On Now >> Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel @ Olga Korper Gallery
by Heather White
Words are tricky to do originally. They’re a public resource. Like celebrities, they belong to the world. Like cities, they’re an infrastructure allowing hordes of people to co-exist. With words, myriad strangers are perpetually explaining, questioning, or fighting; reading novels, directions, advertisements; writing lists, letters, texts; hearing songs, secrets, broadcasts. At the level of material, writers are like graffiti artists (who, in fact, call themselves writers, because they express themselves through written language). They transform something that was never theirs, and the component parts are always getting reclaimed.
On Now >> Red Sky at Night @ Mercer Union
by Heather White
I love the term ‘close’ for the kind of weather Toronto’s having these days. It’s been extremely humid here, and ‘close’ gets at how that feels: like the very atmosphere has encroached as a tangible presence. Hovering doggedly all day. That you have to keep moving through to get to anything else. This weather makes visceral the way weather always is, fundamentally: inescapable, intimate. Close. We experience it on a basic and immediate level.
On Now: Concrete Island @ Jessica Bradley Projects
by Heather White
Concrete Island – Jed Lind’s current exhibit, at Jessica Bradley Projects – is named for a J.G. Ballard novel that chronicles a man stranded with his Jaguar on an L.A. traffic island, forced to take the decadent vehicle apart to fashion tools to survive. The novel’s urban and automative themes inform the show: sculptures are cast from car parts; photographic collages mix mechanical motifs with imagery of exotic flora that’s overtaken L.A. infrastructure.
On Now >> Road Shots @ O’Born Contemporary
by Heather White
The first image of Road Shots is framed by two pairs of men’s turned backs. Their anonymous forms usher us into the show: a series of altered photographs that is largely about human legacy and that only uses figures here, as introduction. We’re led in and then left alone with the remaining scenes.
Noticed >> Fuzzy Figures
by Heather White
There’s something uncannily similar in these human-shaped, beastly-textured forms, which all appeared (two, in fact, are still appearing) on the walls of Toronto galleries in recent months. Doubtless, the visual resonance has something important to say about the zeitgeist: all this concealing must reveal something of the way we feel about bodies – and how contemporary artists feel about depicting them.
On Now >> God Loves Japan @ MOCCA
by Heather White
Daisuke Takeya’s new installation, God Loves Japan, reaches to MoCCA’s ceiling: the approximate height, in some residential areas, of the tsunami that dominoed the devastation of the artist’s country of birth last spring. The catastrophic connotation of the scale is deliberate but inexact (the average crest was actually much taller); Takeya is not so didactic. The installation is not so sinister. It is not sublime; it doesn’t overwhelm with horror. Instead, it takes the shape of a devastating force, and makes it accessible.
On Now >> The Tie-Break @ Neubacher Schor Contemporary
by Heather White
The Tie-Break is incredible. The main axis of the exhibit, now at Neubacher Shor Contemporary, is a video work comprising footage from Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen’s October 2011 Nuit Blanche performance of the same name. That night, for twelve hours, the duo posed as rivals, try and trying again to recreate the famous 1980 tennis match of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe — stroke for stroke, outburst for outburst.
On Now >> Bogdan Luca @ LE Gallery
by Heather White
From the edge of one of Bogdan Luca’s new paintings, it’s hard to say where you are. Structures intersect impossibly and figures group incongruously, like in dreams. But the brushstrokes are too angular and the compositions too stringent for dreamscape.
Pondered >> Deer Art
by Heather White
Two fake deer watched Mike Hansen interview Robert Hengeveld at the opening of the artist’s Natural Revision. One was perched atop a cliff of cardboard, wood, and astroturf; the other was nestled further down the synthetic escarpment that Hengeveld has installed at Mercer Union. Both were framed by artificial evergreens; a tinsel-based waterfall ran between them.
Noticed >> Monochromes
by Heather White
Monochromes are back! The proof is in the pudding: three concurrent Toronto shows that consider their conceptual, political, and formal implications, respectively.
On Now >> Sarah Cale @ Jessica Bradley
by Heather White
I want to be careful in describing Sarah Cale’s new works; unseen and reduced to the bare facts of its innovation, her project could read dispassionate. So take note: Cale’s new body of work exudes as much presence and charge as the aesthetic it abandons. The show has major soul.
Noticed >> Translation
By Heather White
The artists with work up at Diaz Contemporary, Mercer Union, Leo Kamen and Bau-Xi Photo are all translators. They translate between different modes of art – literature, painting, photography – and their process is translation as Walter Benjamin saw it: as an art far beyond the rote processing of information. Over and above literal meaning, this art honours the tone and spirit of an original, and aims not to preserve but to complement.
Punctum’d >> Tristram Lansdowne @ LE Gallery
by Heather White
I can’t say everything that I love about Tristram Lansdowne’s new work at LE Gallery, so I’ll focus on the one detail of one work I love the most. If the watercolour in question were a photograph, I’d be limiting myself to what Barthes called the punctum. Violently summarized, the punctum is a kind of emotional vanishing point; it’s that spark that melts the frozen surface of the picture. And for me, in this watercolour, it’s what’s inscribed on the inner wall of an iceberg.
Anticipated >> Joshua Barndt @ Show and Tell
by Heather White
I don’t mind admitting that I watched the entire season of Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. A new addition to the reality tv crop, each episode saw contestants challenged to produce art according to prescribed criteria, with limited time and media available. The only constant, reliable material was the experience – technical and otherwise – of the artists. It behooved them to summon something personal.
On Now >> Alex Fischer @ O’Born Contemporary
by Heather White
The world of Alex Fischer’s Smarter Today is not ours. For one thing, Fischer doesn’t depict our time; his images are appropriated from current sources, but then intricately camouflaged, via a process of digital layering, into compositions of possible futures. Those futures are spacey and pastel, and sparsely peopled with hybrid figures that might approach the monstrous if they didn’t veer so resolutely away from categorization.
Rorschachesque >> Maggs & White
by Heather White
Would anyone deny that art is about finding? That creation is discovery? I’m not asking altogether rhetorically; I’m skewed from overexposure to theory that considers this obvious, and wonder if there are others left unlike me. In my world, thanks to Duchamp, even old toilets placed out for collection by the curb demand aesthetic pause.
Double Take >> Balfour & Clyne
by Heather White
Verticality isn’t new, in the world or in art. It’s existed as long as space has, and, consciously or not, artists necessarily consider the vertical (and the other axes) in their work. Often, it functions symbolically: the vertical is associated with divinities, heavens, transcendance. Mondrian used verticals and horizontals as a code for universals and particulars, and painted to understand their intersection; Newman’s famous ‘zips’ seek to lead us up to the sublime. I mention all this because I like how two artists, currently showing in Toronto, are mobilizing the vertical: as accomplice to their organized distortion.
On Now >> Betty Goodwin’s Work Notes @ AGO
by Heather White
I came to Betty Goodwin’s art late in the game, through a poem by Anne Carson. Commissioned by Artforum to respond to Goodwin’s ‘Seated Figure with Red Angle’, Carson proffers a series of ‘if’ clauses suggesting dozens of possible worlds for the work (“If objects are not solid”; “If objects are much too solid;” “If the rain lashes your face like manes of all the horses of this century”). The poem hones in on a beloved quality of Goodwin’s art: what AGO Director Michael Teitenbaum calls an “ambiguity of feeling” achieved by “the enigmatic mark, which is the signature” of Goodwin’s work. And it’s this reputation for ambiguity that makes Goodwin a fascinating subject for a show about process.
Noticed >> Works of Bodies
by Heather White
In the few weeks since ArtSync TV premiered, we’ve featured short interviews with Shary Boyle from the opening of Flesh and Blood at the AGO (see clip here) and with Martin Golland from the opening for his show at Birch Libralato, Skins and Skeletons (see clip here). Which got me thinking: are these titles just paying lip service, or is there something really afoot with the body in this city? Below, brief reviews of these and two other similarly pitched shows.
On Now>> Viktor Mitic @ Gallery Moos
by Heather White
The parallels between guns and art run deep: at heart, both enable contact with what might otherwise be unreachable. This capacity for projection is an important feature of humanity: no other animal can assert a threat from afar nor produce such complex images for what is abstract or absent. So what happens when the parallels tangle, when guns becomes an explicit part of artmaking?
Who’s That Man? >> Shaun Gladwell @ Georgia Scherman Projects
by Heather White
Shaun Gladwell’s first Canadian solo show, at Georgia Scherman projects, bears the head-tilting title Portrait of a man: alive and spinning/dead as a skeleton dressed like a mountie. Which begs the question: who is this man, portrayed? I have some ideas, but wouldn’t trust myself to pick him definitively out of a lineup.
What Just Happened? >> Adaptation: Between Species @ The Power Plant
by Heather White
If summer is a bit of a sleepy season for gallery goers, it’s not without some vivid dreams; our brows will furrow over them even as we rub our eyes and blink into the fall. I know I’ll be mulling especially hard over The Power Plant’s Adaptation: Between Species ; I’ve returned several times in person, and will be wandering back on my mind’s legs well after the exhibit closes tomorrow.
Double Take >> Babel & Babel
by Heather White
Briefly: according to the Bible, the Tower was a monument that ancient global citizens planned to build into the heavens. Disapproving of their zealousness, God shattered the builders’ single, shared language into many, halting their construction and scattering their community. Besides the obvious, Garcin and McLeod share much in common as they interpret the story of Babel.
