DIRECT MESSAGE: WHAT’S ON MY HIT LIST THIS FALL

Canadian art, Istanbul, TIFF, gala season and a few things I already want to wear.

I love September.

Maybe it’s years of being conditioned by back-to-school season, but September has always felt more like a reset to me than January.

Toronto comes back to life. Galleries reopen. TIFF takes over the city. The art calendar gets very full, very quickly. Everyone suddenly has somewhere to be.

This September is particularly packed for me. I’m working on TIFF, heading to Istanbul for Contemporary Istanbul, watching the Canadian gallery calendar and already thinking about what I want to wear through all of it.

Here’s what’s on my radar.

A LOT OF CANADIAN ART

In Toronto, I’m looking forward to Heather Goodchild’s Left At Etruria at Clint Roenisch, with new hooked textile works in wool and burlap; Wanda Koop’s Lumière at Blouin Division; and Michelle Bui’s Tangles at United Contemporary, where everyday materials, tarp, flower petals, plastic netting, are transformed into temporary assemblages and photographed as strange, beautiful still lifes that blur the line between beauty and destruction.

Outside Toronto, Caroline Monnet’s Kwìngwan: The Earth Trembles at Blouin Division in Montreal is high on my list. Monnet’s work around land, material, repetition and making feels very connected to what I’ve been thinking about in my own collection. I’m also watching Lise Latontaine at Pangée and Maria Hupfield at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.

In Vancouver, Equinox Gallery is showing an earlier side of Takao Tanabe in Spatial Abstractions, alongside new work by Maggee Day. And in Calgary, Esker Foundation has Brendan Fernandes, Arthur Jafa and Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca opening together this September.

There is a lot to see.

Looking first. Always.

A LITTLE OF ISTANBUL

I’m heading to Istanbul this month for Contemporary Istanbul, and my itinerary has gotten slightly out of control.

Which is exactly how I like it.

Of course I’m going to the fair, but I’m possibly more excited about everything happening around it.

I’ve booked private collection visits. I’m going to Dirimart for Ugo Rondinone, Istanbul Modern, and spending an afternoon walking Beyoğlu, Galata, Pera, Çukurcuma and Cihangir looking at galleries, architecture, antiques and collectible design.

I also want to understand the relationship between contemporary Turkish art and centuries of making: İznik ceramics, Ottoman decorative arts, textiles, carpets, metalwork and furniture. I’m even looking at doing the Grand Bazaar with a guide who can take me beyond shopping and into the history of the objects and crafts themselves.

Then I’m heading to Alaçatı for a few days on the Aegean, where I’ve already found another contemporary art centre I want to visit.

After Paris this summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I like experiencing a city this way.

The museum, the gallery, the restaurant, the antique shop, the clothes, the architecture. They don’t have to be separate experiences. The whole city can become the exhibition.

I’ll report back.

TIFF, BUT DIFFERENT

September in Toronto obviously means TIFF.

I’ve worked around the Festival for years, but this year DMPUBLIC is working on a very different part of it: TIFF: The Market’s Innovation Hub.

And it is very cool.

The Innovation Hub brings together eight immersive projects spanning VR, mixed reality and interactive storytelling. These are works you don’t necessarily sit down and “watch.” You enter them, move through them and participate in them.

One I’m particularly excited about is Mekwâc: “Now Is Good”, a 360-degree immersive experience by interdisciplinary Cree artist James Monkman and Quantum Wampum.

The Innovation Hub is open to Market delegates September 10–16, and the public gets access September 15 and 16.

I spend a lot of my working life thinking about how to get people excited about culture, so getting to work on something exploring what storytelling itself might look like next is pretty exciting.

Also, TIFF Toronto is just fun.

For ten days the restaurants are full, everyone is out, screenings and conversations are happening everywhere and the city gets a little more glamorous.

I’m ready.

GALA SEASON

And then TIFF ends and Toronto basically says: great, now put something on.

Fall art gala season is here.

Power Ball returns to The Power Plant on September 17 after a seven-year hiatus, which feels like a very good way to kick things off.

Then come the openings, dinners, benefits and parties that somehow turn September and October into one long cultural calendar.

I genuinely love gala season—not only because I love an excuse to get dressed, although I absolutely do.

I love the rooms it creates.Artists, collectors, curators, patrons, designers, fashion people and people who are simply curious about culture all end up together.

WHAT I WANT TO WEAR

I keep coming back to Vaquera.

Huge proportions. Things worn slightly wrong. Clothes that are serious about fashion without taking fashion too seriously. I’ve been having much more fun getting dressed lately, and I think this is why.

I’m less interested in looking perfectly “put together” and more interested in proportion, texture, an unexpected shape and a strong hat.

And then there’s adidas Originals × Simone Rocha.

Pearls. Bows. Sportswear. Ballerina references. adidas stripes filtered through Simone Rocha’s strange, romantic world. I’m particularly interested in the shoes. Obviously.

I love a collaboration where you can still clearly see both sides. Sport + romance. Hard + soft. Practical + completely unnecessary embellishment.

More of that, please.

AND THEN OCTOBER…

October’s art calendar might be even better.

At the Gardiner Museum, After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics opens October 8, bringing together PJ Anderson, Eddy Firmin, Manuel Mathieu and Sharon Norwood. Ceramics are the starting point, but the exhibition moves through sculpture, installation, painting, scent and interactive media to explore Caribbean Canadian identity, migration, ancestry and memory.

At the Bata Shoe Museum, Brilliant: The Art of Beaded Footwear Around the World opens October 22. More than 85 objects and 400 years of beadwork, looking at footwear through craft, labour, identity, status and material culture.

Very much my thing.

At The Power Plant, the entire Fall season opens October 24. I’m particularly interested in Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo’s Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, Xa’s first major solo exhibition in Ontario. The immersive installation brings together painting, murals, sound and a huge conch-shaped sculpture made from more than 600 brass bells, connecting Korean mythology, diasporic identity and marine ecology to the shores of Lake Ontario.

Also opening is Sharon Lockhart’s Fogo, made over four summers on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, and the moving-image group exhibition Owner of a Lonely Heart. A very good reason to spend an afternoon at The Power Plant this fall.

Toronto’s Union Station will also be showing Points of Departure, featuring work created through the inaugural cohort of The Globe and Mail Foundation’s Photojournalism Training and Mentorship Program, giving me another reason to discover spaces and artists I might not otherwise encounter.

And then we end the month with Art Toronto, October 29–November 1.

Art Toronto is always part fair, part reunion and part education for me. Galleries from across Canada in one room, artists I wasn’t looking for and, inevitably, something I start thinking about that I had absolutely no intention of collecting.

Which is usually when collecting gets interesting.

That’s what’s on my radar.

What’s on yours?