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Spring 2003
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Shotgun Reviews
50 short reviews of art exhibitions and things that happened recently. (September 2002 to March 2003)
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* All locations are in the Toronto area unless indicated otherwise
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(Allyson Mitchell and Lex Vaughn)
Flea Market Freak Out
1080BUS Gallery
Oct 17-Nov 3, 2002
Political activism can disappoint when merely masquerading as visual art. Not so with the deeply loaded images in this show. Ideas are delivered with a powerful, lingering beauty. "Sad Toy Fortunes" are hard plastic toys with text that says things like, "I will poke your eye out," "My paint is made of lead," and "No one has ever played with me." "Jacko Eyewear" is a series of hand-painted MJ™ sunglasses depicting a variety of Michael Jacksons; e.g. Pepsi-commercial Jackson, and hair-on-fire Jacko (with a warm smile and a big thumbs up). Bucky & Fluff's Make Crafts Not War zine commands us to "Go Decorate!" and the "Scarred-for-Life Sexy Dolls" are stuffed animals with frozen-smile plastic doll faces attached. These were hung like a scary mobile over a baby crib. For audio accompaniment, Kitty Wells croons country classics followed by Faron Young's "If You Ain't Lovin', You Ain't Livin'." Clearly, Bucky & Fluff have a lot of love to give.
Pete Dako
image: Allyson Mitchell and Lex Vaughn Flea Market Freak Out, 2002. Courtesy: 1080BUS Gallery
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The Films of Jack Chambers
Art Gallery of Ontario
Oct 23 & 30, 2002
With its tight editing and conceptual structure Mosaic (1966) may be Jack Chambers' most accomplished work, but its themes only begin to display his propensity to the world of 1960s London, Ont. In the film, flower petals flow between the perfection of motherhood and the disintegration toward death. In Hybrid (1967) Chambers digs far below the daily newscasts on the Vietnam War by juxtaposing photos of monstrous civilian casualties with a scene of a gardener cross-pollinating a rose bush in a local plant nursery. His full-length masterpiece, The Hart of London (1970), combines archival footage of a hapless deer lost in the backyards of London and shot by authorities, together with another hapless animal (a lamb) slaughtered by a man in a leather apron. These creatures are a stand-in for all the pitiable humans remaining alive throughout the rest of the film.
Linda Feesey
image: Jack Chambers The Hart of London (film still), 1970. Courtesy: Film Reference Library Toronto
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Nobot
BUSgallery
Nov 7-Dec 1, 2002
I am always happy to revisit Tanya Read's upright cat-like character Mr. Nobody. His sad-sack charm has surprising endurance, and despite the fact that he's been around forever, I am always up for more. So when I stuck my head into the back room at BUS, I was content with my expectations of finding Read's usual quirky animation and charismatic drawings of Mr. Nobody. Surprise! I literally gasped with awe at the gigantic floor-to-ceiling, duct taped, robotic, Sphinx-like sculpture that over-filled the space and gazed down upon me with a blank-yet-fearsome air. Behold, there is a new guy in town, and his name is Mr. Nobot. Shudder before him and be amazed.
Sally McKay
image: Tanya Read Nobot, 2002. Courtesy: the artist
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Studio open house with twenty-five artists
1400 Dupont St.
Nov 8-10, 2002
Collage can either look really cool or like something thrown together by an eight year old. Simon Dragland and Rob Waters, fortunately, do better than the average preteen. Dragland's assemblages are bright, exotic, and colourful. No matter how long you look, something else pops out at you, which is the beauty of collage when it's done well. Waters' collages are more like abstract paintings. There are no concrete images or words, but rather layers of textures and patterns. Instead of jumping over the surface of the work, your eyes are drawn deeper into them. These two artists, as well as Maria Gabankova--who paints richly coloured portraits divided into three panels, focusing on the head, hands, and feet--had the most visually stimulating work on display at this studio open house. It felt like I was poking around the Tacheles Art Center in Berlin, but without the risk of crumbling concrete falling on my head.
Bill Clarke
image: Simon Dragland and Rob Waters Split the Difference, 2002. Courtesy: Neubacher Gallery
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Weekend
Katharine Mulherin Gallery
Nov 8-Dec 1, 2002
Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Weekend tells the story of a nasty bourgeois couple who set out for a peaceful country drive and end up experiencing carnage, rape, and murder. It's also an allegory for the political situation in France at the time. I find Godard migraine inducing. Sure, his films are "important," but aside from watching Anna Karina shimmy to loud rock music in Vivre Sa Vie, they're a chore to sit through. This exhibit did away with Godard's seemingly high minded, but ultimately vague, political/arty ideas and focused on his most accessible aspects--sex and violence! Jason Van Horne's super miniature models of bloodied figurines crawling away from car crashes were also selling like crazy, so I'm obviously not alone in my appreciation of the morbid.
Bill Clarke
image: Jason Van Horne, detail of a miniature model, untitled, 2002. Courtesy: Katharine Mulherin Gallery
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Katharine Mulherin Gallery
Nov 8-Dec 1, 2002
At first glance, Sara MacCulloch's deceptively simple landscapes reminded me of paint-by-numbers or computer-enhanced photographs made to appear like artistic watercolours. Over time, these passive works revealed skill and intelligence, and had more painterly muscle than most abstractions seen in galleries on Spadina or Yorkville. It was refreshing, for a change, to see non-trendy, deft, and sincere art in comparison to the hip, ironic, daft, post-cultural, stuff that usually populates Queen West galleries.
Patrick DeCoste
image: Sara MacCulloch Road, 2002. Courtesy: Katharine Mulherin Gallery
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Serpentine Gallery
London UK
Nov 12, 2002-Jan 26, 2003
Picture this: You walk into Takashi Murakami's exhibition and it's everything you've seen in magazines and more. Flowers explode and explosions mushroom and mushrooms flower. You step forward to admire the perfect surfaces and tiny smiling faces appear. You step back to take in the giant monsters and sculptures pop up in the foreground. Overwhelmed and dazzled, you read the wall text with the hope of understanding what's going on. It's everything you've read in magazines and less. The catalogue mentions Warhol's Factory and manga and does its best to sound respectably dull. So you leave the gallery frustrated and grumbling, stumbling through the well-groomed gardens and past the Albert Memorial (an ode to Prince Albert who appears as a gilded gothic prick). You put your headphones on when you reach the edge of the park and as Al Green sings "All this love inside me/I believe there's going to be an explosion" you fail to notice the shiny Red Routemaster bus hurtling towards you. Lying in the road looking up at the cartoon stars, things begin to make sense.
Mark Beldan
image: Takashi Murakami If only I could do this, if only I could do that, 2002. Limited edition print available from www.serpentinegallery.org
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Roanoke Clayscapes
Bracket Gallery
Nov 14, 2002-Jan 4, 2003
Ron Taggart's ceramic dioramas are action packed. They are miniature worlds bulging violently within circular slab walls. Taggart makes three-sided bowls out of clay, big enough to just barely fit inside a standard-size kiln. The insides are jammed full of complex detail and disturbing visions made of tiny clay figures, buildings, fires, airplanes, trees, cliffs, planets, and boiling seas. The most radical one depicts the battle at Iwo Jima. Two-inch soldiers scale a hill of death, covered in tiny corpses, explosions, and blood, and guts. The sea is full of battleships, the sun a thickly glazed disk of cool white that glares with dispassion upon the gory scene below. Taggart is a man who knows his craft inside and out, taking technical risks and making bold decisions to startling effect. You ain't seen nothing like it made of clay.
Sally McKay
image: Ron Taggart Iwo Jima (detail), 2002. Photo: Clint Mclean, courtesy: Bracket Gallery
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Musee du Quebec
Nov 14, 2002-Jan 12, 2003
Online at www.6168.org
In this web-based film, Peter Horvath presents forty-eight hours (or so) of contemporary life as seen through the eyes of the artist, especially when they are rolling around in REM sleep. The project is a QuickTime extravaganza of pop-up windows. Horvath scrolls through a shopping list of daily events that are the joy and frustration of urban life: fresh fruit for breakfast, riding around on a bike with an iPod, going to openings and clubs ... but finally it's all too much! The noise and Koyaanisqatsi -like crowds soon take their toll. Retinal overload, cascading streams of data and competing voices aaaaaaahh! Night arrives and the dreamalogue begins: dark clouds, gothic creatures, eastern European stuff. Eventually the past takes over and several screens of super-8 nostalgia fill his head: adults looking more dapper than they do now, parents smoking beside their kids and no-one is wigging out, two guys horsing around in the ocean wearing full-body bathing suits. He wakes up again, a bit of CBC and spirulina and he's back out there. But then it's all too much. Night flaps its wings and the brooding returns. The film begins with the phrase "May I Die Of Happiness." It ends with "Your Dreams Are Not My Dreams," and the image of what looks like a mushroom cloud. These are perhaps the two emotional walls that Horvath is referring to in his title Either Side Of An Empty Room. The project seems to propose that life is a bipolar trek from ecstasy to fear and back again, and that we vacillate between having our nerves frayed daily and our mind defragged nightly.
Clint Roenisch
image: Peter Horvath, web-based film still from Either Side Of An Empty Room, 2003
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Zsa Zsa Gallery
Nov 16-30, 2002
If you flung yourself on the couch and free-associated in images rather than words, the result might be something like Ian Fraser's lushly perverse magical paintings. Girls catch fire, cats in tutus dance a mysterious feline ritual over the body of a dead cat, women with handguns take deadly aim at someone off canvas, and men with multiple ejaculating cocks parade across the walls like uncensored scenes from an unconscious movie. Fraser is clearly fascinated with the expulsion of bodily wastes: people and animals pee, shit, vomit, fart, spit and ejaculate, polluting the environment around them with an almost defiant aggression and yet, at the same time, they are caught in moments of terrifying vulnerability. My personal favourites: "Red Shooter," in which a woman shoots a hail of rich black bullets across a red field, and "Red Dog," possibly Fraser's tip of the hat to Futurist Giacomo Balla's "Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash." But Fraser's many-footed dachshund is off the leash and heading for some unsupervised pleasure.
Lynne Fernie
image: Ian Fraser Red Dog, 2002. Courtesy: the artist
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