Toronto
Stories, In Pieces at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery | Tim Whiten at Olga Korper Gallery | Ted Tucker and Rory Dean at Christopher Cutts Gallery | Ulysses Castellanos and Gareth Lichty at Peak Gallery
posted by Terence Dick - July 31st, 2008.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery Director Barbara Fischer must have been busy with her Venice Biennale application. That’s the likely explanation for the last couple of guest curated shows in this University of Toronto campus space. It’s an ideal location for emerging curators to cut their teeth on a manageable, structurally uniform site that provides a bounty of sympathetic contexts and extra-gallery possibilities (being a university and all).
Curtis Grahauer & Kara Uzelman, Firewatcher (detail), 2007
Aileen Burns curates this summer’s exhibition, Stories, In Pieces, a concise quintet of works that fit together relatively nicely in confined quarters. Newcomers Curtis Grahauer and Kara Uzelman share a room with Liz Knox and unfortunately overpower her still life photos riffing on pop culture with their multi-format (video, suitcase, armour, fort) channelling of urban obsession and debris. Them’s the breaks though and Grahauer/Uzelman’s practice ties in in a much more engaging way with the exhibition’s overall theme of the narrative impulse in visual art. Firewatcher both elicits stories and evokes a storyteller in action. Across the hall, Jon Sasaki’s room mines the soft horror genre along the same lines as Gregor Schneider or Mike Nelson. It’s not as ambitious but contains a couple surprises that make it fun.
Of the two contributing Vancouver artists, Geoffrey Farmer’s work is a bit weak - more could have/should have been done (the recessive gene passed on by conceptualism results in too many young artists putting too little in the material of their work [which is not often the case with Farmer]), while Myfanwy MacLeod shines with a mind-bending series of photographs and a couple sculptures that evoke any number of frightening stories about tormented children and the places they once lived in. When’s she going to get her touring retrospective? Or is that honour only reserved for the boys of the Vancouver School, Part Two?
Tim Whiten, In-Sintilate, 2008, brass, glass beads, crystal and standard glass
A much more reserved sense of object can be found at Olga Korper Gallery. Tim Whiten’s glass sculptures evoke a 19th Century cabinet of curiosities frozen through some radical physical (as in physics) shift - like they belong in that glowing white room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Looking down at the top of his glass umbrella, I get a sense of armament I had never considered. Placed alongside his glass turtle shell, things start to jell. But what of the kaleidoscope/telescope? Our scientific understanding is only fragmentary, refracted endlessly through mirrored glass? Heavy.
Ted Tucker, Chalice, 2008, watercolour on paper
Ted Tucker is not so heavy. His in-your-face canvases at Christopher Cutts Gallery combine Tim Gardner’s partying frat boys with a Troma Films trash aesthetic, plus some No Limit hip hop graphics. Other than one subdued watercolour, it’s all too over-the-top for me (though I’d probably rent the imaginary movie these scenes come from). That said, I don’t think I’m the demographic for this kind of art. I think it’s more suited to the boardroom of some twenty-three year old advertising executive.
Also at Chris Cutts, Rory Dean’s canvases are best suited to the office/lofts of twenty-three year old computer security experts. Or, at least, the gothy ones who live nocturnally. All the better to make out the scowling children and their nefarious experiments in these dark (as in blue black) paintings.
Ulysses Castellanos, The Sybil Pictures, 2008, india ink on wallpaper
There’s a different type of darkside on display over at Peak Gallery. Ulysses Castellanos has more of a Kenneth Anger-vibe going on. His size-large stills from an old super 8 porno are too obvious for me (sacred vs profane, you know the deal), but his so-called Sybil Pictures (cartoonish doodles on scraps of ugly wallpaper) and his reprints of an old children’s book are less explicable and therefore more interesting. The source of these images is uncertain and their combination of innocence and experience give them a sense of grim import.
Gareth Lichty, Range, 2008, six kilometres of garden hose hand woven into a three foot diameter, one hundred foot long tube (1600 lbs.)
Finally, be sure to check out Peak’s presentation of Gareth Lichty’s massive macramé in the pit at Morrow Street before it is heaved away by many arms (or a crane perhaps?). The woven hose that is Range, looks like rolling hills from a distance and the shed skin of a giant snake up close. As I write this, it’s pouring rain outside and I bet this monstrosity (in a good way) is even better all slick and wet. It’s accompanied by another woven rubber labour of love, this one looking like a patch of glistening water snatched from a virtual world of computer graphics made real. I resisted the urge to lie down and be massaged by its coils, but I’m tempted to go back and try.
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.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery: http://www.jmbgallery.ca/index.html
Stories, In Pieces continues until August 24.
Olga Korper Gallery: http://www.olgakorpergallery.com/index.html
Tim Whiten: Up, Down, In-Between continues until July 31.
Christopher Cutts Gallery: http://www.cuttsgallery.com/
Ted Tucker: NC-17 continues until August 9.
Rory Dean: New Paintings continues until August 9.
Peak Gallery: http://www.peakgallery.com/index.htm
Ulysses Castellanos: To Drive The Nail of Terror Into the Hearts of The Backsliding Sinners continues until August 2.
Gareth Lichty: Thrum continues until August 2.
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