her third or fourth work of fiction, will be published next year) and graphics into the Mecca Normal vehicle. The duo has worked various day jobs to keep the vehicle running Lester's the editor and designer of B.C.
BookWorld while Smith, a former ski instructor, has a steady gig as a fitness technician encouraging and instructing women in weight-bearing exercise. David Lester and Jean Smith are Mecca Normal Neither Lester nor Smith has ever seriously considered moving out of Vancouver to, say, New York (Mecca Normal has opened for Sonic Youth and Fugazi) or Seattle. True, we have made a lot of friends in the U.
S. over the years, perhaps because Americans believe or hope that art and music can change the world more than Canadians and because the gregarious nature of Americans, their energy provides more of a boost to Mecca Normal's live shows. But, noted Smith, we did not set out to be famous [we're] not essentially a get-ahead' kind of a band.
Yes, if fame and fortune ever come to the band that once produced this couplet You vote Socred next time instead of NDP/I'm gonna have to wonder about you and me, it's gonna come on their own terms. The Serpentine Gallery is housed in a lovely converted tea house situated in the heart of London in Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park, in fact. England, of course, has been at the forefront of the contemporary-art boom of the last 10 years, and the Serpentine, founded in 1970, has been a big player in that scene, having mounted exhibitions by Damien Hirst, Elizabeth Peyton, Bridget Riley, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin, among other stars.
The gallery, which charges no admission and averages more than 750,000 visitors each year, is also famous for the invitation it extends each summer to an international architect to design a temporary pavilion adjacent to the tea house. Architects who've received the commission include Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. Catapulted into this heady environment last August was Kitty Scott.
She'd just been named chief curator of the Serpentine after having spent the previous six years at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, five of them as its curator of contemporary art. It was Scott, a Newfoundlander by birth (in 1963) who orchestrated the gallery's famous purchase of Louise Bourgeois's huge, rather menacing sculpture of a female black spider, now installed in the outdoor plaza by the gallery's main entrance. Scott's no stranger to London she completed her MA in visual-arts administration there at the Royal College of Art in 1995 but prior to last year, her career had largely been in Canada, in cities such as Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto, with forays to San Francisco, Santa Fe and Amsterdam.
I'm not really the kind of person who has wanted to get ahead,' she observed recently. More than anything I have wanted to work with artists, from Canada and abroad, and see their work realized in the best possible way. I have sought out situations and like-minded individuals in order to realize my goal.
Scott said she was hired by the Serpentine because, as I understand it I have a good reputation internationally, with artists. I cannot say I was conscious of this, but in my work I have always been driven to do the best I can do for artists. Life at the Serpentine is much less bureaucratic than it was in Ottawa and Scott enjoys being higher in the food chain than I was at my old job.
Moreover, as she told Canadian Art magazine, I have had more Canadian artists calling and asking to drop by to see me since I have been in London, whereas in Ottawa there was not too much traffic. That said, she doesn't put too much pressure on herself to try to include Canadian artists in the Serpentine's exhibition schedule. For one thing, I'm not sure what it means to be a Canadian or what Canadianness' is.
For another, the art has to come first I want to work with artists who are making challenging art first and foremost and, of course, I'm always thinking about the work of artists I feel passionate about, some of whom just happen to be Canadian or have strong links to Canada (such as Peter Doig, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Althea Thauberger). It's Scott's opinion that major Canadian art institutions don't do enough to support living Canadian artists, nor do they show much initiative in mounting big shows by non-Canadians. By contrast, the world is very generous to Canadian artists, she remarked, noting the large retrospective New York's Museum of Modern Art recently did for Vancouver's Jeff Wall.
They come home having had major exhibitions accompanied by big books or catalogues. However, Canadian galleries don't really give back to the larger world in the same way. We caught up with Aszure Barton the other day by cellphone as she rode a bus out of Manhattan en route to a performing-arts centre in Hartford, Conn.
Barton's a dancer and choreographer currently associated with Hell's Kitchen Dance, a troupe of young dancers (Barton is 31) assembled by none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, founded in 2005. In fact, Baryshnikov was on the bus with Barton that day because, at 59, he's dancing in a piece choreographed by Barton (in which she dances as well) called on a three-month tour that's taking Hell's Kitchen to Chicago, Ann Arbor, Reno and Birmingham as well as Madrid, Rio de Janeiro an Sao Paulo. It was happenstance, not design, that brought Barton to New York seven years ago and into Baryshnikov's orbit or, as she calls him, Mischa.
A native of Edmonton, she left the Alberta capital at 14 to train at the National Ballet School in Toronto. After graduation, she got a Canada Council grant to study contemporary dance in Europe for a year, returning in the early 1990s to join Montreal's Les Ballets Jazz. But then, wanting a change in my life, she heeded the invitation of her dancing sisters, Charissa and Cherice, to come to New York where they were already living, and see what happens.
A lot has happened. She started her own company, Aszure and Artists, in 2002. She met Baryshnikov in Nebraska in 2003 when she was on tour with New York's Ruth Davidson Hahn Company and he was a guest soloist.
Last year, she choreographed Scott Elliott's interpretation of with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi and a cast including Cyndi Lauper and Tony award-winner Alan Cumming. Barton acknowledged New York, which she calls a mecca of dance, has been beneficial to her art. It's definitely pushed me, opened me to so much.
There's so much to feed your brain and art there, and you have to be really motivated. But I don't think you necessarily have to leave [Canada] to become a big deal. I mean, I do know a lot of people who've never left or left briefly and had amazing careers in Canada.
I like Canada more than I like America, to be honest with you, she said, laughing. But New York is world unto itself. It's so international It doesn't feel like George W.
Bush country, that's for sure. When Stephen King travelled to Toronto from his home in Maine earlier this month to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association, the billionaire creator of and told an adoring crowd of about 1,400 of his fondness for certain Canadian writers. One he singled out was Robert Charles Wilson who, at 54, he declared, was probably the finest science-fiction author now writing.
Now you'd think the audience would have whooped it up for the hometown boy. (Smith, while born in California, has resided in Canada pretty much full-time since his ninth birthday and currently lives in Concord, just outside Toronto.) After all, this wasn't the first time that King had sung Wilson's praises; in a column in Entertainment Weekly last year, he'd called Wilson a hell of a storyteller and the geek factor in his books is zero.
Last year, Wilson won the biggest science-fiction prize of all, the Hugo Award, for his novel, her third or fourth work of fiction, will be published next year) and graphics into the Mecca Normal vehicle.
News RSS