Art Gallery of Ontario
May. 2nd, 2013 20:47I went to Toronto last weekend! It was pretty great. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toft had urged me to check out the AGO, and I did, and it was really awesome. I am a big fan of contemporary architecture, and the building itself is really cool (pictures may be forthcoming on Tumblr if I can get all my ducks in order). I checked out the Group of Seven, whose landscape paintings are as a group pretty phenomenal and which form the cornerstone of the AGO collection. I also saw the Henry Moore gallery, which includes many of his really striking monumental sculptures, and which currently has Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet installed in part of the gallery.
The 40 Part Motet is extraordinary, particularly installed as it is in a light-filled gallery filled with amazing sculptures. I can't remember the last time I had such a trasnporting experience in an art museum. I would have stayed much longer than I did, but I wanted to get to the special exhibition of Cardiff's works with her collaborator George Miller, Lost in the Memory Palace. I could have stayed hours in there; everything was amazing and absorbing. Cardiff does multimedia installations that suggest narrative but withhold it at the same time. Storm Room is a room in a house in northern Japan with a thunderstorm outside. Experiments in F# Major (name?) is a shadow-activated spontaneous jam session of different kinds of music in the same key. Opera for a Small Room and Dark Pool are like a page from the old I Spy books, in which you know there's a story that beyond your reach, and in the meantime there are many amazing things to look at.
If you can go to the AGO and see this exhibition, you totally should, and if you have an opportunity to see Janet Cardiff work's ever, take it.
toft had urged me to check out the AGO, and I did, and it was really awesome. I am a big fan of contemporary architecture, and the building itself is really cool (pictures may be forthcoming on Tumblr if I can get all my ducks in order). I checked out the Group of Seven, whose landscape paintings are as a group pretty phenomenal and which form the cornerstone of the AGO collection. I also saw the Henry Moore gallery, which includes many of his really striking monumental sculptures, and which currently has Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet installed in part of the gallery. The 40 Part Motet is extraordinary, particularly installed as it is in a light-filled gallery filled with amazing sculptures. I can't remember the last time I had such a trasnporting experience in an art museum. I would have stayed much longer than I did, but I wanted to get to the special exhibition of Cardiff's works with her collaborator George Miller, Lost in the Memory Palace. I could have stayed hours in there; everything was amazing and absorbing. Cardiff does multimedia installations that suggest narrative but withhold it at the same time. Storm Room is a room in a house in northern Japan with a thunderstorm outside. Experiments in F# Major (name?) is a shadow-activated spontaneous jam session of different kinds of music in the same key. Opera for a Small Room and Dark Pool are like a page from the old I Spy books, in which you know there's a story that beyond your reach, and in the meantime there are many amazing things to look at.
If you can go to the AGO and see this exhibition, you totally should, and if you have an opportunity to see Janet Cardiff work's ever, take it.