Remembering Avrom Isaacs
Event Avrom Isaacs Memorial Service: In a city that often seems more concerned with where we’re going than how we got here, this week’s memorial for Avrom Isaacs, one of the foundational builders of Toronto’s contemporary art scene, is a key opportunity to look back. Isaacs’ Yonge St. gallery, which enjoyed a heyday in the 1960s, was an incubator of what we now take to be the building blocks of Canadian contemporary art. He showed Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Greg Curnoe, Gathie Falk and Jack Chambers, to name but a few. He helped to build here what had generally been seen as more or less impossible: a thriving and current art scene that could participate in the global conversation. His powerful impact is reflected in the ongoing urge to remember: Isaacs died in January at 89, but his legacy is such that a funeral, not to mention several eulogizing articles in this paper and elsewhere, could never be enough. On Friday, Toronto’s art community gathers to officially honour one of their own, knowing what he built will stand long after all of us are gone.
Friday, 6 to 9 p.m., at Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave. Opening Vanessa Maltese, Birds flew down to peck the painted grapes: The poetic impulses of painter Maltese play out as much in the form her works take as the paint she applies to them. For this exhibition, the big, round panels on view connote myriad associations, ranging from ancient notions of cycle and continuity to the hectic tumble of street art. Maltese, wisely, refuses to be pinned down, pitching curves with a practice that always reads as part sculpture, part painting and part other (a recent show here featured slender, baton- like works studded with rubber washers and a careful lick of paint), and her furious restlessness never fails to beguile.
Opens Friday, 6 to 9 p.m., Cooper Cole Gallery,1134 Dupont St. Maltese also appears as part of All Right Already, a summer group show at Harbourfront Centre opening Friday. Vivian Maier, Meaning Without Context: When the hauntingly beautiful, silver-grey street photographs by an unknown, already deceased Chicago nanny appeared on Flickr in the fall of 2009, a few months after her death, a star was born and the unseen trove of images by the late Maier became the stuff of legend. Seven years later, the world is as entranced by her mystery as by her pictures, maintaining interest — five books and two films so far, and counting — at a brisk rate. The mystery, though, is beginning to unravel and, this week, a show of her images at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery takes place against the backdrop of biographical research that appears to reveal that Maier, unmarried and without children, wasn’t as alone in the world as once thought. Most importantly, a previously unknown relative in France may have some claim to royalties now being collected at a brisk pace every time a Maier print is sold. How that unfolds remains to be seen but, for now, enjoy the pictures for the moody joys that they are.
Opens Thursday, 5 to 8 p.m., Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1026 Queen St. W.