Toronto
I_wanna_see_YOU at YYZ | Yam Lau & Alain Paiement at Leo Kamen Gallery | Roger LeMoyne at Toronto Image Works | Peter Kingstone at Gallery TPW | Re-Surfaced at Xpace
posted by Terence Dick - May 22nd, 2008.
He’s best known as a filmmaker, but Mike Hoolboom could easily take on a second career as a stand-up raconteur. Having seen him introduce his films in various contexts over the years, eliding the actual endeavour of talking about the film by talking around the film, seemingly conjuring his thoughts on the spot, playfully teasing out words to hint at what is to come (all the while pacing in his unique soft-shoe way), I eagerly attended the book launch for Practical Dreamers, his new collection of interviews with experimental filmmakers across Canada. For not only is he a prolific auteur, he’s also a key conduit for the movie making community deemed “fringe.” As Richard Fung, one of the book’s interviewees, said that evening, Hoolboom is a “national treasure.” A true self-effacing Canadian, the author deferred to the status of interlocutor and MC, introducing Fung, Jubal Brown, and Su Rynard, who then introduced a film each of their own. The division between the film/video world and the visual arts seems meaningless to me, but for those who prefer the white cube to the black box, names like Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Kent Monkman, Emily Vey Duke, and Cooper Battersby might pique your interest.
Katie Bethune-Leamen
Back on the gallery circuit, I first headed to YYZ to catch the awkwardly named I_wanna_see_YOU[Y.Y.Z.ca_DE_overslag.nl], a group show (and perhaps a collaboration) between artists from Toronto and the Netherlands that, in it’s attempt to not be dictated by a curatorial strategy, feels highly self-conscious in its organization. That said, amid a panoply of pencil-drawn catch phrases – meant to inspire spiritually bereft consumers, but only serving to taunt the purportedly higher minded art crowd – there are a smattering (a scattering?) of works, two of which stand out. Corwyn Lund’s short video is funny enough to be on Saturday Night Live – if they did jokes about Modernist furniture design – and should be posted to YouTube any day now. Katie Bethune-Leamen’s work is also funny, but in a macabre way. As is her wont, she twists pop culture references in unexpected directions. Here she posits the corpse of slain rapper Tupac Shakur as a farm bed for mushrooms. A series of delicate drawings and an accompanying sculptural assemblage brings her musings on hip-hop fungi to light. (Hot Tip: keep your head up for her giant mushrooms studio opening next Wednesday at the Toronto Sculpture Garden.)
Yam Lau, Room: An Extension, 2007, computer-generated animation and video
Down the street at Leo Kamen Gallery, I enjoy Alain Paiement’s repurposed remains of his own practice. He has an excellent eye for isolating patterns in the world and his trademark God’s-eye-views on human endeavour are always worth lingering over. But my mind is blown by Yam Lau’s computer generated video installation, Room: An Extension. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t so convinced by a weaker version of the same shtick at YYZ last month or maybe it’s because I just came from hearing a sixteen year old speak at length about the representation of multidimensionality in two dimensional images, but Lau’s rotating hypercube takes it to the next level.
Roger LeMoyne, Evidence from Graves, Bosnia, 2006
Downstairs at Toronto Image Works, there’s an exhibition of Roger LeMoyne’s photographs that I’d call great if what he was photographing wasn’t so horrible. It’s the dilemma of how to respond to documentary images as art without belittling their content. At least in this case, the photographs as photographs are excellent and vary from still lives of human remains to interiors haunted by past atrocities to stunning panoramas, some of which could pass for Jeff Wall tableaux.
Peter Kingstone, 100 Stories About My Grandmother, 2008, video still
A similar quandary in responding to real lives in art (as opposed to paint on a canvas) is faced in Peter Kingstone’s 100 Stories About My Grandmother at Gallery TPW. (Be warned: This wonderfully installed video work is a time sucker that is hard to tear yourself away from.) On four video monitors, each set up in a little sitting room with an ugly but comfy couch (or sofa or chesterfield, depending on your gran), there is a total of six hours of men talking about their grandmothers. The twist is the men are all prostitutes. And the further twist is that’s all there is. Okay, well there’s a little twist about Kingstone’s grandmother possibly being a sex worker, but that’s peripheral to the stories recounted here, because it isn’t about anything other than hearing (as opposed to watching or fucking) these men speak. The stories they tell are as varied as they are and a delight to hear.
Lucilla Bonfanti
Right next door at Xpace is a fine contribution to the CONTACT Photography Festival with two artists in particular making a visit necessary. Lucilla Bonfanti hews craft and photography together to play off the nostalgia of old family snapshots. Most effective are her works where the people have been cut from the background only to be tied to it by black thread. It’s an evocative image of movement, change, and our inescapable ties to the past, the places we come from, and the distances we’ve travelled. Sabrina Russo makes a different use of family photos by printing them on edible paper and encasing them in hard candy. Visitors are free to choose one, unwrapping it to see the memory they will then suck on until it disappears. That has got to be a metaphor for something!
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog.
YYZ Artists’ Outlet: http://www.yyzartistsoutlet.org/
I_wanna_see_YOU[Y.Y.Z.ca_DE_overslag.nl] continues until June14.
Leo Kamen Gallery: http://www.leokamengallery.com/
Yam Lau & Alain Paiement continue until May 31.
Toronto Image Works: http://www.leokamengallery.com/
Roger LeMoyne: Srebrenica: The Absence continues until May 31.
Gallery TPW: http://www.gallerytpw.ca/
Peter Kingstone: 100 Stories About My Grandmother continues until June 14.
Xpace: http://www.xpace.info/
Re-Surfaced continues until June 7.
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