BURNAWAY Magazine presents ROAD TRIP, a summer photo series covering critics Lilly Lampe’s and Alex Robins’s path as they make a circuitous journey from Atlanta to Brooklyn. Below find highlights from their visit to Detroit!
We spent a memorable few days in Toronto enjoying art and Chinese food. We stayed at a great little bed and breakfast right between the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Chinatown. Between our arrival and departure we didn’t drive once, which was a relief after the previous weeks.
We got into town in time for dinner, and walked over to Mother’s Dumplings before catching a show at Second City. Second City is an improv comedy troupe whose alumni include Mike Myers, John Belushi, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey, to name a few. No pictures allowed, but it was a good time.
On our way home we stopped at Smoke’s Poutine. Poutine is a Canadian dish featuring french fries, gravy, cheese curds, and whatever else you’d like to pile on. As we can attest, it’s superb late-night food.
The next day we walked to The Power Plant, a public (that’s nonprofit to us non-Canadians) contemporary art gallery known for intellectually rigorous exhibitions.
We spent some time in the exhibitions, particularly Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art.
Afterwards, we headed over the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).
The AGO has the largest public collection of works by Henry Moore and a massive photography collection, as well as notable Canadian, European, and Contemporary artworks. We were lucky enough to see Lost in the Memory, an exhibition of works by artist-duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. If you were at MoMA PS1 last year, you may have seen Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, 2001, which features forty speakers each broadcasting an individual singing a Sacred Choral piece by Thomas Tallis. The effect is spellbinding.
The AGO cleverly chose to install The Forty Part Motet in their Henry Moore Sculpture Center, giving new life to the bronzes and adding to the sense of being enveloped.
The top floor of the Gehry wing was devoted to the Cardiff-Miller exhibition. Each piece had a different focus; some were interactive sound, others–like the recreation of a thunderstorm in Japan–set a scene, others seemed to toe the line between free-form and character-driven. In short, highly experimental work and intriguing on many levels.
After wearing ourselves out at the museum, we returned to Chinatown for dinner at the House of Gourmet.
The next day we left Canada, but not before one last donut stop at Glory Hole, a dubiously-named establishment that has shot to the top of our list of favorite donut shops.
On our way out of Canada, we stopped by Niagara Falls. Sorry America, but Canada has the better view.
Next up: our final road trip post, featuring Buffalo, NY and Mill Run, PA.
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