Toronto Biennial of Art winding down

In addition to this being Black Friday, it is also the last weekend of the Toronto Biennial of Art.  I truly had meant to blog about this much sooner, but I guess better late than never.  (Actually, I had briefly considered signing up to volunteer for this, but life intervened as it always does.)

There has been a small exhibition of photos by Luis Jacob in Union Station since the beginning of the Biennial, but it took me a while to go out to some of the other exhibition sites (and I just never had any intention of going much beyond the urban core, like out to Mississauga).

Luis Jacob, Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall, 2017

I did make a bit of an effort to get out to MOCA to see the Age of You exhibition curated by Douglas Coupland.  This wasn't technically part of the Biennial (since it wasn't free), but it was reasonably thought provoking, even if the artistic element of the show was on the thin side.  This show seemed to be designed specifically for people with short attention spans, even more than Coupland's previous retrospective.)

This exhibit runs through Jan. 5, so there is still over a month left to see it.  One video installation by Shezad Dawood (actually three parts of the Leviathan series) were on view, though that stopped running in early November.  However, part 5 is still on view at the main Biennial Hub (259 Lakeshore Blvd East) through tomorrow.

It took me quite a while to get to the Biennial Hub, and in the end I tried to bike there.  I did make it in the end, but it felt incredibly dangerous, particularly with the heavy truck traffic on Lakeshore and the construction at the Biennial site itself!  I would not recommend trying to get their via bike (or really even by transit), but if you do attempt it, it is probably safer to stick to Queens Quay and the Martin Goodman Trail, and then cutting north on Bonnycastle.  Nonetheless, this felt like a terrible, terrible location for the hub of the Biennial.

I'll just post a few things I found of interest at the hub, and circle back around and caption them tonight.

Curtis Talwst Santiago, from the Infinity Series, 2012-2019

Shezad Dawood, The Trouble with Lichen 3, 2019

Luis Jacob, Regent Park Boulevard, 2018

Adrian Stimson, Guess who's coming to dinner?, 2019

At this point, I am debating whether to go out to Ontario Place to catch part of The Drowned World installation.  I probably will, since this is the last day (it doesn't run tomorrow), but I definitely find getting over there to be a chore.  I suppose I might take the GO Train one stop to Exhibition.  I already can't make the opening (J.G. Ballard reading from his novel The Drowned World) but I can make some of the intermediate and end sections if I decide I really want to make the effort.  I'll decide shortly.

Update: I did go to Ontario Place.  It was actually an enormous hassle, since the train doors didn't open at Exhibition!  And we were hijacked to Mimico and had to take an Uber to get back.  Believe me, I am going to take this up with many people at GO and Metrolinx on Monday!  I was in an incredibly foul mood by this point, but I decided to head over to Ontario Place anyway (across the seas of parking lots).  It was vaguely amusing to see the long lines to get into Cirque du Soleil's new show, Alegria, and then the lack of lines to get into the Cinesphere for The Drowned World.  That's not to say that there were not people there.  It was moderately full of people who had settled in for the long haul (5+ hours of various video pieces).  Unfortunately, I arrived just as a one-hour piece on saving seeds from ecological devastation started, and this just didn't interest me at all.  I think if I hadn't been waylaid by GO, it would have been more to my taste, and the pieces in the previous half hour looked a bit more interesting.  However, it was pretty clear that this was just not my day, so I turned around and left.  I actually would have taken the streetcar back, but I just missed one, and it was only a 4 minute wait for the next GO train, which did open its doors at Union Station at least.  I will ask the organizers if any of the video from The Drowned World will go on-line or if a DVD will be produced, but the likely answer is no.  So I have to say the way the Biennial wound down for me was fairly disappointing, and I probably won't fondly remember this event, even with the passage of time.  C'est la vie.