gallery | timotheories

Show Me Yours (Art Gallery of Alberta)

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Tim Kuefler

The last time I went to the art gallery, I made the mistake of enjoying myself.

This led me to the belief that I didn’t need to visit a gallery for a while, I mean, I’d done my part and contributed to the bigger picture of supporting the arts. I even posted some photos from my visit for social proof. But if I’m being really self-reflective, I should probably visit a local gallery at least once a week. Not because I want to support the institutionalization of art, God that would tragic. No, because it’s important to be inspired by artists and to be informed of what’s going on in that art world of ours. Also, doughnuts.

Metaphorical doughnuts of course. You see dear readers, the history of doughnuts is storied much like the story of art, all perspective and no objectivity. We accept the gallery system, much like we accept the donut, but no one person is capable of upending the mythos or claiming it’s birthright.

By the by, I’ve never liked the term art world, it’s a catch-all for everyone involved in producing, commissioning, presenting, preserving, promoting, chronicling, criticizing, and selling fine art, but what about the people consuming the art, eh? Eh, Pacha?

It’s important to acknowledge the people who spend the most time with the art, the audience. Fuck, they’re the ones that are going to spend the money to support the continued existence of the building(s).

For instance, I went down to the Art Gallery of Alberta last Sunday, January the 15th with my belle and took in a good mix of exhibitions. This is what we saw –

Hannah Doerksen: A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves Part mythology, part conspiracy, part vanity project… Doerksen ripped a page straight out of the 80’s and it’s eerie to view this alien display of ancient artifacts
Season to Season, Coast to Coast: A Celebration of the Canadian Landscape showcasing paintings from the 19th century to today, this exhibition features works across Canada and in all seasons. It’s a clever nod to the 150th anniversary of Canada and there are some great paintings there
David Altmejd: The Vessel essentially a piece on movement, featuring references to the act of creation, my favourite part about this piece was the accompanying gallery of works by other artists that drew connections between the themes in his work
The Edge: The Abstract and the Avant-Garde in Canada yet another exhibit focusing on Canadian paintings, this time the draw was the Avant-Garde and how it unfolded at home

But the gallery at large wasn’t exactly brimming with visitors.

There were maybe fifty people in the whole 85,000 sq ft space. I have this theory that part of the problem is parking, another is that ZINC, the on-site restaurant is over-priced and open at weird times, but mostly I think the largest problem is the $10 price tag for each entrance. If the art gallery were free to the public, like the EPL, then attendance would jump from 100 people a day to 300 people or more – and when the EPL was struggling with attendance people were hesitant to pay an annual $12 for a library card.

Overall I enjoyed my recent experience, and it reminded me to keep making art, because I can make better stuff than what it being touted there. And thus I set the stakes for competition.

But you might not be interested in viewing the gallery for the same reasons. Instead, you should set your own expectations and head over at your discretion. Located in the heart of downtown (2 Sir Winston Churchill Square), the AGA is open Tuesdays 11-5, Wednesday & Thursday 11-8, Friday 11-5, and Saturday & Sunday 10-5. The gallery is closed on Mondays and some holidays, but well worth the visit.

Tim!

Problems With Art Galleries That No One Talks About (Take Photos All The Time)

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

Now here’s a little story I’ve got to tell, about an artist blogger you know so well.
It started way back in history, with a museum, a guard, and NYC – you see?

And that dear readers, is how you make a transitional joke from one post into the next one. Please see previous post for reference if you want to get the joke, but I’m going to move along so that I don’t lose this post’s momentum.

Let’s visualize for a moment here.

This is a situation that seems to happen all the time across the world in various museums and art galleries alike. You are seeing a-one-of-kind piece of history for the first time (often a famous art-work) and you want to take a photo of it for posterity and so that you can remember what you saw when you return home. Let’s be honest here, you’re done have an eidetic memory and you definitely aren’t getting any younger.

So you snap a photo.

Kinda like I did when I was visiting the New York Metropolitan Museum for the first time back in 2006. Yes, this story is 10 years old, and for you recent graduates and Millennials on the edge of the age generation cut off, that time probably doesn’t mean much to you.

But for the sake of the story let’s pretend you all do understand me. So you snap a photo with your digital camera (not your phone), and get the warm and fuzzies almost immediately, because you now have proof that you’ve been in the presence of greatness, and your loved ones can be excited or feign excitement when they see you again, and you both show and tell.

And this was definitely part of my intent, but not the whole plan. The whole plan was to get some photos, so I could reference them in my own art later on, and because folio pictures from art books aren’t always the best quality. And at as much as 100 bucks a pop, the costs add up quickly.

But then I felt it, a warm hand on my left shoulder. Ever so slowly followed by a deep voice. “You can’t take photos in here son, read the sign.”

I had read the sign, I saw the sign, and it told me that these works were over a hundred years old and in a dark room to preserve their colour. And I thought I was being clever, because I know all about lightfastness in painting, and I made sure to turn my flash off on my camera (not my phone), because I was being respectful.

It didn’t matter though, I had been caught.

And the guilt quickly set in. But why should I feel this way, it was 2006 and people love to take photos, in fact, digital cameras were making it easier by the day for people everywhere to get into the photography hobby. So all I have are a couple of blurry memories of one room, and I can barely remember which artists I saw in there, so that sucks.

Luckily for us today though, because museums and galleries are loosening the reins on this particular restriction. Because people take photos everywhere, of anything, and all the time. We can thank smart phones for that phenomenon. It’s really difficult for a venue to justify taking away someones’s phone, because it’s not socially acceptable, and phones can save lives.

And from the perspective of the venue they have to decide if it’s more important to have guards paying attention to visitors touching antiquities or snapping photos. That and the challenge of social media. When organizations use social media to show work going up and down, can they really complain when people are using social media to generate traffic for them? The way we think about communication and conversation is changing, visual communication is becoming hot topic once again.

But of course the biggest challenge is the issue of copyright and fair use. I think that institutions need to protect themselves by asking for permission to take photos of work, but for the layman, taking photos for noncommercial use is a lot more permissible, which may be the first indicators of a culture shift.

As time changes peoples opinions about gender, sexuality, and race, and we become more compassionate, my theory is that we will also become better communicators because we need to and our ideas about images will shift too.

What do you think? Comments? Questions? Please leave some and also subscribe! See you tomorrow with a theory about a rabbit.

Tim!

Art House

timotheories presents Tim Kuefler (Allegory of the Collage series)

Gallery | Posted on March 17, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

Well, I have finally done it. My real “identity” is out there.

I had to do this because I promised you a peek into my art practice going forward, and today I deliver, dear readers.

Now is the time of great reckoning for I’m putting up personal elements of myself for display and inspection, and potentially for sale as well. It wasn’t an easy decision, but if I am going to further refine and evolve this project of curating, creating, and collaborating, I need to inject myself into the mix.

Let’s go over my back story a bit more so before I open up the floor to some of my art.

I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art & Design from the University of Alberta in the spring of 2007. My major focuses during that time were painting, drawing, and sculpture. Pretty classic examples of fine art education. I didn’t always believe this, but I am very fortunate to have a university education and to have studied with professors that had invested their own art practices in both the modernist and post-modernist eras of art making. I believe this because it informed my own decisions about art.

You see dear readers, by dealing with two specific schools of thought constantly it either fueled or resulted in a great split in my mind and own practice about the very nature of art making. I began to produce work that was either conceptual or technical, and sometimes both. It felt rather like a struggle with divorcing parents, and as a child (student), I couldn’t possibly know which parent was the right one to pick (school of thought), so I did what I’ve always done in my life, I chose to do something different.

I made art for myself and specifically to both impress and disrupt my professors. This was almost ten years ago. And so I share with you an ongoing series of work I’ve been creating since my senior year of university, which has inspired paintings and drawings, some of which I will share later on in coming months.

At one point I called the series below, the Allegory of The Cave, because I was self-prescribing philosophy when I first started to deal with my issues of doubt and frustration at institution and with routine. Something which comes naturally for a lot of artists. #realtalk

Almost ten years later, I have a blog that is gaining real traction thanks to readers like you, and I am working on community with artists of all walks of life. This blog serves as a platform for my vision of more accessible community across the arts, a soapbox for my theories and other artist theories on the arts, a theatre for collaboration, now a gallery for my own art, and eventually a lounge and studio for both art enthusiasts and artists. More on that last bit in future posts. Please hold me to it.

So, I recently decided to change the title of the series to the Allegory of the Collage, because This series represents the complex narrative I am weaving for myself and my local community, by using material from local publications, with local characters and events that don’t have a distinct meaning in the image just yet, but an abstract and big-picture feeling. And frankly, because it is succinct in it’s purpose and as a metaphor for timotheories itself – to create art by combining different materials together with a solid backing.

More importantly, creating art for the purpose of joining people and ideas together has always been important to me, and because I want art that looks good in my own home, I have an obligation to produce that which is interesting and entertaining. The discipline of writing 5 days a week, and producing a minimum of 2 videos a month is all related to the passion of creating to be at peace and to fulfil what often feels like a compulsion to share.

It is very important to me that the work a produce be authentic and related to myself and what I experience in this life, so I always make work which ties back to that creed. I learned that lesson from a professor in my second year of university, and whether he truly believes it or was just lecturing, it’s solid advice.

This series is made up of text and pictures that are taken from local events, people, and ideas, and is naturally authentic for those reasons.

In sharing my work on my blog, I want to challenge others to make their own work better, to become full-fledged entrepreneurs in a time when we are entering back into cottage industry practices because of the access the internet provides to us on a global scale; an era of modern craft. And so I developed this post, to begin the process of adding my gallery of artwork into the blog in some capacity, eventually with piece titles, prices and everything, but I felt a visual introduction and artist statement was a good start for now.

If you are interested in commissions, prices of the work I’ve included in today’s post, or if you want more information about the series, please leave some comments below or email me at timotheories@outlook.com.

And of course, please follow me to get even more awesome content in the future. I interview visual artists, designers, musicians, actors, and other creative types every month. I also write reviews on film and music as they relate to my theory of film as the great narrative of our culture, and I always have some wisdom, events, and theories to share. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Sunday with a new Cross Talk episode!

Tim!

I Am an Art-bitch (Latitude 53)

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Tim Kuefler

I’ve written about the band CSS once already in recent months, as an opener to a Melodic Monday entry on Grimes, in fact. But because this is a music reference, I’m okay to play like a broken record and write about this week’s Timely Thursday entry on timotheories with a repetitive start.

Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS) is a rock group from São Paulo, Brazil. The band came together in 2003, which was the year I entered into university for my undergrad BFA in art and design. For the next few years, I became accustomed to their new rave sound. This is back when there was a bar called HALO in the downtown core of Edmonton.

A long time ago, in an Edmonton far, far away, for you younger readers.

Anyways, CSS had this great little ditty called Art-bitch (chorus to follow), and when my graduating class was putting together their final submissions to the exhibition and supplemental catalogue, I witnessed several lyrics come together in the titles of some of my friends final pieces. Titles like Art-bitch, Art-lick, and Art-hole.

Lick lick lick my art-tit
Lick lick lick my art-tit
Suck suck suck my art-hole
Suck suck suck my art-hole

I ain’t no art-ist
I am an art-bitch
I sell my panties to the men i eat
I have no port-fo-lee-o
Cuz i only show
Where there’s free al-co-hol

This is significant because a band like CSS represents an aesthetic gone by, and fashion is often closely associated with visual arts. For instance, new rave took elements from both new wave and rave to produce a fashion look (and sound) that incorporates fluorescent clothing, and similar visual accessories, ie glowsticks. It even had a shelf life, much like fashion, because by the time it got really popular in mid-2008 it kinda just died right then and there. The use of synthetic music combined with apathy and anarchism made it perfect for artists to capitalize on.

And this is totally applicable to the memories I associate with a key group of friends at that time, many of whom continued on their art journey almost immediately after university and are now making waves all over the world, but in totally different ways then they did a decade ago, kinda.

One of those friends now works at Latitude 53, the same one who organizes Manhunt-Edmonton.

Incidentally, I went to see an art opening at his invitation back in January. It was for students of the UofA at Latitude 53 and called Bridging Encounters. This is where I heard Grimes new album blasting away, that’s right, Art Angels was playing in the background. Yes! I thought, this means that the revolving aesthetic is still alive and well.

Which is why I’ve spent all this back story building up to an event that is happening this saturday and which I’m pretty excited about. Latitude regularly hosts exhibitions of two kinds. In their main space artists and curators can submit proposals twice a year, which are reviewed and then selected by a board. A second option exists in the ProjEX Room, where artists and groups can submit work that is midway through it’s process; allowing the audience to contribute in the research and development.

That’s where the exhibition, The Menagerie, comes in. Edmonton visual artist Lisa Jones will be hosting an artist talk on her work this Saturday at 2PM at Latitude 53.

It’s exciting because she is a painter, who is exploring aspects of her physical self and identity through an analogy of the circus! It promises to be a good one! The Facebook event is here, and the Latitude 53 link is here. Address is 10242 106 St NW.

What do you think dear readers? Any fond memories of your art past? Any triggers? Please leave some comments and of course subscribe if you haven’t already to say updated on timely events in my journey and local events!

Tim!

What A Creep Show! (DeviantArt)

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Tim Kuefler

What the heck is a deviant? And why does it send a chill down your spine when Grandma calls that guy with a mustache across the street feeding the pigeons one?

I’ve often wondered this myself dear readers, and I’ve read definitions of the term of course, to properly understand what the word means, but do these people really exist? I feel compelled to wonder, and of course they do, because people are slowly coming to terms with the idea that normative behaviour isn’t as far reaching as we’ve been told by experts. but before I go any further, this description should get us all started on the same line of thought.

deviant

(ˈdiːvɪənt)

adj

1. (Sociology) deviating, as from what is considered acceptable behaviour

n

2. (Sociology) a person whose behaviour, esp sexual behaviour, deviates from what is considered to be acceptable

Okay, so if someone differs from a norm or a standard of society, then that makes them a deviant. But why do I have a strong suspicion that grandma is somewhat biased in her outlook?

Well to be quite blunt and methodical, my rationale for this is that while psychopaths and sociopaths are decently capable of managing their illness from an external viewers perspective, there are several factors to consider.

According to this article which discusses the findings of Dr. James Fallon (a neuroscientist of U of California who accidentally diagnosed himself with psychopathy), people can have the genetic markers of psychopathy but not be dangers to society, but that doesn’t mean they are criminals. And further to that point, it can be difficult to separate “discovery” of traits from “acknowledgement” of traits and realize that doesn’t make the person a threat.

So the assumption from grandma that someone is a threat because they have strange behaviour is problematic, and further to that point, the people who DO exhibit those tendencies or follow criminal behaviour don’t exhibit the behaviour in obvious ways in most cases.

But you knew that discussing sociology and criminal deviancy wasn’t the real intent of today’s Wisdom Wednesday post.

No I want to write about the implications of deviancy and share with you a resource that encourages that behaviour in the realm of the arts. And luckily for us, the name of said source is DeviantArt.

Deviant Art is the self-proclaimed “largest online art gallery and community,” and has been around since the beginning of the 21st century. Which is fairly poetic and appropriate, given the content it churns out.

Of course I am going to over the INs and OUTs of the community with you of course, but I think this tutorial video I’ve included below is a good place to look at before we continue. Mostly because it makes me laugh.

If I’m being perfectly frank, DeviantArt is not as obviously deviant from the typical fare as it sets out to be, but that doesn’t mean it is something to avoid. As you learn to navigate the forums, you will find some really amazing content and in many cases, it will spurn creative ideas.

Where you see the deviation will be in the communication of ideas.

Don’t be alarmed by this. Because it is an unmoderated forum, there will be offensive artwork, but mostly it comes in the form of posts and groups. The questionable content is what makes the website so unique in it’s identity.

This website has millions of images on it which is amazing in and of itself, but it also features videos and written content for artists pursuing those disciplines. It is effectively both a gallery and an art forum, a place for people to submit their artwork and comment on artwork with both text and pictures. Heck, if you want can record yourself making a drawing and submit the entire process to the website for critique.

I find it incredibly fascinating that users have the option to submit their works to be used however they personally deem appropriate. Which means that work could be copyright protected or distributed freely.

You have the option to view work that is trending, artwork that is currently featured in contests, whatever has been submitted in the past “instant”, participate in art challenges, submit work to particular boards, comment on blog posts or create your own virtual gallery. And you would be surprised by all of the different kinds of artwork available from pencil drawing to painting, from child friendly to mature themes, from realism to comic book fan art, there is something on DeviantArt for everyone.

I hope you enjoyed today’s resource folks, please leave some comments and share you experiences with the website or send me an email with a resource you want me to talk about next. I’m out of theories for now, till next time.

Tim!