peak gallery; contemporary art; Zack Pospieszynski




		And, of course, there's all that art. All that other art. Stuff you've never seen before and stuff you have seen before that never looked as good as it does now, dressed up for these four gala days. The artists and the dealers who are participating in the fair have high hopes for its outstanding success -- a steadily evolving success. As Zack Pospieszynski, owner of Toronto's Peak Gallery, said to me a few days ago, "The Toronto International Art Fair should be as important to this country as hockey is!" And maybe it's gradually moving that way. GARY MICHAEL DAULT Full text see below

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR
A chance to feast your eyes and think about art
GARY MICHAEL DAULT

The Toronto International Art Fair launched its seventh annual edition with its gala, Opening Night Preview, last night at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and, now that the bubbles in the wine have subsided a bit, settles down today at noon for the first of four intense days of looking at art, buying art and increasingly -- for this is the way the fair is going -- thinking about art. Last year, more than 18,000 visitors pushed their way through the turnstiles -- an 8-per-cent increase in attendance over the year before. This year, even more will come.

Art Toronto 2006, to use its official name, offers the viewer an ever more dizzying array of 20th- and 21st-century artworks in all media as marshalled by more than 80 galleries from all across Canada and from around the world, 14 of which will be first-time participants from Britain, Germany, Belgium, France and Spain. For those for whom money is the bottom line, let it be said straightaway that there will be works for sale ranging in price from $300 to $3-million. Last year, art dealers represented at the fair reported an unprecedented growth in sales, especially -- and this is perhaps surprising -- of works costing more than $100,000. There was also, apparently, a big increase in the number of international artworks sold, as well as substantially more selling of edgy examples of art from younger, more obviously avant-garde artists.

For those for whom sales are still not quite as important to art as ideas are, the big fair is also offering opportunities aplenty to encounter art as a rich, stimulating and even potentially life-changing experience. To that end, the fair will be underpinned, to use its organizers' parlance, by "an impressive cultural program of speakers and special projects contributing to the dialogue on contemporary art."

For example, The News at Five, a popular series of rotating exhibitions curated by Canadian Art magazine editor Richard Rhodes, is back again for its fourth consecutive year. In this year's edition of his shows-within-the-show, Rhodes will be offering a multiphased curatorial experiment called Survey, Solo, Set Piece, which today offers a "survey" of the short films of photographer/filmmaker/theoretician Mark Lewis ("which," Rhodes says, "engage with the city of Toronto as a modern backdrop for micro-narrative events that reveal experiential patterns in a structured film framework"). Tomorrow, for the "solo" phase, Rhodes mounts a presentation by conceptual photographer Lisa Klapstock ("which presents the artist's ongoing investigation of urban space -- often its laneways and front yards --and its intersection with photographic seeing").

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The last of the three mini-exhibitions, Set Piece, which continues through Sunday and Monday, brings together the work of two very different artists -- Martin Bourdeau (a painter of landscape pastels from Quebec) and Victoria-based Robert Youds (a maker of three-dimensional abstract light boxes) -- in a dual exhibition called illuminates, in which their radically varying approaches to the use if light is contrasted and perhaps synthesized.

And there is a series of Power Talks all weekend, so called because they have been organized in partnership with the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. They offer lectures by a squad of internationally high-profile curators who will address the two interrelated themes of Institutional Futures for Contemporary Art and The Collector as Curator (for the times of the talks, phone 416-973-4949 or email thepowerplant@harbourfrontcentre.com).
What is also fun is the section of the fair called the Fresh Avant-Garde, which supports emerging artists. Here, 12 well-known galleries -- including Toronto's Peak Gallery, Birch Libralato, the Clint Roenisch Gallery, le Gallery, P/M Gallery and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects -- will offer work by hip art-comers at less than $5,000 a pop.

There's lots more. There's Solo Spaces (solo installations selected from proposals submitted by interested galleries), and -- new to the fair this year -- an ongoing, ad-hoc series of one-on-one, live interviews with artists, curators, critics and dealers called T at Three, conducted by popular art journalist Robert Enright. The series is presented by Winnipeg-based Border Crossings magazine, for which Enright serves as a senior contributing editor.
And, of course, there's all that art. All that other art. Stuff you've never seen before and stuff you have seen before that never looked as good as it does now, dressed up for these four gala days. The artists and the dealers who are participating in the fair have high hopes for its outstanding success -- a steadily evolving success.
As Zack Pospieszynski, owner of Toronto's Peak Gallery, said to me a few days ago, "The Toronto International Art Fair should be as important to this country as hockey is!" And maybe it's gradually moving that way.
TIAF runs to Nov. 13, today and tomorrow, noon to 8 p.m., Sunday and Monday, noon to 7 p.m. $16 a day, $60 for a four-day pass. The Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, Exhibit Hall E, 1-800-663-4173.