Toronto
Andre Ethier at Hunter and Cook | Median Contemporary | Brown Cities at galleryDK
posted by Terence Dick - January 22nd, 2009.
My brother in New York sent me a link the other day to a local Toronto blog’s list of best new galleries in 2008. I initially chalked it up to my ever-encroaching uncoolness that I hadn’t heard of half of them, but when I did some digging, I think I came up with another reason: they’re mostly stores. Some of them are actually stores with galleries included and others are commercial galleries. Now, I’ve got nothing against artists supporting themselves with their work, but I can’t seem to shake an anti-market attitude that goes back to my formative punk rock days when anything anyone else liked was too popular and therefore considered a sell-out. Times have changed and I’ve grown up, but that same attitude around accessibility and quality, that resistance to the easily consumable, drives a lot of my critical thinking. If I wanted to psychoanalyze myself (which I do), I’d find the roots of this attitude in incipient social fears, in feeling like I didn’t belong or didn’t fit in. That led to a valorization of the margins, the underdogs, the underground – my people. If I wanted to do a Cultural Studies dissertation on this (which I don’t), I’d try to draw some connections from the oblique strategies of conceptualists and neo-conceptualists (that is, the “difficult” people and the people who love them) to the pathological insecurities of adolescence.
But instead of doing that, I went to a store that wasn’t on the list, but contained a brand new gallery that was so enamoured by self-promotion, it started out as a magazine!
Andre Ethier, Untitled (No New Jokes), oil on board, 2007
Hunter and Cook the magazine is put together by Toronto artists Tony Romano and Jay Isaac. The first issue can be found online, while the new issue can be found everywhere that arty things are sold. It’s a large format publication (which is perfect for visual art) that includes examples of work by Andre Ethier, Kristan Horton, Scott Lyall, and Fastwürms as well as interviews with Jason Maclean, Melanie Schiff and a bunch of painters (Elizabeth McIntosh, Sally Spath, Mina Totino, and Monique Mouton). It’s more along the lines of hipster art rags from New York and Europe (big pictures, big ads, elegant design) than the second coming of Lola, so don’t expect a million shotgun reviews and an opportunity to catch up on local gossip. The aim is clearly professional and international (which is not to dismiss the Canadian content).
Hunter and Cook the gallery can be found in the back of the Silver Falls clothing store at 15 Ossington. The debut exhibition features wonderfully horribly wonderful paintings and a couple innocuous sculptures by Andre Ethier. I’ll always think of Ethier as a musician first, having had my world rocked on more than one occasion by his old band the Deadly Snakes, but he is clearly equally talented with pigment and brush and these paintings will either win you over with their overloaded grotesqueries or turn you off completely. There is so much that seems wrong with them - the subject matter, the colours, the gloss, the romanticism, the absence of cool, the presence of guts - but the care and intricacy of the technique and the generosity of the work warms the cockles of my heart. As with all good things, they made me want to linger.
Kal Mansur & Rui Pimenta, Module Existence, 2008, latex, ink, resin, and oil on plexi
Median Contemporary is a new gallery on Queen West, just doors from the Drake. The founding artists Kal Mansur and Rui Pimenta are light years away from Ethier in their aesthetic, yet there’s a little bit of the gooey here too. They make what is best described as the art that appears in science fiction films. Only an interior designer from the future would place their high tech plexi constructions and light boxes in someone’s home. Their largest collaboration, Module Existence, rotates in the window, the many planes of clear plastic overlapping hard lines and colourful wads of epoxy spunk. Some of the spermy squiggles are a bit much and I have a feeling that I shouldn’t like it for trying so hard to be the statement of purpose that it is, but I can’t help but enjoy the spirit of optimism that it represents. It is also romantic in its own way, attesting to a techno-utopian future that feels increasingly unlikely.
Sandi Wheaton, Bombay Beach Home
The future I imagine is more along the lines of galleryDK’s Brown Cities exhibition. Founded by a group of photographers who share an obsession with our decaying urban centres, DK has set up shop in the frontier land of Queen west of Dufferin. The current group show has some ups and downs, but Sandi Wheaton’s pictures, particularly the eye-grabbing fantasy/reality of Bombay Beach House is a real winner. It looks like something from an H.G. Wells story, but feels like the end of the world. Esmond Lee is the other standout. His Forest Wonderland is a homoerotic idyll from some alternate 1950s, while Hong Kong Dichotomy and Urban Savages depict the contradictions in contemporary China with a keen eye.
After having waded through the trenches of commerce, I came out none the worse for wear. I actually found a lot to like. So to paraphrase President Obama’s paraphrasing of the scriptures, the time has come to set aside childish things! No longer will I resist the gallery as shop! I’ll embrace the commercial ideal! I’ll like everything!
Um, probably not.
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.
Andre Ethier: No New Jokes continues at Silver Falls, 15 Ossington Ave.
See website for current exhibitions.
Brown Cities continues until January 31.
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