Art Gallery of Windsor summer preview
Josh Kolm
Lance Writer
June 3, 2009
 Windsor Biennial: The aim of the Windsor Biennial program is reasonable enough: organize works from local artists created within the last two years in order to observe impulses in local contemporary art.
It ends up, however, being a lesson in talent used for a constructive purpose.
Be it paintings of guys lazing around in headbands and American Apparel briefs or a painfully ironic portrait of Tom Selleck, you wonder if these were meant to be released to the public or hung in a friend’s apartment for a good chuckle/conversation starter.
The work is well done, but seem silly next to the more ambitious pieces.
A strip of cast iron dozens of metres long is patterned in the staircase outside, and inside the walls, floors and furniture have been scuffed and mutated as part of a wonderfully borderless piece.
While the goal is to pinpoint regional trends, the collection ends up serving a different purpose.
You may not find unifying themes between different artists, but you do see that some have the direction to use their talent to create with purpose and impact.
The 2009 edition of the Windsor Biennial runs until July 5 on the second floor of the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Workers Leaving the Factory: AGW has constructed a strong perspective on working life in Workers Leaving The Factory.
The exhibit, curated in conjunction with the Media City festival, is mostly made up of video and film pieces.
Using Louis Lumière’s revolutionary short La Sortie des usines Lumière—from which the exhibit gets its name—as something of a starting point, names such as Nancy Davenport and Sharon Lockhart take the idea of working life and show what it has meant in the hundred years since Lumière shot 40 seconds of ladies leaving a blank stone factory.
While it may seem like a set-up to a grandfather-esque, back-in-my-day lecture about how hard work used to be valued (unlike today, gee-dee lazy kids) the exhibit is really a solidly centred display of recurring necessity that can always be found in workers.
The photographs and accompanying literature are interesting, but don’t go far beyond what we’ve all seen in a history textbook. The films are fascinating arranged like they are, in how the basic human elements are a persistent force as everything else may change.
The conditions and realities of working life, however they may change over time, have always been an inevitability to providing and achieving.
Workers Leaving The Factory runs until July 5 on the third floor of the Art Gallery of Windsor.
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