Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Aleph

I know I haven't been posting regularly as I had intended lately, but I've been drowning in projects. I'll admit, most of my stress was facilitated by my procrastination, but it's not my fault that the weather makes me sleepy, is it? Alright, I'm done making excuses for myself, time to move onto a few of things that I've seen within the past week.

Attended the Beyond Sharkwater lecture:
In case you dont know what Sharkwater is, allow me to elaborate.

For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a beautiful and dangerous life journey into the balance of life on earth.

Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes and media depictions of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas.

Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world's shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.

Okay, maybe I took that off of the film website, but guys the message is important. Shark finning is a really big deal. Shark finning is basically dragging in sharks, cutting their fins off, and tossing the rest back into the water. Why? for shark fin soup, yeah SOUP. Basically, the fin is used to add texture to the soup and really does nothing for the taste. We're disrupting the food chain by killing off the top predator. The entire ocean biodiversity is effected if this unnecessary killing continues. I've posted links below for both the documentary and also for more info on shark finning. Please check them both out!

http://www.sharkwater.com/
http://www.stopsharkfinning.net/news08.htm

I got to meet the director, Rob Stewart! He's an amazing person, who's so passionate about his cause, I feel so lucky to have met him, even if I DID make a complete airhead of myself. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Luminato
k.d. lang concert @ Pecaut Square, the belle brigade, siss boom bang--
A couple of lang songs that I'm listening to at the moment.
Hush sweet lover--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQoF0CIKRbc&feature=fvwrel
I confess-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amM3Z2YgcKI

Soulpepper theatre
This was my first time in the distillery district during the day. It was beautiful. The brick buildings that were once used in the brewing process now had the most curious shops, theatres, restaurants, cafes, galleries etc etc. If you do decide to check it out, remember to stop by SOMA chocolate and gelato. My last time was during Nuit blanche of 2010. It was an interesting experience no doubt. I dont even know how I got there, but somehow at 2am or so, I was sitting around a fire amidst a circus of steampunk, post-apocalyptic performance artist with someone I briefly knew. Strange how things turn out.

So anyway, I got to check out the Soul Pepper theatre and saw Aleph, I've posted the link below. It was definitely an interesting experience to say the least. Apparently an aleph is a point where all points of the universe interject. [I guess a kind of worm hole. I don't pretend to understand exactly what and how a wormhole works, but this how I've learned to make sense of it: ask yourself, whats the shortest distance between two points drawn on the same side of a paper? Is it a line connecting the two points? What if you fold the paper so that one touches the other?] The show definitely went into some strange, thought provoking places, but isn't that one of the best parts of theatre?


The second show that I saw at the soulpepper was Virtuosic Toronto. It was a ~20 minute long performance that took a video of a job, and layered it's sounds and processes with dance and acoustics that kind of recreate it in a more conceptual way? I'm not explaining this very well.

Virtuosic Toronto
Musicians Waleed Abdulhamid, John Millard, Aline Morales and Greg Oh, and dancers David Cox, Troy Feldman, Anisa Tejpar, and Brendan Wyatt, create music and choreography set to film footage of everyday Torontonians doing their jobs with a high level of artistry.

...that's better.

http://www.thedistillerydistrict.com/index.php
http://www.thedistillerydistrict.com/directory.php?cat=CAFES
http://www.soulpepper.ca/performances/11_season/the_aleph.aspx
http://www.soulpepper.ca/
http://www.soulpepper.ca/media/144975/advisory_
_soulpepper_summer_repertory_schedule_-_updated.pdf

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Alice's adventures in wonderland at Luminato!

Luminato is a great Toronto wide festival that brings the arts to the fore for about a week so that the general public can experience, develop interest, and perhaps even be involved in it.

This is a couple of things that I'd like to check out during the festival

Alice's adventures in wonderland

Sargasso

Confluence

One Thousand and One Nights

Garden of roses

I'm still browsing the site, so I'll post more once I've found more things to pique my interest.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Krasner

Saw a couple of Lee Krasner's work too. It's really quite unfortunate that (up until recently) she hadn't gotten the attention that she deserved (both because she was a woman and because she was married to Pollock). It was hard to be a woman in a man's world unless you could make yourself asexual in some way. Lee chose to initial her work with L.K., which is sexually ambiguous.

Have you been to The Bean?

Isamu Noguchi!


I discovered Isamu Noguchi (I hear you scoffing, I know, I'm late) at the Abstract Expressionist New York Exhibit (100 masterpieces from MoMA) at the AGO. Though magnificent, his work was completely over shadowed by the Pollocks hanging in the adjacent room (seriously, it was as if I had died and went to heaven...I stared at Number 1A and sighed happily for a good ten minutes). However, Noguchi's work crawled his way back into my life. Without knowing it, I had actually photographed and admired his work long before knowing who he is while in Manhattan last month.

I am now completely and utterly in love with his work. I mean, check out these floating fountains!

I really want to know the inner machinations for these two. Just incredible in general, especially against the night sky.

I've fallen in love with his sculptures. They're so raw and timeless because of their abstraction. They take on a character of their own, silent, indiscriminate, but seemingly aware of their own presence within their context. I'll post a couple of sculptures that I like below so hopefully you can see what I mean.