What: Ottawa Art Gallery fundraising auction
When & where: 6 p.m., May 30 at the gallery, 2 Daly Ave. in Arts Court
There are a lot of fundraising art sales in the city each year — I even organize one myself — but there’s little doubt the biggest and most-anticipated is the annual auction at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
The OAG silent auction has more pieces available to buy than do most all other fundraisers in the city, and the list of artists is a who’s-who of Ottawa’s best.
This year’s artists include Tim Desclouds, Andrew Morrow, Sarah Hatton, Bear Witness and Natasha Mazurka. There are younger stars — Genevieve Thauvette, Colin Muir Dorward and Cara Tierney — and highly respected senior figures on the city arts scene — Leslie Reid, Jerry Grey, Pat Durr and Norman Takeuchi. There are works by more than 60 artists in total, too many to print here. (See the entire list, and more artworks, by clicking here.)
Three artists have been singled out by the gallery for special mention. It’s the second year the gallery has called in a panel of judges to select winners of the Critics’ Choice ribbons, and this year’s judges gave best-in-show bragging rights to the artists Jonathan Hobin, Martin Golland and Meryl McMaster.
McMaster’s piece is a digital C-print entitled Ancestral 12. The artist, who is still in her early twenties and half Plains Cree, often uses self-portraiture as a vehicle for representing the history of her people and family. Last fall one of her works was chosen to represent 2012 in the Canadian Art Bank’s 40th anniversary exhibition.
Meryl McMaster’s Ancestral 12 (digital C-print, 101.6 x 76.2 cm), a Critics’ Choice winner from the Ottawa Art Gallery fundraising auction on May 30
Martin Golland’s winning piece is an oil painting on linen. It’s an abstracted scene of a greenhouse, with vibrant, shifting greens that contrast sharply with the swirling mass of darkness in the background. The colours, like the materials, are a marriage of delicacy and force. Golland has shown at the National Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, and was a finalist for the annual RBC Painting Prize.
Jonathan Hobin’s photograph is a typical mix of vision and technique. Hobin’s In the Playroom, a series of photographs of children re-enacting headline-grabbing situations, has shown around the world for at least two years now. His photograph in the OAG’s party is from 2011, a round portrait of a white boy and an African-American girl who (appear) to be dressed as bride and groom and (appear) to be sleeping. It’s made of UV ink and printed on an aluminum panel.
These pieces were singled out by judges, who were former National Gallery senior curator and Carleton University gallery director Diana Nemiroff, artist and Nuit Blanche Ottawa cofounder Megan Smith, and former Citizen arts critic Paul Gessell, who now writes for Ottawa magazine.
Elsewhere in the fundraiser there’s a wide variety of art. Anna Williams’s wildly erotic She Wolves III is a cast bronze sculpture of two lovers with the heads of wolves and the bodies of human females. Marcia Lea has a darkly funny ink drawing called Cold War Nurse. Dark humour is also seen in Andrew Fay’s painting Competition, with two young girls fighting bare-knuckle in a boxing ring. Or perhaps they’re dancing?
Danny Hussey has The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) With CP 107 Argus, a multi-media sculpture, etching and painting of an old-fashioned, life-sized TV and matching wall hanging. Michele Provost has a witty and untitled piece made of hat pins and threads, with the words “Untitled Contextual, Text-based Abstraction” weaved onto its surface.
All of the art at this event — and all the others like it, including the one I organize each year, Portraits of Bluesfest — is testament to the deep generosity of artists in the city. The average salaries for artists in Canada are notoriously low, yet time after time Ottawa artists make donations to public causes. If only some taxpayers would consider that generosity before they complained about “artist getting rich off of grants” in indignant letters to the editor or uninformed rants to radio call-in shows.
Well, one can wish.
Tickets for the OAG LeParty fundraiser are $85 and $150 and available through the gallery’s website, by phone (613 233 8699, ext. 224) or email (development@ottawaartgallery.ca). Details of what comes with each ticket are on the gallery’s website. A portion of the price is tax deductible.
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Jonathan Hobin’s The Ring (UV ink on aluminum, 50.5 x 50.5 cm), a Critics’ Choice winner from the Ottawa Art Gallery fundraising auction on May 30
