Milk Truck Delivery #5 JULY 🥛 🛻
an assortment of interesting (in my opinion) art.
After six beautiful months in Paris, my first semester has wrapped up and Starling and I have returned to Victoria, B.C. It’s nice to be home, it’s nice to hop in the Pacific Ocean and let the body feel the open space around it - I love it here. Paris has been challenging at times but has pushed me to get way outside of my comfort zone - to speak in a tongue I haven’t spoken since I left the French immersion program in grade six has definitely been the most challenging aspect. It can wear on you. Every time you leave the apartment you open yourself up to completely botch a sentence or miscommunicate something. People are typically pretty friendly - any time I’ve asked for directions, they provide them, which is sweet but the directions sometimes fly completely over my head and I walk off in the wrong direction and open my phone to ask my little friend Google Maps who is fluent in every language. Being in Paris and trying to learn a new language/get accustomed to a different way of life requires a lot of trial and error. It reminds of skateboarding - an obsession born in falling hundreds or thousands of times in order to land one trick - there is no negative connotation to the attempts; you’re always getting one step closer to figuring it out. I feel that although frustrating at times, learning to live in a new system is actually pretty similar because I really want to figure it out.
That’s my rant and I’m looking forward to a summer of checking out the scene in Victoria!
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Buyer/Searcher Beware: Like milk - these posts can spoil. I’ll try to stay up to date so these works stay fresh!
Whatever the case, or use case that this newsletter might hold, I can only hope that it helps expand your knowledge and love of art.
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🎉 🎊 🙌 50 Subscribers 🎉 🎊 🙌 Wow. Big! Day!
My hope is to one day be an art advisor, pairing people with art and more poetically/romantically, art with people. Spending hours talking to people about art, looking at art, and diving deep into different nooks and crannies of the internet to learn as much as possible really gets me excited… When I learned that there was a job out there that allows, nay, encourages acting as an interlocutor between art lovers, galleries, or auctions, I went so far as to quit my job!
Before I set up an advisory, I need to get some practice. So, as one of my 50 first Milk Truck subscribers, I’d like to offer my services for free to anyone interested.
If you have some empty wall space you’re looking to fill, I would love to help you find a (this offer is just for one piece per person who takes me up on this) piece to fill that empty space.
All I need is the dimensions and a photo of the space you’re looking to fill, and the price range. There is no budget too small (or too big - looks like Monet is back on the menu). Beyond that, you can supply me with as much or as little info as you’d like, on your taste, preferred style, and dreams.
Within two weeks, I’ll provide you with the following:
A list of artists who align with what makes your heart swoon.
Research into the pieces available by the artist
Historical prices of the artist’s works (in case this is something you want to pass down to your children and then to their children so they can sell it and pay for flying cars and smell-o-vision)
Help to complete the purchase if you decide the piece is right for you; finding any associated literature or documents to contribute to the piece’s provenance
I’m not charging a cent for the blood, sweat, and tears that will surely go into this project, rather, I just want to help one person, or multiple people find a piece of art they love and see it hanging on their wall.
Back to why all 50 of us are here!
To learn about art.
*disclaimer - this month has been a lot of moving around and I haven’t had a lot of time to sift through auctions or to dive into what is hot on the block. I have had time to check out some galleries and see some really amazing stuff so this will be more of a recap*
Starling and I were visiting some family on the East Coast of Canada (Atlantic Ocean side) in Halifax. We had a few days together with my sister, brother-in-law, and their two-year-old, and outside of multiple trips to the tennis courts which are right beside a solid playground for the younglings, they budgeted a day to check out the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) and go to Value Village to scratch our thrifting itch. We made it to the AGNS and immediately I was shocked by how much my two-year-old nephew loved art. He was verbally in awe of every piece around him; screaming and climbing on top of the benches onto his belly (probably to get a better vantage of the large Kent Monkman piece that stood before him). Eventually, he had to leave as he could not contain his excitement as he moved into the permanent collection housing the Alex Colville’s. I don’t blame him, honestly, imagine being surrounded by all of these new colours and shapes - that should be fun, right? cause for celebration - but everyone around you is whispering as if they’re telling each other secrets. My god that would be a confusing place as a toddler.
Counterclockwise from top left: Kent Monkman Miss Chief’s Wet Dream 2018 | John Greer, Maquette for Origins 1994 | Alex Colville Ocean Limited 1962 |Tom Forrestall Untitled late 1960s early 1970s | Mary Pratt Sunday Dinner 1996 | Norval Morrisseau Me’mna’q weskwijinuik mijua’ji’j (Embryo) (mid-1980s?) | Artist: Briere, piece inspired by the works of Daphne Odjig from the ArtSmarts Project with We’koqma’q Mikmaw School in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Above are some shots I took from the Maud Lewis exhibition. An interesting retrospective that was only supposed to run from 2022-2023 but was luckily still kicking midway through 2024! My only exposure to Lewis’s work has been through books and the internet as well as a trip to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia (where Lewis lived quite near to the town of Digby) where I spent the night to catch a ferry to Maine the next morning. Although I didn’t see any of Lewis’s works on that trip, I did see some signage indicating that she had lived pretty close to there (good enough for a claim to fame!) I pondered the obscurity of the town and the beautiful work she produced not far from where I chowed down on a lobster and some “steamers”. I was quite floored to see Lewis’s actual house that she spent her life painting in, placed in the middle of the exhibition. It reminded me of Benjamin Vautier’s Le Magasin de Ben (1958-1973) a seminal example of the Fluxus movement which is housed at the Pompidou in Paris. I doubt Lewis envisioned her house making it into an art gallery and becoming the art itself, but it’s interesting to see how both started as something that was not intended to be art and became the main attraction. The other aspect I find beautiful about both of these installations is how both artists created a non-art piece into an art piece through their desire and need to create, to change the feel and look of a place to better suit their form of self-expression. Maud Lewis spent her life in the one-bedroom house where she painted cheery scenes of unique to Atlantic Canada; with a disability developed in her youth - she resorted to selling her works with the help of her husband and artistic contributor, Everett Lewis where they lived in relative poverty. It wasn’t until the 1960s that her work started to gain natural relevance before she died in 1970. An aspect of taking a peek into Lewis’s life was how she transformed her physical existence into a work of art. If you look at the above photos of the interior of her house, it’s quite a gloomy prospect if you take away all the life she added to it through her paintings. Her world from the outside must have been perceived one way and the layers of paint that she added must have created an entirely unique experience for her
I can’t remember which newsletter in my inbox was writing about Shelley Niro’s retrospective 500 Year Itch at the National Gallery of Canada but it caught my eye and the name “Niro” found a soft spot somewhere in my psyche. Niro who was born in Niagara Falls, NY and grew up on the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, near Brantford, Ontario uses multimedia, beadwork, sculpting, and photography amongst other things to investigate various stereotypes of her Indigenous experience. Through her films, photography, and paintings, Niro employes a sometimes satirical undertone throughout some of her works to explore themes of cultural appropriation, gender inequality, as well as loss and oppression. Niro also puts herself in the middle of a lot of her photographic projects - acting as the model in a Cindy Sherman-esque capacity creating an an approachable or familiar face narrating these important themes. One of her works Sleeping or Sleeping Warrior Series (2012) features a young man from the Six Nations posed on a chaise-lounge, sleeping with what we are to interpret as his dream playing out around him. His clothes or costumes change, how you’d slide the pieces of a childsbook over a scene to change an element of it (I can’t remember the name for those books but they had the tabs you’d push and pull) from traditional to modern business attire. The ideas of heritage, present, and future or an idealized state all jump out from these images. An idea of memory or connection to the land which has been slowly disappearing throughout time by way of exploitation of both people and nature are all present, as well. Something about the composition of these works pulls at a certain nostalgia. Whether the exposure of the images harkens back to the quality of picture you’d get on an early 90s TV set; there is something that they are saying about the progression through time that I connect with. I’m incredibly happy to have found Shelley Niro’s work and to discover more of it.
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