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Toronto
Beatrice's Centre for Student Affairs at InterAccess | Jean-Paul Kelly at Gallery TPW | Gwen MacGregor, Sandra Rechico, and Christof Migone at Mercer Union
posted by Terence Dick - November 13th, 2008.
I headed out to the galleries this week with four year old in tow, which is always a gamble. Bribery and cajoling can only go so far, but I lucked out with three exhibitions all dealing in their own way with the exhausted parent’s standby: storytelling.
Evan Tapper, Eddy Explains That It’s Not You, 2008
InterAccess curator Jennifer Cherniak’s mouthful of a title, Beatrice’s Centre for Student Affairs, or, How I learned that my mother was right about making art in a prairie town during the rise and fall of grunge music, immediately introduces her narrative thrust, locating the exhibition not in some abstract conceptual nether-world, but in the here-and-now - or, rather, the there-and-then - of personal and historical circumstance. This is a story of a time and a place that links the curator with three artists who came of age in Winnipeg in the late nineties told in stories that, each in their own way, link art making with struggle and doubt. After perusing the exhibitions described below, I kept coming back to Cherniak’s portrayal of herself as a curator who struggles with meaning, not some expert who gives away all the answers, but a curious traveller who discovers things about herself in what she sees. The conceit might involve a bit too much navel-gazing, but, based as it is in the formative experience of art school, navel-gazing as a means to growth is par for the course.
This wasn’t exactly the kind of storytelling my daughter was looking for, so it was lucky for me that the exhibition included the crack cocaine of toddlers everywhere: a craft table. That it was linked to a creepy computer generated video by Evan Tapper didn’t seem to bother my offspring, so, while she made macaroni landscapes, I perused the always pleasing Daniel Barrow’s video documents of his lo-fi animation performances, disappointed that I couldn’t see them live and still smarting from his loss of the Sobey Award to that nether-world conceptualist Tim Lee. Jo-Anne Balcaen’s videos detailing her (or someone like her?) obsession with a Canadian rock band (and the little wooden outhouse you sit in to watch one of them) don’t fit as cleanly into the art student theme, but bring the whole grunge facet to the fore, just as I managed to forget those years.
Jean-Paul Kelly, Cat (Mom), 2007, ink drawing
Across the street at Gallery TPW, there is a mysterious exhibition by Jean-Paul Kelly that loses its mystique if you read the accompanying essay so I would suggest you don’t do that. And Fastened to a Dying Animal is another suggestive title that alludes to some elusive narrative linking Kelly’s meticulous ink drawings of surreal pets and piled sandbags to a series of home movies and a collection of photographs. The disparate elements and absence of immediately evident coherence are entrancing in the way the edge of a cliff draws one forward. This fear factor played out in a video short called When All is Said and Done. Kiddo and I sat and watched this grim tale of a ghost that kills a cat and a dog, only to be haunted by their revivified remains. I wasn’t surprised to learn it was inspired by Casper the Friendly Ghost, the cartoon character who brings an end to every child’s innocence when they finally think to ask, “How did he die?”
Christof Migone, Disco Fall
And then we headed over to Mercer Union’s new digs on Bloor near Lansdowne. Six months ago this move seemed to forewarn of an impending wave of gentrification in this neglected corner of Toronto, but, what with the financial collapse of the last couple months, I don’t see this neighbourhood changing anytime soon, so Mercer should settle in and make itself at home. The inaugural exhibition is, in part, about cities and the way we use them. Gwen MacGregor and Sandra Rechico’s Maps in Doubt continues their ongoing translation of urban transit into a variety of visual forms. Sure, it can be read as a revelation of the schism between depiction(s) and reality, but I prefer to look at each image as a travel diary, mapping out how one personalizes the city, making sense of it in a creative way that is generally overlooked. Only by disassociating individual paths from the official maps do you get a sense of the person.
MacGregor and Rechico’s portraits in line are a whole lot more effective as portraits than Christof Migone’s so-called portrait in music in Mercer’s back room. Having done my time as a rabid record collector, I should have an immediate connection with the ways in which Migone rearranges the material of his listening habits. Records are cut up, band names are rearranged, song lyrics are alphabetized, and sound samples play at seemingly random intervals. The decisions are all programmatic, but the result has no greater meaning. I’d rather just listen to the music. The stripped disco ball and smoke machine are a nice touch, though. They and the music would have been enough.
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.
InterAccess: http://interaccess.org/
Beatrice’s Centre for Student Affairs, or, How I learned that my mother was right about making art in a prairie town during the rise and fall of grunge music continues until November 22.
Gallery TPW: http://www.gallerytpw.ca/
Jean-Paul Kelly: And Fastened to a Dying Animal continues until November 15.
Mercer Union: http://www.mercerunion.org/
Maps in Doubt continues until November 29.
Christof Migone: Disco Sec continues until November 29.