Akimblog
Toronto
Steve Lyons & Susan Lakin at Gallery 44 | Contingent Ecologies at InterAccess | Jason Garcia at Meta Gallery | Sara Graham at MKG127 | Vladimir Kato at Show & Tell |l Sarah Clifford-Rashotte & Bogdan Luca at LE Gallery | Erin Thurlow & Alex Hubbard at Mercer Union
posted by Terence Dick - June 9th, 2010.
I’m making my rounds before the city centre is shut down for the billion dollar G20 conference, and while I haven’t had my path blocked by an eighteen foot chain link fence, a certain sense of siege has settled on Toronto. What better way to celebrate our surveillance culture than a trip to see the television art at Gallery 44!
Steve Lyons, Loch Ness, 2009, salvaged materials and live-feed video
I wanted to check out Steve Lyons’ Loch Ness since reading about it last spring in an Akimblog report from the Windsor Biennial. Its construction is immediately intriguing: an old photograph reproduced in a splay of fragmented detritus and reassembled through the singular perspective of a video camera’s eye. So it’s sort of nifty when you see all this junk on the floor and then look at the screen and it makes a picture. That it originates with a Loch Ness monster expedition says something about the inconclusive bits and pieces the media turns into narratives, just like last week when I stayed up too late trying to piece together the events that lead to the deaths of nine humanitarian aid workers in the Mediterranean through micro-clips of Al Jazeera satellite broadcasts and Israeli Defense Force YouTube videos. Over in the next gallery, Susan Lakin’s portraits of regular folks reflected in their TV screens are almost nostalgic in contrast. Lyon’s work announces that passivity is no longer the only option.
Noel Harding, Galileo
A welcome artistic optimism can be found in the utopian proposals at InterAccess’ Contingent Ecologies exhibition. This has the look of a science fair or design competition and each of the three stations has much explanatory text and interactive components (from a bike to a mouse). For those interested in the new green urbanism, make the time to wade through the documentation. Me? I wanted to see more of the site-specific art projects that came about in Noel Harding and Rod Strickland’s Windsor-based Green Corridor project.
Jason Garcia
The new hip urbanism is old news on Ossington where a smattering of galleries hold their own amongst the chi-chi resto-bars that have proliferated on a street not long ago known for knifings in karaoke clubs. Meta Gallery is a newer addition to the ‘hood and lays claim to the increasingly common artistic turf that harvests painters from the global design and graffiti communities. The work is decidedly not conceptual, relying as it does on charged images mashed-up with a PhotoShopper’s disregard for history or context. Not that that’s a bad thing! (Actually, I think it is, but I’m not going to get into it here.) Jason Garcia makes dude paintings for the dudes who want to decorate their loftominiums. Back in the seventies, dudes had art sprayed directly on the sides of their vans. Now, they hang above black leather couches.
Sara Graham, Yellow Pipe Prototype (Schedule 40-G-01), 2010, powdercoated aluminum piping, iron fittings, aluminum clamp
In view across the street at MKG127, but light years away in terms of style and intent, Sara Graham thinks about cities and mapping and “geographic fictions” and urban critical theory and comes up with yellow mylar graphics that are so overthought as to be rendered artistically vacuous. Her pipe installations however evoke everything from plumbing (duh) to circuit boards to subway maps to circulatory systems, and successfully go to the places she claims to be visiting.
Vladimir Kato, Wallpaper of Despair, 2010, acrylic on wood
Show & Tell Gallery, however, has become the heart of young dude art in this city and Vladimir Kato’s current exhibition does little to change that. Despite his cosmopolitan background, it all comes out as the offspring of nth generation VHS dubs of Wild Style and Saturday morning cartoons. I also catch a whiff of underground comics from the sixties and, just like those geezers, the focus is on vaguely transgressive imagery (gay apes) along with assorted macho signifiers (lizards and other jungle beasts). It’s an undeniably popular aesthetic, but one that is so far beyond me, I recoil from it.
Sarah Clifford-Rashotte, Family Portrait, 2010, photograph
Wil Kucey from LE Gallery and I discuss this trend as I peruse his current crop of painters. We both think it has something to do with digital technology and leave it at that. Sarah Clifford-Rashotte’s work is in the front gallery and, if I may continue to be reductionist, is the young girl art to the previous dudes. To their brash colours, hard edges, and in-your-face imagery, she offers pastels, blurs, scribbles, fashion models and even a ballerina. It probably reveals something about me that I find this more appealing, but (as they say) girls mature faster than boys and something of that advanced introspection comes through in this work and makes it less obvious, more ambiguous than the men. Despite what I learned in university in the early nineties, gender is not simply a social construction; I see evidence of this every day with my daughter and her friends. There is something hardwired in (certain) girls and boys that leads them to princesses and trucks. It’s in their art too.
Bogdan Luca, Event Horizon, 2010, oil on paper and plywood
Also at LE, Bogdan Luca challenges my theories by taking up what one might (if we’re going to go this route) consider male imagery (iron bridges, submarines) and then abstracts it in a (dare I say) “feminine” overindulgence of colour and brush stroking. He is dealing with online images (his source) in an interesting way for someone so young, wrestling with its migration to the canvas, and arriving at something that elicits that sense of uncertainty, that distrust, we now have for what we see.
Erin Thurlow, Behind the Shadow of a Doubt, 2008, shoes, plaster, paint
And then sometimes art looks just like art. Or it looks like the art you’d see in a TV show or movie where an artist appears. Sensing this as I wandered through Mercer Union’s current shows, I’m not sure I can tell the difference anymore. Erin Thurlow’s visual non sequiturs – bricks and ash trays glued to plate glass, unplinthed half shoes, and sleepy ladders – look just like you want art to look: like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You go in and say, “What the fuck?” And that’s where the journey begins. Bricks made of broken mirrors? Of course! Even if in the end they are all just visual gags, what’s wrong with a few laughs? Every other art form is allowed comedy, only art gets a beatdown for having some fun (mostly because folks think the joke’s on them).
Alex Hubbard, Lost Loose Ends, 2008, video
Alex Hubbard is another joker, assembling the cliché’s of assemblage in real time on a pair of videos. The making of the work is inevitably more interesting than the final product, so these how-to tapes function as calls to action more than anything else. There’s no better inspiration for exercising your democratic freedom in the upcoming weeks, protests or 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.
Gallery 44: http://www.gallery44.org/
Monitors: Steve Lyons and Susan Lakin continues until July 3.
InterAccess: http://www.interaccess.org/
Contingent Ecologies continues until June 12.
Meta Gallery: http://metagallery.com/exhibitions/13/strange+magic/
Jason Garcia: Strange Magic continues until July 4.
MKG127: http://www.mkg127.com/
Sara Graham: The London Series continues until June 22.
Show & Tell Gallery: http://www.showandtellgallery.com/
Vladimir Kato: Wilderness continues until June 27.
LE Gallery: http://le-gallery.ca/
Sarah Clifford-Rashotte: No Poetry continues until June 27.
Bogdan Luca: Unmoorings continues until June 27.
Mercer Union: http://www.mercerunion.org/
Erin Thurlow: The Bermuda Triangle continues until June 19.
Alex Hubbard: Lost Loose Ends continues until June 19.
Comments (newest first)
Posted by Terence, 82 days ago on June 13th, 2010
Thanks for the compliment, Teri. Present, but distant pretty well sums me up.
Posted by Teri, 82 days ago on June 13th, 2010
I like your take on things. It's as if you're present with what's going on, but also somewhat distant from it. It's a refreshingly non-bandwagon approach.