Artist Talk Sunday

On Sunday we attended our first ever "Artist Talk” and then took some time to wander around The Rooms to check out some other new exhibits!

For anyone not sure exactly what an Artist Talk is, it seems to be exactly what it sounds like. On Sunday we joined 10 other people at The Rooms for a one hour presentation by two Canadian artists, Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, who took us through their body of work. According to their website, “their work is the product of an ongoing conversation concerning the modernity of the mid-century, the production of space and the built environment.” In particular, they create film installations, sculptures and public art. The most interesting part of the talk for us was when they discussed specific design problems they had to solve and how they made them work.

The exhibit they have at The Rooms is entitled Infrastructure Canada and focuses on new infrastructure projects across the country. It showcases four of their film installations, three of them forming a trilogy (Every Building, or Site, that a Building Permit was Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006; 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot; and their most recent film, Infrastructure Canada). The fourth film that is included in this exhibition is entitled Camera Tracking a Spiral Drawn Between the Two Curved Towers of Viljo Revell’s Toronto City Hall. Luckily all of these film titles are fairly self-explanatory, so we don’t need to say much more about the content.  

By the time the talk was over, we were ready for an afternoon snack but first decided to take a look at the exhibit for ourselves. The films were basically what we expected, which tends to happen if you hear someone talk about something extensively beforehand, so we spent a bit of time there watching the films and then moved onto the café. Maybe we should have looked at the exhibit before the talk. The jury’s still out on that one.

Over coffee and desserts in the café, we discussed the Artist Talk and its associated exhibit like civilized human beings. There were aspects of the experience that we enjoyed and it promoted a lot of discussion, but we did find that the talk wasn’t very accessible to people not in the art world. On second thought, this is probably to be expected! Regardless, we found the talk to be thought-provoking and we’re glad that we tried out something new because that’s what Something Saturdays are all about.

After gobbling up our tasty desserts, we returned to The Rooms’ Art Gallery and visited a couple of other exhibits entitled Folklore and Other Panics and Audrey Hurd’s Until it Remembers You. We then checked out an exhibit in the museum that we’d be meaning to visit for a while about the Newfoundland Sealing Disasters of 1914. The exhibit was installed last year and marks 100 years since the tragedies involving the SS Southern Cross and SS Newfoundland claimed the lives of 251 sealers. The National Film Board produced a 13 minute animated film last year that is based on accounts of survivors of the SS Newfoundland incident who spent 54 hours out on the ice, and it is showing at The Rooms. If you’re in Canada, you can watch it here. The film is very well done and puts the events of that incident in context.

We don’t like to end on a sombre note, but that concluded our visit to The Rooms. We had just enough time after the film to peruse the sealing exhibit and then make out way out the front door before it closed. We only took a few pictures of our afternoon, and here are the rest: