Aboard the Art Bus

Contemporary Art has Legs

Fabulous, busy day yesterday. I finally got a chance to hop aboard the Art bus–a seasonal event organised by Toronto collectors and contemporary art mavens Susie Kololian and Sue Kidd, who run an art excursion endeavour they call Variant Path–which I am shortly to discover is nothing like the relaxed meander the name suggests.

Variant Path takes art trips to art cities like Montreal and Berlin and London , but they also host a couple of days in Toronto every year where they drag a group of  art-seekers around to galleries and studios to meet the artists and talk to gallery owners–sort of like a ladies’  Day with VIP art access. The days are always over-subscribed and so I’ve never managed to make it. But this year I pledged to go, and it was great fun, like being on a school field trip, but with grown-ups.

You meet at the bus at 9:30 in the morning and Sue and Susie greet you with clementines and bottles of water and fresh-baked muffins in a pretty basket, along with harsh instructions that it is a strict schedule: we are to visit each of the dozen galleries for a total of 15 MINUTES (Sue carries a kitchen timer, seriously, which she sets the second we file into one of our scheduled stops and when it dings we are out the door in single file), and that we are free to look around but during the presentations we are NOT to TALK.

I’m a little bit frightened by this and feel more and more like a child in danger of reprimand as the day progresses. I am warned by the more experienced seekers not to drink too much of the bottled water on offer as these two really mean business–you aren’t even permitted an extra five minutes in a gallery to pee.

Our first stop in less-travelled Leslieville is the Brayham gallery, where I am impressed with director Angela Brayham, who advises us that unlike some of her colleagues who have made it a vogue, she is loathe to take on young artists straight out of school as “artists need time to develop a voice and have something to say”.

Next stop was PARTS gallery, where I literally wanted to buy everything,  particularly owner Ric Santon’s hilarious duck-tape assemblages of musical instruments and retro audiophilia. As Santon described it, “there is definitely something in the air right now that has a ‘low art’ almost cartoonish feel.”

At Headbones gallery, the gallerists, whose names are Julie Oakes and Rich Fog (seriously), identified themselves as ‘life partners’–a New Age-y term that offered perhaps more information than necessary. Then the artist, Jim Hayt, took us through his work, pointing out how the wings of his magnificent wall-mounted laser-cut steel butterfly was actually patterned with erotic drawings of couples, coupling. On the same wall, a series of cast gloves spelled out Count Your Blessings in sign language. According to Hayt, it’s amazing how many single gloves you can find in the snowbanks of Toronto. 

Across the room, an enormous face, with features that spelled out Looks Like Shit, was built from 1500 used rolls of toilet paper Hayt had gathered from his friends.

At our next stop, Avenue Road, a lovely contemporary furniture gallery designed by Yabu, Pushelberg , I risked my life and snuck off to find a bathroom.

At the Corkin gallery, Jane Corkin greeted us with a passive-agressive put-down (“I thought you said this group knew nothing, but I see some people here I know”)–or was it an acknowledgment?

At the Engine gallery, the most impressive sight were the painted-on looking stockings of the gallerina, whose legs looked tattooed. Her name was Mandy, and she told me that all the girls are wearing them in London and that she had bought them at H&M.

At lunch in the Distillery district, I sat next to a bright, fun woman with a Kiwi accent named Meg Carlton, who had just moved here from Singapore,  and described herself as a menace because she can never remember which side of the road here to drive on.

 After lunch (salmon and salad),  fellow seeker Claire Duboc was sufficiently cheered to ask dealer Leo Kamen whether she should buy art that should come a set of user’s instructions (“whenever I hear what the artist was thinking about, the work seems so much more interesting, but if I just hang it on my wall, without any explanation, will people who come to my house get it?”)–a bold question, I thought. Leo’s answer, that you should just buy what you love seemed trite in comparison.

At Nicholas Methivier, the gallerina talking to us was so tiny and perfect, it was hard to believe she wasn’t preserved in some sort of glass case.

Saying goodbye to some new friends, and some older ones(collector Colette Barber, former publisher Carole Shea, Elte heiress Mary-Ann Metrick), I vowed not to miss the sign-up date for the Path’s big upcoming trip to the Prospect art fair in New Orleans.

Quick change, and I was out the door to gardening guru, and all-around fabulous Marjorie Harris’ book launch for her newest publication, Thrifty:Living the Frugal Life with Style (to which, I, along with many others, offered contributions).

Stepping out of the taxi, which was blocking Yorkville traffic, the guy in the SUV behind me was beeping the horn. “Get out of the way von Hahn”, yelled Klaus Nienkamper, who was at the wheel with his funny and delightful girlfriend Marisa laughing beside him in the front seat. Who knew the next generation of haute design retail drove an SUV?

Many joked about the glam lavishness of the locale (Sean Gibson and Michael Pellegrini’s gorgeous new Teatro Verde shop in Yorkville) given the subject matter of Marjorie’s book. Exchanged air-kisses with Anansi head honchess Sarah McLachlan, writer Ann Kingston, designer Janice Lindsey, former Toronto Life publisher Michael de Pencier and his lovely wife Honour. 

I also chatted briefly with author Philip Slayton, who was perfectly dressed for the garden-inspired setting  in a   bright green cashmere v-neck, and his wife Cynthia. Slayton is at work on a new book about Canadian legislative history (he used to practice law), and talked quickly turned to the new iPad and whether it would be the saviour of the publishing industry. Apparently Slayton had given a Sony reader to his wife for Christmas.

When I asked her how she liked it, she said that she had to enlist Philip’s help to download a PD James book to read on it but that the book itself didn’t prove to be particularly good.

Dashed off next through the howling wind to drinks atop the former Park Plaza now Hyatt roof with the ever-charming Star Fashion ed David Graham and Living editor Kim Honey, a hilarious gal and dear friend. At the next table were my fave pr girls, Jane Gill and Shauna McMahon, who were entertaining a big, handsome guy who turned out to be the brother of the Star’s Vinay Menon.

But the rest of the crowd in the old literary bar with its framed caricatures of Peter Gzowski and Margaret Atwood, seemed to have driven in from Vegas–there were tables of fedora-clad pumped-up,  tanned guys in Ed Hardy tattoo shirts and tiny girls with dipped-dyed hair and mini-kilts. The best was a Christina Aguilera lookalike wearing a Babushka headscarf in a leopard print. Although I didn’t see another pair of tattoo stockings.