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Feature offers curated selection of art fair fare for high-end collectors

FEATURE: CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR at Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre from October 22-25. featureartfair.com


This smaller, more intimate art fair presented by Canadian org the Contemporary Art Galleries Association ran more or less concurrently with Art Toronto at the Convention Centre. In its second year in Toronto, it expanded to two floors of at the Tanenbaum Opera Centre, a congenial space in an old industrial building that houses offices and workshops of the Canadian Opera Company.

The 29 galleries, all of them Canadian, at Feature each spotlighted three artists with a few carefully curated works, avoiding the overload that sometimes happens at art fairs. The Montreal and Vancouver scenes were well represented, with one outpost from Winnipeg, and a few Toronto galleries went all out and rented booths both here and at Art Toronto.

A wall of Sara Angelucci’s spooky photographic transformation of Victorian carte-de-visite portraits into exotically feathered bird-human hybrids, which she showed at York University as part of Contact 2014, were a highlight at Stephen Bulger Gallery.

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The Feheley Fine Arts booth, with drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona and Saimaiyu Akesuk.

Learning about artists we’re unfamiliar with is one of the important functions of art fairs, and Winnipeg’s Lisa Kehler Art + Projects obliged: Shaun Morin effectively assembles awkward high-schooler’s-notebook-style doodles into wacky and appealing paintings that circumvent the annoying cuteness sometimes associated with this kind of art, and Kristin Nelson weaves convincingly realistic sheets of notebook paper out of cotton.

Speaking of convincing, James Carl, at Diaz Contemporary’s booth, showed what looked absolutely like an orange extension cord mounted on a pegboard, but the work was actually made out of clay. (In the past, Carl has immortalized VCR tapes and stryofoam takeout containers in marble.) It eclipsed Carl’s Henry Moore-ish sculpture made of basket-woven plastic blinds.

Both from Montreal, Galerie Roger Bellemare & Christian Lambert had some strange motorized, rotating sculptures by Pascal Dufaux that resembled models of some deformed solar system, and Galerie Donald Brown exhibited a fantastic, lumpy sewn sculpture on delicate feet by Jérôme Havre. I loved his installation of sewn sculptures at the Textile Museum in 2014, but I was unaware that he also does drawings and provocative, racially charged photographs, two which were on display at Donald Brown.

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Dean Baldwin’s The Hoard.

The fair also had a video lounge with a program of 10 artists, a funky DIY wooden exercise machine by VSVSVS and Dean Baldwin’s theatrical antique-shop-gone-wild installation The Hoard, made from props from the opera’s storerooms, where drinks were served after talks.

The work at Feature was decidedly cutting-edge and aimed at high-end collectors. Rumour was that attendance and sales have been down this year at both fairs, perhaps due to insecurity about the new government – even though the Liberals have promised increased support for the arts.

Feature is not for people looking for woodland landscapes for the living room, but for fans of Canadian contemporary, this year’s outing offered a well-displayed cross-section of what’s happening in gallery scenes around Canada. Even if you can’t afford to buy, it’s worth checking out next year.

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