1. Sonja Ahlers: The Selves published by Drawn & Quarterly
In the spring, Drawn & Quarterly released the latest book project by artist Sonja Ahlers, who is based partly in the Yukon. Described as “a feminist scrapbook” by Ahlers, The Selves is a heartbreakingly beautiful, rambling collage of girlhood ephemera. Found images of pop icons like Princess Diana, Stevie Nicks and the Olsen twins are combined with watercolour drawings and text to create the experience of peeking inside an adolescent’s journal or bedroom. Ahlers’ compositions are at once delicate, familiar, strange and painful. They delve deep into the interior lives of women and consider the relationship between female fantasy and identity. My top pick for 2010 may not be an exhibition, but flipping through The Selves is as experiential as walking through an installation; and the artist’s mix of soft-focus, vintage aesthetic and hard-edged critique is utterly of the moment.
2. Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Shary Boyle’s recent solo show at the Art Gallery of Ontario marked a turning point in the artist’s career. Though Boyle has long been revered as a local heroine by Torontonians and celebrated nationally by art world insiders, “Flesh and Blood” shifted the artist’s status from cult favorite to household name. Predictably, the exhibition’s highlights were Boyle’s porcelain figurines, which explore youthful, contemporary content using a traditional material that is strongly associated with manufactured, conservative forms (think Royal Doulton). Like Sonja Ahlers, Boyle makes powerful feminist proclamations in her work. She’s particularly adept at exploring the physicality of womanhood, as recent works Birth, Burden, and Virus attest to. The high-profile exhibition slot came part and parcel with the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, which Boyle won last December for her contribution to Canada’s cultural fabric. “Flesh and Blood” will travel nationally in 2011.
3. Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever at the Power Plant
Earlier this year, the Power Plant organized Ryan Trecartin’s largest solo exhibition to date. (Disclosure: I began work as a Power Plant animateur after this exhibition ended.) “Any Ever” featured the young American artist’s celebrated 2009 video suite Trill-ogy Comp as well as a series of four new videos entitled Re’Search Wait’S. The gallery’s labyrinth-like installation perfectly complemented Trecartin’s twisted, disorienting and completely absorbing video aesthetic, which has generated deafening art world buzz: his work was featured in the “USA Today” exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2006; he landed a coveted spot in the New Museum’s 2009 “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition; and he was named New Artist of the Year at the Guggenheim Museum in the same year. “Any Ever” was a treat for Toronto’s savvy viewers.
Vanessa Nicholas is the editorial intern at Canadian Art and blogs at www.blogthegood.tumblr.com.
