques at face value, then all we will have is a group of people who assemble because they agree with each other, and those who do not agree wth that pervasive (or pre-determined) viewpoint are criminalized and silenced as "haters."

The only place where this was acceptable was Soviet Russia.

My task as an artist is to do exactly what Ms. Salter "allows" me to do on my blog but not in the real world, where such actions are much more useful for everyone concerned: the critics, the ones being critiqued, and the administrative and managing bodies of art institutions, and the institutions themselves.

I have been doing so for about fifteen years now, providing some lucid and insightful contributions to the art world through my blogs, my longer published articles, and my presentations to large academic audiences. And I will continue to do so.

Sincerely,
Kidist Paulos Asrat

- Reclaiming Beauty
- Society for the Reclamation of Western Beauty
- Reclaiming Beauty Designs
- Reclaiming Beauty Photographs
- Reclaiming Beauty Articles


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mandy Salter
Date: Wed, May 9, 2018 at 12:00 PM
Subject: Kidist Asrat - no longer permitted entry to the AGM premises or events
To: Kidist Paulos Asrat
Cc: Ryerson Maybee , Susan Legge , Sadaf Zuberi


Hello Ms. Asrat,

I had emailed you some months back expressing the AGM’s concern with the nature of your reviews and commentary for the AGM’s programmes, staff, artists and community. I had clearly articulated at the time that if the hateful and insulting tone of many of your blog posts, in regards to AGM content, staff and or community did not cease, you would be no longer welcome at the AGM. While you certainly have the right to freedom of speech, the AGM also has the right to not be defamed and or the recipient of hate propaganda.

As you have continued to criticize, defame and generally create an unsafe space for many at the AGM, you will no longer be permitted to enter the AGM premises under the Trespass to Property Act, RSO 1990, c. T.21 - Ontario.ca

If you are to enter the AGM premises at any time in the future, you will be escorted off the property immediately by City Security.

Mandy Salter

Mandy Salter MA ISA

Director/Curator


T. (905) 896 5507

E. mandy.salter@mississauga.ca

______________________________ ______________________________ ____


From: Kidist Paulos Asrat [mailto:eighthpictures@gmail. com]

Sent: 2018/05/09 3:53 AM
To: Kendra Ainsworth
Cc: Mandy Salter
Subject: Daniele Dennis



Hi Kendra,



I was at the AGM yesterday afternoon and saw Daniele Dennis' video. I asked the staff a couple of questions and they said that you might have the answers.

- I understand that the video was about 10 minutes long and that it was looped (set to replay).

The accompanying music was a Verdi piece according to Mandy:
- What was the actual piece, and the movement

- Were the images set to the music, i.e. the music ended as the images ended and was re-looped accordingly

- Or was the music simply following the images and it re-looped before they ended.

The main question is: what is the technical (editing) relationship between the video's images and sound (music).

Thanks,

Kidist

Sex With Creatures: Getting Closer to the Luciferian Agenda

Forget all the hypocrisy of the Oscars with stars wearing million-dollar dazzling jewellry as they stand on stage talking for the underdog in the movement de l'epoque: "equality."

Forget motherly Meryl who points her index finger with a "you can do better" over-her-reading-glasses look at her proteges.

Forget jovial Owen, standing as clueless as his "alright, alright, alright" moment when things were clearly not all right, especially for his blonde and not-so-rosy future.

Forget black directors and actors (and actresses, to revive a discarded word) who pump their black fists at racist Hollywood as they spend their days (and nights) with white "partners."

Forget the gothic stage looking like Satan's boudoir shimmering from the sparkles of a million Swarovski crystals.

What everyone missed is how a movie about intercourse between a human female and an alien creature made it with "Best Picture" Oscar.

This is not a "first" of course. Others have done it and with some popular success. But none have won a "Best Actor" Oscar, and most have an element of comedy in their theme.

Del Toro is dead serious.

I scoured the internet to see what commentators had to say about this epic first in popular movie history, but no-one, nowhere, in the Main Stream Media™ mentions it.

But that is because Del Toro camouflages this collaboration with Satan with the "equality now," "Time's Up," "Me Too" and all those other slogans that have been circulating through the elite crowd for a couple of years now.

Says Del Toro about his move:

"Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don't wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment."

So there you have it.

Intercourse with a monster is a "Me Too" moment.

Here is commentary on the film by Paul Bois:

The values governing "The Shape of Water" are best summed up as follows: have sex with anything you want, even if that "thing" is not of your species, and kill innocent people to do it . . . Fin!

That the film presents this in the guise of a tale about how love conquers all in the face of white male patriarchal oppression makes it all the more insidious.

The whole article is succinctly written. Still there is an element of awe and ominousness that is missing. Bois thinks this is just another Disney movie as his article's title The Shape Of Water’ Review: An Adult Disney Movie With A Wickedly Perverse Heart "warns" us.

Bois could have written a similar commentary for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (remember that one?), the true Disney alien movie, although without a wickedly perverse heart, which won four Oscars, the same number as The Shape of Water:

E.T.'s four Academy Awards:
- Best Original Score
- Best Sound
- Best Sound Effects Editing
- Best Visual Effects

One would think that The Shape of Water would have the Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects prizes. After all it was a sci-fi film, at least the copulation part.

The Shape of Water's four Academy Awards:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Production Design
Best Original Score

What is Production Design?

Production Design...focuses on the creative process of visually and physically developing an environment that becomes an essential component of the storytelling process. Production Designers must possess a keen understanding of the story in order to create a believable and realistic world on screen.[Source]

Yes, recreating that monster, and his copulation scenes, must have taken a lot of creative talent! Although to be fair, it is also creating the environment where such a story can be plausible. Well the Hollywood/Oscar crowd certainly bought it.

This Hollywood style pornographic horror film is rated "R" (Restricted): Under 17 Requires Accompanying Parent Or Adult Guardian, - imagine an "under 17" watching this in the dark theatre! - whereas it should should have received an "NC-17" (Adults Only) - No One 17 and Under Admitted.

E.T. on the other hand, with its benign alien befriending a young girl (although I wouldn't put it past its team for infusing barely detectable scenes of sexual allusion) was given a PG and fairly so, rather the G (General Audiences):

PG - Parental Guidance Suggested
Some material may not be suitable for children. Parents urged to give "parental guidance". May contain some material parents might not like for their young children.

We have come a long way from (or closer to the luciferian agenda) a 1982 "alien befriends a young girl" to the 2018 "alien fornicates with a young woman."

And I'm not the only one to think so. See here and here.

Reinstating the Artistic Legacy of Homer Watson

Art Gallery of Mississauga's exhibition,
in partnership with the Homer Watson House and Gallery

Beyond the Pines
Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape
September 24, 2016 - January 1, 2016

Background wall:
Various paintings by Homer Watson

Foreground Sculpture:
Reinhard Reitzenstein
Thrust
2015
Bronze, granite
63” x 48” x 28”
Olga oppler Gallery

[Photo By: KPA]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last year, I attended a panel discussion on the exhibition Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape at the Art Gallery Mississauga. The exhibition of the same title was going on at the same time and I had visited it numerous times to go through Watson's work one by one, to study his technique, his evolution as an artist, his views, his concerns, and his Canada.

The exhibition also displayed works by contemporary Canadian artists to bring this pine "narrative" to the fore. Some were reasonably good, but none reached the overall skill and beauty of Watson's paintings.

Watson's talent as a painter was recognized by a friend who initially advised him:

...to quit the nonsense of going in for art in a country like Canada. "Quit it and come into the office and become a business man.”[1]

Watson continues with the story:

...on nearing home [some weeks after he had submitted the painting to the Canadian Academy exhibition] I saw this gentleman on the road in front of his establishment reading the Toronto Globe. Seeing me he advanced waving the paper and putting out his hand he exclaimed, “I take it all back. Go ahead and paint. Look here,” and there it was in flaming headlines in the Globe, “Country boy paints picture bought by Princess Louise.” So that was that...

Below is the painting that gave Watson his faith in his art.


Homer Watson,
The Pioneer Mill, 1880,
Oil on canvas,
86 × 127 cm,
Royal Collection Trust.
(Photo: © hm Queen Elizabeth II)

Homer Watson was born in 1855 in Doon, Ontario (now Kitchener). He started to paint as a young child encouraged by his father and his aunt. He never received any formal art training, but acquired his skill and artistic sense through various mentors he sought as he developed his talent. He moved to Toronto and worked at a photographic studio and met some of the prominent Canadian artists of the time. One of which was the British-born landscape painter Thomas Mower Martin, who emigrated to Canada to take advantage of free land for settlers under the Free Grant and Homestead Act. Watson traveled to New York at the Hudson River School, and was influenced by the work he encountered there. He spent two years in Europe living in England and in Scotland. His brief visit to France introduced him to landscape painting through the Barbizon school. He "developed a landscape style marked by honesty of purpose and a focus on the moods of nature."

While in Toronto, he met and sought the counsel of other artists such as the landscape painter Lucius O'Brien, who was the first president of the Canadian painters' society, the Royal Canadian Academy, which formed in 1880. Watson would follow O'Brien's footsteps as president of the society from 1918-22.

Watson was called "the Canadian Constable," and “the man who first saw Canada as Canada, rather than as dreamy blurred pastiches of European painting,” While he holds these noble acclamations, he has nonetheless been overshadowed by the more forceful Group of Seven artists who along with their art had a mission to accomplish. Watson simply showed us the curiously singular southern Canadian landscape, amidst its farms and homesteads, as a civilized part of northern America, as a uniquely separate and independent country. He is the first nationalist Canadian painter.

Part of Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape's purpose was to present Watson's landscapes as though they were infused with ephemeral supernatural beings. The AGM's curators obtained this notion of "spirits" from one aspect of Watson's life: his questions regarding his deceased sister and whether she could be "visiting" him. “Could it have been? Or was it a delusion?” he asks of a "vision."

Nothing is defined about Watson's belief in spirits, but it makes for an interesting exhibition.

The exhibition's other, more subtle, agenda was to place Watson in the background of Canadian art, albeit discreetly, and carefully, as an artist who no longer represents contemporary Canadians and Canada, and reflects only the past, colonial English heritage. Watson can be admired through an historical "prism" who has little relevance in the current Canada. The AGM was ready to give some artistic legacy to Watson, but from a cultural and historical distance.

This second agenda was less easy to discern since the exhibition had many works by Watson and was titled after him, suggesting the presentation was in his honor. But in reality, as the panel discussion proved, and as the carefully worded exhibition title "Beyond the Pines" elucidates, the interest was not in Watson's work - after all, there are endless exhibitions and museums showcasing the English/Western/Colonial art of Canada - but rather in what came to Canada when the English heritage started to wane and a multicultural ethos began to develop in the country.

The gallery's curators were using a phrase full of political innuendos. "Beyond the Pines" is a reference to Canada's Group of Seven painters who ventured out to northern wildernesses, further even beyond those pines, to discover a more rugged and wild Canada as a way to define Canada's identity separate from Britain's and from America's.

Part of going "beyond" is also reaching territory that even these adventurous men wouldn't or couldn't reach. It is part physical and part psychic. It is the land of the "natives" those aboriginals whose spirits are infused n

Kendra Ainsworth, the AGM's curator for contemporary art, and curator of this exhibition, says:

"Contemporary Canadian artists looking at our landscape must also get to the ‘truth’ of their subject. One that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but also one that is both deeply political and personal. Placing contemporary works by emerging and established artists alongside Watson’s speaks to our timeless quest to appreciate and capture the essence of the Canadian landscapes we live in.”

But the "pine" imagery (or mythology) predates this rugged group of painters. "Beyond the Pines" is infused with Canadian aboriginal mythology:

The pine tree is a symbol of longevity to the Algonquian tribes of the north east, and to the Great Lakes tribes such as the Anishnabe and the Potawatomi pine trees represent wisdom and harmony with nature.

And "Beyond the Pines" didn't correctly identify Watson's works since Watson, who was from southern Ontario, painted few pines and mostly depicted the oak, elm, chestnut, and walnut of the region.

Canada has not been this territory of impenetrable wilderness and inhospitable glaciers for generations now, including during Homer's and the Group of Seven's lifetimes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This Canada was already a nation of defined European, and mostly British, communities with houses, gardens, farmland, forests of many types of trees.

And, more importantly, these pines of this northern country were associated, at least in the eyes of cultural and social historians, both Canadian and American, more with a land of wilderness and glaciers, sparsely inhabited by groups of aboriginal tribes. Pine forests, and glaciers and wilderness, were much further north than Watson's Doon.

The gallery's website explicitly tells us:

The Art Gallery of Mississauga (AGM) would like to acknowledge and give thanks to the land on which we work. The AGM has the privilege of operating in the territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and traditional homeland of the Wendat, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations. We are thankful to the many First Nations, Inuit, Métis and global Indigenous peoples who call this region home.

The AGM is committed to recognizing and incorporating diverse Indigenous perspectives within exhibitions and programming, and highlighting the numerous Indigenous artists who have contributed to this gallery. The AGM is dedicated to providing a platform for contemporary Indigenous art and curatorial practices, and hosts events and programs that reflect various cultural topics and identities. [4]

And that is the other "narrative." We are on the land of the Natives.

As this notification from the AGM website informs us:

The Art Gallery of Mississauga’s recently hired Director and Head Curator Mandy Salter this morning made a pair of announcements - both geared towards First Nations inclusion as an essential part of her populist mandate for the AGM.[5]

"Beyond the Pines," besides a geographical description was also a spiritual territory.

There was only one "First Nations" piece, which was a short - looped - video of two men (aboriginals who looked white) walking around barren land ready to "hunt," as a protest against the hunting permits that they, and all hunters, are required to obtain. This is Native land, which has its own laws and regulations. And Salter wants us to watch, powerless, their protests as an expiation for our sins of "colonizers."


Still from Video: Modest Living
By Brian Junger and Duane Linklater
Art Gallery of Mississauga
Beyond the Pines

A group of eight contemporary artists were also part of this exhibition. None made any explicit references to Watson or his era, rather focussing on the exhibition's general themes of the natural and spiritual. But it was Jennifer Carvalho and Reinhard Reitzenstein who most skillfully combined these spiritual and natural worlds in their pieces.

Carvalho studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she would have obtained some foundational training in the arts. She later went on to obtain her MFA from the University of Guelph. She paints skillfully and confidently. Her trees are in the traditional painting methods skillfully using chiaroscuro techniques. And Reitzenstein works in difficult bronze to tease out intricate trees, although traditional Western bronze works were figurative, using the human body (and animals) rather than the plant world as references.

Carvalho's Unexpected Connectionscraftly renders the pine forest into some kind of impenetrable ghostly space where we're likely to encounter "unexpected" beings:

Its opaqueness sets a tone of exacting anxiety[2a].

At the same time, the trees point up to an open sky with a sun or a moon hidden behind mottled clouds, suggesting some kind of light trying to brighten the darkness, and escape from this ghostly space.


Jennifer Carvalho
Unexpected Connections
Oil on canvas, 22”x28”, 2015

For Jennifer Carvalho the Anthropocene [the “human age”] is not an endgame. “It’s an in-between time,” she says. “I’m not trying to emphasize an end but a line of thought that leads away from ourselves. What does it mean if the world has a will of its own and what is our relationship to that? What would the world look like without us?”
...the mix of olive green and blue in Unexpected Connections produces a colour close to an impenetrable black. Its opaqueness sets a tone of exacting anxiety. [2]

Carvalho's "spirit" connection is rendered urgently apocalyptic with an End Times landscape of burnt trees whose haze of purple fumes envelope the barren land like the devil's burning sulfur whose activity is discernible in the fumes wafting through the background.



Carvalho's Unexpected Connections reminds us of Emily Carr's skyward swirling pines of Metchosinc, although Carr's brighter forest spirits seem more benign and the celestial destination, with the small band of illuminated blue at the top of the painting, more possible[4a].


Emily Carr
Metchosin, c. 1935
Oil on canvas
50.7 x 58.7 cm

Although Carr lived at the other side of Canada in British Columbia, it is not surprising that the Toronto-based Carvalho is influenced by her works, having studied at the prestigious Emily Carr University in Vancouver. And despite her West-coast location, Carr had been allowed into the prestigious and exclusive company of the eastern Canada's Group of Seven based in Ontario, a group of artists to which Beyond the Pines makes references [4b].

While Carvalho's trees appear grand and majestic, Reitzenstein shows us only one tree at the AGM exhibition, which is reduced to a tiny spike at the top of a sinewy vine that winds down and pulls us toward a fungi base.



Reitzenstein's tree makes one of its first appearances not as the bronze-sculpted piece sitting in a gallery but outside in the natural landscape. In 1987, he tells us of his idol worship of the tree in a piece he calls: Tree-Cantations where he has uprooted grown, tall trees and re-planted them upside down. He is not looking heaven-ward for the presence of God instead but digs deep down within the roots the fungi.


No Title
1987

In this subversive work, it is not only spiritual grievance that he is presenting but a cultural one as well. As he explains his title "No Title":

No Title was installed on Topsail Island in the St. Mary’s River between Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada and Sault Ste. Marie Michigan, U.S.A. It was part of a sculpture symposium called Sans Demarcations. The project refers to the titling of land and ownership. It was realized with the cooperation of chief Dan Pine of the Garden River reserve near the Sault. He helped me site and dedicate the project to the cause of respectful resolution for land claims made by the indigenous nations of this continent generally and his community specifically. The circle of inverted trees draws the viewers’ attention to the state of inverted priorities of the dominant colonial cultures that have stolen native lands and suppressed indigenous cultures on a global scale. No Title also supported the Garden River people in their claim to land now under water, flooded by the process of building locks in the St.Mary’s River and drowning thousands of acres of their ancestral lands.

"Indigenous nations" has been a theme of Reitzenstein's art, and continues to be. He uses it to portray, as does Carvalho, both spiritual and cultural themes. As he usurps the Western traditions, its God and its art, he supplants it with something else: the "forsaken" other. For the time being, it is those "indigenous" groups. I predict that in his next major work, he will betray these natives and he will embark on ethnic immigrants. Perhaps it will be an ode to the Syrian "refugees'. Hs painterly theme will be of those who are subjugated to the colonial racism of the West even as they leave their forsaken homes and come to this land of plenty. His native betrayal will be callous and opportunistic as all his art has been. His "No Title" shows no empathy for natives, the environment, or even those trees which he seems to admire so much. Syrian refugees, like Native Canadians, will be just another issue to take on and to force onto his art. He is not merely an artist, he is also a self-proclaimed saviour! He has no interest in gods or in God except as imagery for his ever-changing idols. He calls out to mother nature only when he needs to form another of his naked bronze trees.

He gave us a glimpse of this dystopia in "A Destructivist performance" where

Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein with sound support from Buffalo's legendary 1970's era Post-Punk band The Vores featuring Biff Henrich as well as additional Friends.

"In a 1919 essay, Wyndham Lewis posited Nature and Design as the antipodes of representation. Excessive concern with Nature leads to pure content, to allow Design to dominate is to force the work to surrender to pure form. As he describes it, the artist devours, or conversely, is devoured, as one monster struggling against an equivalent monster.

"Acknowledging a debt to both Raphael Montanez-Ortiz and Richard Hulsenbeck, Monsters is a duet of ritualized violence and stifled catharsis emerging from the dying shrieks of two sacrificial pianos, set against a starkly jagged swirl of throbbing guitar feedback and pulsing percussion. The resulting sound sculpture presents a darkly ceremonial existentialist confrontation that underscores the dissensus of the current historical moment."

"Acknowledging a debt to both Raphael Montanez-Ortiz and Richard Hulsenbeck, Monsters is a duet of ritualized violence and stifled catharsis emerging from the dying shrieks of two sacrificial pianos, set against a starkly jagged swirl of throbbing guitar feedback and pulsing percussion. The resulting sound sculpture presents a darkly ceremonial existentialist confrontation that underscores the dissensus of the current historical moment."

His tree has become even more metaphorical in his 2012 installation piece Hanna's Cabinet in St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto, where a twig strewn on the floor becomes the sinewy serpent. In this piece, which he presented as his first exhibition work with the Netherworld collective after it re-grouped following a 20-year hiatus (he was one of the group's original members), he shifts ever more farther away away from God, sacrilegiously displaying his collection of idols which this blasphemous church allows him to do so. Where God has been discarded, other spirits rush to intervene. The serpent has made its entrance.

But Reitzenstein's adoration is for is the whole earth Gaia to whom he makes his incantations with these forlorn objects, his most cherished being his tree branches.


Reinhard Reitzenstein
Hanna's Cabinet, 2012
Materials: wood bronze flowers oil ceramic petals
St. Anne's Anglican Church, Toronto

Hanna's Cabinet, depicts a space that speculates on the question I asked myself, where would St. Anne (Hanna) go to be a lone and find solice [sic] and refuge? What would the space look like. In St. Anne's Church there was a tiny secluded space under the stairs which felt like the right site to prepare such an environment.

At a recent exhibition at the Netherworld collective were he presented work he titled Parasite, he

populates the gallery’s walls, corners and columns with realistically rendered fungi made from beeswax.

Collectively titled Parasite, the pieces evoke multiple metaphorical associations that could apply to art — art as sustenance, art as fermentation agent, art as medicine, art as hallucinogenic. The link between fungi and art might also include magic and spiritual enlightenment in the realm of ceremony and ritual. And true to the inverted nature of the pieces (netherworlds...). Reitzenstein uses the beeswax as the main sculptural material, whereas it is traditionally used as a mold for the enduring bronze. Beeswax s also "degradable" which is the man theme, whether explicitly presented or suggested, in all of Reitzenstein's pieces.

...the pieces evoke multiple metaphorical associations that could apply to art - art as sustenance, art as fermentation agent, art as medicine, art as hallucinogenic. The link between fungi and art might also include magic and spiritual enlightenment in the realm of ceremony and ritual.

Left: Artist Reinhard Reitzenstein filled some of the gallery walls
with realistic-looking fungi made from beeswax.
The pieces are collectively called Parasite.

Right: Catherine Heard’s Grave consists of
a grouping of small skulls, which is also
accompanied with a video animation
projected on the wall to make it look like some
kind of scanning device such as a ultrasound or MRI

Reitzenstein never shies away from telling us his true beliefs.

+++

One of hs earliest pieces with the Nether Mind Collective in 1991, Reminiscent of a ...Cell Series, shows twigs and branches with rounded brass balls at their ends suggesting some kind of bomb:

Reitzenstein is represented by his Reminiscent of a ....Cell series, large bronzes in wh9ch a rod or branch sprouts out of an initial ball, suggesting tension between growth and proliferation...

...Nether Mind purposefully sought out a basement space for its work, seeing there a metaphor for the internal world of which their art speaks.

Kate Taylor Globe and Mail May 10, 1991
511 King Street West Basement

511 King Street West, a run-down building in 1991, is now a posh yuppie's destination where these former starving artists such as the Nether Mdn collective's members now have become wealthy to reside.



He finally puts together his Gaia environmentalist shout out in a piece at the Indigo Art Gallery in Buffalo titled Socorro.


Socorro
From the exhibition Tree-Cantations
Indigo Art Gallery
September 2-October 2, 2016
Buffalo, NY

The art gallery's catalogue describes this exhibition thus:

Professor Reinhard Reitzenstein’s work explores the interconnection between nature, culture, and technology. In Tree-cantations, Reitzenstein, a self-described dendrophilliac (lover of trees), features a selection of drawings and sculpture, which are more like portraits in their representation. They celebrate the grace, fragility and strength found in nature, reminding us of our responsibility to respect and protect all living forms.

There is a thin line between a dendrophile and a worshiper of inanimate objects.
"Socorro" means:

...help, relief in Spanish. It is taken from the title of the Virgin Mary María del Socorro meaning "Mary of Perpetual Succour".

Skywards is reaching out for God. Reitzenstein’s tiny shrub of a tree in his AGM piece Thrust may be trying to pull us upwards to the heavens but the fungal forces are stronger and we are being dragged into some netherworld from which even that "thrusting" shrub of a tree cannot save us. We are in the realm of the hallucinogenic fungi, of ritualistic magic, and of the paranormal. We are asked to participate in Reitzenstein's quest to reach the netherworld. It is a communal journey in which the artist alone would be bereft of company. Where God is denied, other supernatural spirits take over.
Reitzenstein’s particular spirit is the earth. His fungi pieces are his cry for the earth. But his mother nature incantations have no respect for the environment that he purports to represent and promises to save. In an extraordinary "Environmental Art" in Topsail Island near Sault Ste. Marie in northern Ontario, in a piece he titled - unimaginatively - "No Title," Reitzenstein:

...upended eight fifty-foot-tall trees, planting them upside down in the ground. The sixty-foot-diameter circle configuration that resulted again refers to the native cosmology, but the circle is likewise a Christian symbol.

Reitzenstein explains in an interview;

The circle is a universal form. This piece, called No Title, referred to the titling of land. I worked in collaboration with Dan Pine, an eighty-eight-year-old medicine chief from the local reserve here, to create a site where the appropriation of land, the ownership of place could be discussed. By inverting the trees and placing their topsoil in the ground I tried to address the inversion of priorities...

When did Reitzenstein realize that "Topsoil" would make an deal location for his dendrophlic work? If he weren't so deep in the deeply serious Gaia world, I would say that he had a sense of humor. But he inhabits a world of ideological dogmas, and while Gaia may be one of them, a recurring theme in his art is the "Native" perspective. The main idea behind No Title is the "Native" connection and land appropriation. He dismisses the Christian symbol of the cross which the interviewer brought up (did he even know about it?) and replaced it with the spiritualism that makes up all of his art. This is the usual arrogant position of all environmentalists, where for the sake of conveying their message, they are willing to dig up the roots of trees, and communities, and civilizations.
His inability to give this piece any title may be a reference to the "voiceless" Natives, but it is more of his subconscious realization of the enormity of his arrogance and hypocrisy where he cannot give a name to these destroyed, dead trees.He has reached a creative block, which is the mind's way of tuning out things he doesn't want to acknowledge.
20 ways to overcome creative block announces this psychology advice:
01. Tap into your unconscious
Strange things happen in a semi-sleep state, when your unconscious takes over," says Shotopop's Casper Franken. "Wake up and write down whatever was happening before you forget it."

Reitzenstein must continually tap into his unconscious, which is why he delves so readily into the "spiritual." The ghosts have taken over to provide the antidote for his "no title." Then the titles and the pieces come to Reitzenstein in droves. He has a prolific portfolio of spirits.

But on the "spiritual" level, which Reitzenstein has made an intricate part of his works, his rejection of Christianity and adherence to the netherworld is made apparent by the skyward-projecting roots of the trees, as though he were taunting God with this world he has turned upside down.
In his 1992 piece Memory Phantom Reitzenstein. continues with his glorification of trees but this time as a commentary on civilization. Hs dead sinewy strands of a tree (or trees?) are curled around a grand piano and in a home full of wood, from the beautifully designed marquetry of the floor to the grand staircase, and of course the piano.


He would rather the primitiveness of nature take over thousands of years of human civilization.
What would he do without his camera and the smart SUV he drives around to get to these project locations?

As the catalogue for the exhibition informs us:

Contemporary Canadian artists looking at landscape must also find a way to access the ‘truth’ of a subject that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but one that is both deeply political and personal. Placing contemporary work by emerging and established artists alongside that of Watson illustrates the universality of the quest to appreciate and capture the landscape in which we live.

"Truth" becomes a subjective quest with a subjective importance placed on one truth above another. The AGM's agenda was bigger than dismissing geographical and cultural truth. What they wanted to do was to dismantle it, destroy it, and replace it with something other than this White European man's vision and depiction of his country.

Beyond the Pines is an ambitious project attempting to encompass, and to unite, several themes of Canada art. This was partly responsible for its failure: trying to be everything to everyone, from European-influenced landscape painting, to spirit-influenced Canadian art and finally to Native Canadians' contributions to the Canadian identity.

Its other failure, although it would be more accurate to say that rather than a failure it is the ideological direction the curators took to present the exhibition, produced a collection of work which was not convincing in presenting its original idea of "moving forward" from the Watson "narrative" to a more "inclusive" multicultural art, where Homer Watson can be slowly and subtly removed from the fore of Canadian artistic tradition

Art Gallery of Mississauga's exhibition,
in partnership with the Homer Watson House and Gallery

Beyond the Pines
Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape
September 24, 2015 - January 1, 2016

Homer Watson
Cows in Grand River
Oil on Board
Collection of Robert Tattersall
[Photo By: KPA]

Culture Watch: Burning Down Western Culture

I have started a new topic I've titled "Culture Watch."


Nafiseh Emadmostofi
Do it Yourself: Coffins II, 81cm x 101cm
Oil on Canvass

Art is one of the first ways that we get indications of the directions a culture is taking. That is because it is hard to lie with art. Your authenticity is revealed firstly through your technical dexterity. And having invested so much time learning the techniques and processes, what you present becomes a labor of love. You do the very best that you can do.

And images are more primal than words. One can mask meanings and intentions with words, but pictures are more direct.

We have now in Canada (and specifically in Mississauga) artists who have gone through - so far - the exemplary schools that the region have to offer. Even in this era of postmodernism, there are first class traditional schools of painting and drawing available to anyone who wants to attend. Many are at very low cost or even free. Public secondary and post secondary school systems in Ontario have them in their curricula, with skilled art teachers on their staff.

Many times these artists are second generation immigrants who may have been born in Canada or came to the country as very young children. They maneuver through "Canadian" culture with expertise, speak fluent English, and often also their own languages.

They go through the usual rigorous screening systems, first for admissions into these post secondary schools and even secondary schools. For example The Etobcoke School of the Arts is highly selective in admitting its high school students.

Then, as they complete their studies, these artists start their rounds of galleries and museums to submit their works for exhibitions. Some venture out into the commercial world, but that comes much later.

The fascinating thing is the themes they chose to represent. Without fail (view work by students and alumni of Chinese or other ethnic backgrounds at the Ontario College of Art and Design here, or here at the University of Toronto ), their works reference their own cultures. Often there is a sense of alienation in their works. And where these works intersect with other cultures, and specifically with white, western culture, there is an amorphous sense of doom. This may be representative of the postmodern era of doom and gloom in art, but this doom and gloom is specifically Chinese, or Indian, or some other ethnic group's where the artists pull from their own cultural vocabularies to represent such worlds through their art.

Multiculturalism has really brought out their unique demons.

But there is another interesting layer. While each culture represents its imagery, in its own way, with unapologetic references to its "identity," whites are not allowed to do so. For if they do, then they are channeling into their "oppressor" history, their legacy of "racism" where they prevented the ancestors of these non-whites (some only as far back as 1/2 a generation ago) from participating and fully living in this land. Whites cannot be genuine artists because of the crimes that have been allocated to them. They will only make more of the same art, "alienating" and "oppressive."

What could be further from the truth!

But all these "ethnics" cannot be true artists either, for their inauthentic methods of "copying" their oppressors.

So where does that leave us in the world of art?

We get to watch the burning of the Western tradition, painted in the immaculate tradition of Western art.

Nafiseh Emadmostofi channels back to this tradition, having nothing else to emulate. Yet her deepest desire is to see it go up in flames, to vanish, so that she can once again return to her true, authentic self, her true authentic art.

The Art Gallery of Mississauga will exhibit Emadmostofi's works in the XIT-RM from June 29-August 27 2017 under the title Burning Desire. She will also participate in an "Artist Talk" on June 29, the opening night.

What is Emadmostofi's burning desire? I have answered that question above: "...her deepest desire is to see [this Western culture] go up in flames, to vanish, so that she can once again return to her true, authentic self, her true authentic art."

The gallery's communication describes Emadmostofi's work thus:

Nafiseh Emadmostofi’s bold figural paintings offer up representative and allegorical examinations of ideological conflict, and the power of art to inspire protest, incite censure, and yet also speak to a collective (and contested) desire to envision a better world.

And we get this "better world" after we get rid of the "old" and "corrupt" one.

There is nothing more exhilarating than utopian visions.