Museum of the Moving Image Chief Curator David Schwartz, left, in conversation with Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.
David Cronenberg in Conversation Opens Three-Week Retrospective
On a snowy Saturday in January, the Canadian Consulate of Canada in New York helped kick off a three-week Museum of the Moving Image (MMI) retrospective celebrating the films of Canadian director David Cronenberg with a public conversation between the filmmaker and the museum’s Chief Curator, David Schwartz.
Featuring a lively, wide-ranging conversation brimming with insights and anecdotes, and highlighted by several film clips selected from throughout Mr. Cronenberg’s career, the sold-out, two-hour conversation was capped with an audience Q&A.
From his early horror movies – with their exploding heads, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects – to his latest, A Dangerous Method, a deceptively classical period film about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the birth of psychoanalysis, Mr. Cronenberg has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh.
“I think of human beings as a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical, and both of these things have their say at every moment we’re alive,” Mr. Cronenberg said. “My films are some kind of strange metaphysical passion play.”
He has moved deftly between genre and arthouse filmmaking, between original screenplays and literary adaptations, with work that is thematically consistent and marked by a rigorous intelligence, a keen sense of humor, and a fearless engagement with the nature of human existence. That intelligence, humor, and engagement was on full display during the MMI “conversation.”
The Museum of the Moving Image David Cronenberg retrospective runs through February 12.
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King Kong Call, 1995, one of Bruce McCall’s best known works, is on display as part of McCallapalooza!.
McCallapalooza! Celebrating Bruce McCall at Canada’s Official Residence in New York
A star-studded array of media personalities and special guests turned out for the opening of McCallapalooza! Celebrating Bruce McCall, a private exhibition and reception hosted by John Prato, the Consul General of Canada in New York, and honoring Canadian artist and prolific New Yorker contributor Bruce McCall.
McCallapalooza!’s 16 original “McCalls” – a collection of paintings that has, until now, never been seen together – were hung in two rooms at Canada’s Official Residence, giving the spaces a colorful new backdrop. Mr. McCall’s best-known work draws on the big-shouldered hubris of the middle 1920s and the early 1950s to create a future paradise where the skies are filled with zeppelins and every car has wings, and he remains a compellingly wry observer of contemporary life.
Left to right: Author Calvin Trillin, Consul General John Prato, and 60 Minutes mainstay Morley Safer, with wife Jean Fearer. Two of the exhibited works by Bruce McCall can be seen in the background.
Although born and raised in Simcoe, Ontario, the artist is also a real New Yorker’s New Yorker. And despite the fact that his best known work in that magazine is visual, he has become one of that great publication’s key “voices” over the past several decades. Guests at McCallapalooza! were reminded yet again that the artist’s unique take on modern life, especially life in New York, has become iconic in this country, a development that in its own way underlines the strong ties between Canada and the US.
Despite his many decades as a US resident, Mr. McCall still clings to his maple roots (he remains a citizen of Canada). As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of Canada, but you can’t take the McCall out of McCallapalooza!
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Nathalie de la Fontaine in her Upper West Side restaurant, Machiavelli.
Machiavelli’s Ends Justify its Theme
In Machiavelli, her provocatively named new restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, Canadian Nathalie de la Fontaine invites guests to step into a veritable work of art, where just about everything from floor to the ceiling is hand-made. With murals inspired by the Renaissance painting of the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello and live chamber music at lunch and dinner, Machiavelli serves up a Northern Italian menu of authentic dishes, featuring hand-made pasta.
The trattoria’s renowned lasagna – typical of the Emilia Romagna region – is layered with béchamel as well as ragu. Meat is grilled in a brick oven, which also fires a wide assortment of pizza that is made in the traditional Italian method. Lamb chops are a particular favorite on the current winter menu, and the wine list features an edited selection of 31 French and Italian reds and whites.
With ambitions of becoming a true neighborhood restaurant, Machiavelli is open from 7AM to 2AM daily, with breakfast served until 11:30 am, lunch until 4:30 pm, and dinner until midnight (the bar is open until 2 am).
Finally, while the flavor is European, the craftsmanship is all la belle province. A native of Longueuil in Quebec, Ms. De la Fontaine is a long-time New York resident who enlisted the skills of talented artisans from her home province, including artists, ceramists, woodworkers, a sculptor, and a blacksmith to create Machiavelli, which is currently showing up at yelp.com with an impressive four-out-of-five-star rating, based on 22 reviews.
Trattoria Machiavelli, 519 Columbus Avenue (at the corner of West 85th Street), 212-724-2658.
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Michael Snow’s The Viewing of Six New Works (installation view), 2012, seven looped video projections, silent Touch design recording technology by Greg Hermanovic.
Snow Adds to Winter in Manhattan
Canadian Michael Snow, is an extraordinary, multidisciplinary artist, who is considered among Canada’s most important. He has participated in myriad exhibitions exploring images in the modern world. Among them: Passages de l’image at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Projections, les transports de l’image, and the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon.
And this winter, works by the 2007 Order of Canada recipient are on view in The Viewing of Six New Works, a new seven-part projection, at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery. The installation draws on Snow’s oeuvre to examine the nature of perception and the physical relationship of the artwork to the viewer. His light projections simulate the varying ways a person might look at a rectangular wall-mounted artwork by digitally mimicking and “essentializing” the movement of the eyes. The gestures of viewing are revealed as the shifting focus of the spectator’s gaze becomes fleetingly tangible and physically manifested through the piece.
“The work is an attempt to present only the movements of perception, not perception itself,” explains Snow, “the art of looking at art.”
The exhibition will be on view through February 12.
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