Art for Art’s Sake

Thursday noon we picked up Maggie and Abigail from their hotel and headed for the Art Gallery where Carm was dropping us off. If you can believe it I’ve never been to the gallery so was really happy to accompanying the ladies on their visit.

The building is impressive. It has a very fortress like feeling, but with a lightness from the windows overhead. Of course the display rooms are properly lit and not from art destroying windows! We missed the entrance to the Canadian section and ended up in the middle of the Contemporary section. It was interesting, but I’ve got to tell you, I am a philistine when it comes to modern art. Sure it was fun making up stories about what the artist was saying… but it wasn’t long before we were looking for the Canadian art section.

This was more my speed.

The museum has a large collection of Canadian art on display, starting from the earliest aboriginal art to current. Yes, I saw the “Voice of Fire”, the one million dollar commission made several years ago… and was underwhelmed by the experience.

Next on the agenda – the clock exhibit. This was a film made up of thousands of clips of movies showing clocks. The neat thing about it was the clocks were all sync’d to real time.

Catch the Canadian premiere of Christian Marclay's most ambitious video installation to date. The Clock evokes the wonder and illusionism of more than a century of cinema through a captivating 24-hour looped video that plays in real-time. This remarkable production compiles thousands of film references to time and timepieces creating a compelling moving image illustration of the minutes of a passing day. The Clock won a Golden Lion for best artist at the 2011 Venice Art Biennial.  http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/current/details/christian-marclay-the-clock-3408

Our final time at the art gallery was spent in the Early European collection. This was most certainly more my speed. I even recognized some of the author’s (Gainsbourgh, Renoir, Degas, to name a few).

When we were all done Carm picked us up and drove us around the city a bit (past 24 Sussex, we stopped for a walk at the Governer General’s residence, through Rockcliffe), and we ended up at a mall food court for a quick meal before dropping them off at the airport.

 

It was a fun day – one I’d like to repeat some day – perhaps they’ll come back for another visit? I would have loved to show them some of rural Ontario, it is so different from Alberta. And it would have been good if the weather had been better. Maybe some warm sunny days would have made a better impression!

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
Paul Cezanne