Akimblog
Toronto
Kelly Lycan at Gallery TPW | Office as Medium at Xpace | Mark DeLong at Hunter and Cook | ARENA and BMO 1st Art! at MOCCA | Flash Forward at Lennox Contemporary | Balint Zsako at Katharine Mulherin
posted by Terence Dick - October 14th, 2009.
I started off my week sitting down with a journalism student doing a piece on art criticism in Canada for the Ryerson Review. The two prongs of her investigation were the question of negative reviews (that is, how come there aren’t any?) and the significance of art criticism in general (particularly in the here-and-now versus the old days). In terms of the latter, I think it has value discursively and economically, but no longer politically (and the art may be to blame for that as much as the critics). As to the former, I wrestle long and hard over every less-than-favourable remark I make, and they always get a guaranteed response (often a hurrah), but I still feel guilty about criticisms I’ve made years ago and skulk around certain parts of the city wary of running into artists who’ve caused me displeasure. Maybe they don’t care anymore, but if they do they should keep in mind that the consequences of writing a bad review are far worse than making bad art. No one thinks you’re an asshole for making bad art.
To avoid any such pain, I went in search of art to celebrate. I caught a bunch of exhibitions just as they were closing. Kelly Lycan’s WHITE HOT flea market had me wondering where the photography was in Gallery TPW. Once I got over that, I was overwhelmed by the overload of low cost high concept knick knacks that collapsed contemporary works (by Lycan and others) with Dollarama disposables (all white, of course) in an interactive – or rather, relational – store-concept that rewarded a bit of browsing, but I left it at that.
Joshua Bartholomew
Next door I walked into a different inversion of the gallery space in Xpace’s group show Office as Medium. Sure we’ve seen administrators thrust out into the light in other exhibitions, but the artists here (Joshua Bartholomew, Jenipher Hur, Håvard Pedersen, and Avery Nabata) don’t stop there, they use the office supplies to create curious temporary sculptures, rebuild the architecture to disrupt the navigable space of the back rooms, and - the piece de resistance - drop a ceiling fan to the floor to create a hypnotic kinetic sculpture that evokes any number of infernal machines.
At least they did do that. The show’s closed now so you missed it.
Mark DeLong at Hunter and Cook, installation view
A bit further down Ossington I caught the final moments of Mark DeLong’s collection of work at Hunter and Cook. He’s got a slacker aesthetic that puts quotation marks around the arty semiotics of his paintings and sculptures. The wall works in particular seem “not right” in the way hipsters appropriate ill conceived and conflicting styles. Which is not to say I don’t like it, but to suggest that not getting it is to get it.
But it’s unlikely that you’ll have a chance to do either before ex-Torontonian David Armstrong Six sets up shop with his current crop of oblique wonders.
Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Zamboni, 2005, polystyrene
Taking to the straight-and-narrow like a hammer to the head, MOCCA is the latest stop for the ARENA: Road Game touring exhibition, a no-brainer of a populist group show that brings together hockey and art in an attempt to convince the masses that the latter can be just as scintillating as the former. I’m all for bigger audiences, but these kind of strategies leave me a bit queasy. A good group show needs to say something more than, “Hey, it’s art about…” (fill in the blank: hockey, music, film, food, hands, artists named Jennifer, etc.). A good group show needs to transcend its individual elements or else it runs the risk of suffering its weakest links. Which happens here so I can only point out the works that stick in my head like the undeniably impressive polystyrene Zamboni (largely because of its weird colours), Jason Maclean’s totemic hockey gear, and Graeme Patterson (with Darryl Sittler)’s stop-motion animation.
Jody Zinner, Circle of Hair, 2009, ink on watercolour paper
In MOCCA’s back room there can be found the provincial winners of the BMO 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition. It’s a spotty affair and I resisted the urge to attribute levels of sophistication to geographical location, but certain schools seem to result in stronger work. The overall winner is some William Eggleston Jr. from Ontario, but I leaned toward Nova Scotia’s entry Jody Zinner and her uncanny illustration of a disembodied tonsure or an infinite (as in without end) sheepdog.
Elliott Wilcox, Real Tennis 04, 2009
Lennox Contemporary has yet another of these up-and-comers showcases (Katharine Mulherin’s secondary space also had a neat show of tykes from the Etobicoke School of the Arts that showed some promise). Presented by the shadowy Magenta Foundation, Flash Forward 2009 is a hodgepodge of photography in all its variants. The game to play here is spot the influence, but I left with only a couple images by a fellow named Elliott Wilcox clinging to my retinae. His tightly composed shots of the interior of racquet-sport courts looked at first glance like out-of-place abstract paintings, gained depth as I got closer, and then spun on their axis to capture something totally other in the random patterns of tennis balls repeatedly thwacked against blank walls. The interesting thing is they clearly resemble brush marks.
Balint Zsako, Untitled (Touch), 2009, collage
Finally, over at Mulherin’s main space, Balint Zsako is mining the same turf as Max Ernst did in his collage novels of way-back-when. Zsako adds colour to the equation, reconfiguring magazine-sized reproductions of old master paintings to bring forth their repressed sexual content. Sure, it’s an old trick, but it’s still transgressive candy for the eye. I’d love to see full-sized paintings of some of the figures wrapped in fabric but have to satisfy myself with their miniature approximates.
Happy to end on a good note, I’d have to say, on reflection, that I take the lessons of my high school report card writing to heart with the artists I grade: don’t say something bad without also saying something good. Fair?
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.
Gallery TPW: http://www.gallerytpw.ca/
See website for current exhibition.
Xpace: http://www.xpace.info/
See website for current exhibition.
Hunter and Cook: http://www.hunterandcook.com/pages/gallery.html
See website for current exhibition.
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art: http://www.mocca.ca/
ARENA: Road Game continues until November 1.
BMO 1st Art! Exhibition continues until November 1.
Lennox Contemporary: http://www.lennoxcontemporary.com/
Flash Forward 2009 continues until October 25.
Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects: http://www.katharinemulherin.com/
Balint Zsako: Old Master Paintings continues until October 18.
Comments (newest first)
Posted by Michael, 288 days ago on October 15th, 2009
Hi Terrance
You statement regarding reviews both good and bad. I asked Gary Michael Dault a similar question and he stated there is not enough room for negative reviews. I see that could be a truism, it seems we have a ton of galleries, a ton of bad art, mixed with a sprinkling of good work. But space seems to play a major role in the review business. As an example you write about 3 or 4 shows, and are forced to not write about the 200 hundred others happening in the city. I understand promote the good forget the garbage. What I would like to see is that if a big name artist fails that we read about it. I believe that a standard is set and if a name artist produces a show that could be considered below their standard then a negative critque is needed.
Thanks Terrance for your dedication. Maybe art reviewers should play a similar role as food critics- disguised.
mike hansen