Toronto
posted by Terence Dick - January 31st, 2008.
I was first introduced to the work of Óscar Muñoz in The Power Plant’s sprawling Stretch exhibition back in the summer of 2003. His take on the intimacy and fragility of identity was amply demonstrated with a series of mirrored discs which, when breathed on, revealed faces of disappeared Columbians. Folding in elements of memento mori and the overarching political context of life during wartime, he manages to evoke a whole slew of thoughts, emotions, and memories in surprisingly simple gestures. I could have watched for hours his video of a face, drawn on the surface of water in a sink, dissolving as the water ran down the drain.
Óscar Muñoz, Proyecto para un Memorial, video installation
The face-down-the-drain motif is repeated in Prefix ICA’s current exhibition of his work, but with a couple added twists: the video screens set on the floor have real metal drains in them (literal yes, but effective) and the videos run seamlessly forward and back so the sinks seem to be breathing the subjects in and out. Equally tenuous and temporary faces drawn in water on stone or held in the cup of a hand explore the same themes and build on the artist’s unique take on portraiture. It culminates in a handheld two-way mirror that superimposes a friend’s face on your own. The effect is quite disturbing.
Marla Hlady, Playing Piano, 2007
Prefix’s exhibition is a collaboration with YYZ next door where Muñoz exhibits his take on the landscape. Squares of blurred city maps lie in a grid on the floor under shattered glass. What sounds like a no-brainer on paper ends up suggesting any number of visual metaphors for the make up or break down of urban life: shattered neighbourhoods, cracks in the surface, webs of interconnecting lives, social threads, or even ice-bound streets.
In the adjacent gallery, I was delighted to discover Marla Hlady’s infernal machine, a player piano that plays on with its guts on display like a disembowelled anatomical model. Hlady’s added some of her own electronics to the clockwork and air-driven machine to up the Frankenstein factor, but even without her stuff (which adds a certain John Cage/Prepared Piano avant-garde flair to the proceedings), the monster is entrancing. Hell, I’d be happy just to see the heart of the bellows keep churning away. That’s entertainment!
Simone Jones and Julian Oliver, Unprepared Architecture, 2007
Nothing at InterAccess’ state of the union address, IA25: Mapping a Practice of Media Art, matches up to the sheer mechanical whomp of Hlady’s creature, but Simone Jones and Julian Oliver’s virtual room in an actual cube had me interacting in ways that IA always aspires to. The spatial disorientation (not unlike Muñoz’s mirror) I experience as my real hand “interfaces” both in the gallery and on screen has me asking that age old question: Where am I when I’m on the computer?
Peter Kingstone, Charles L. Roberts, the War Years, video still (original image from The Frogmen, 1951), 2006
Back at 401 Richmond, I’m wandering through A Space’s War Zones group show and I’m reminded of something Philip Monk said to me a while back about one of my rare forays into exhibiting my own art: “There’s too much to read.” Which isn’t surprising considering I’ve always been more of a writer than an artist. The funny this is, this memory is brought up in an installation by Peter Kingstone, who happened to have curated another of my small, best forgotten (in an alley behind my old house) body of work, years ago (at A Space, no less!). But I like reading and Kingstone’s collections of artefacts, videos, texts, and tenting feels like one of those meaty Ilya Kabakov narratives I used to like so much.
Ivan Jurakic, Avatar, clear light bulbs, 2004/2007
Ivan Jurakic’s glowing outline of an airplane has a decidedly Kabakovian, magic realism feel as well. And Aubrey Reeves' Dagbok requires a lot of reading. Both are up at Gallery 44. The latter manages to activate her text in a way that feels fresh and links directly to the World War Two narrative (What’s with all these war references? I’m sensing the zeitgeist!) that inspired her. I’m just not sure I like the video portion of her piece; it’s got too much “acting” (if you know what I mean).
Robert Burley, Demolition #2, Kodak Canada, chromogenic print/dye coupler print, 2007
I thought I was going to like Robert Burley’s photographs the least in The Death of Photography, now on at the Stephen Bulger Gallery. That he was documenting the last days of Toronto’s Kodak factory before demolition seemed just too literal, particularly in relation to the exhibition theme. But I was happily won over by his three striking images of emptiness and abandon. Allison Rossiter, mining a conceptual gesture that is way more up my alley, developing old, forgotten, and never exposed sheets of photographic paper, comes up blank though. She should move on.
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.
Prefix ICA: http://www.prefix.ca/
Óscar Muñoz: Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial continues until March 1.
YYZ Artists Outlet: http://www.yyzartistsoutlet.org/
Óscar Muñoz: Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial continues until February 23.
Marla Hlady: Playing Piano continues until February 24.
InterAccess: http://www.interaccess.org/
IA25: Mapping a Practice of Media Art continues until March 8.
A Space: http://www.aspacegallery.org/
War Zones continues until February 15.
Gallery 44: http://www.gallery44.org/
Aubrey Reeves and Ivan Jurakic: Constellations continues until February 2.
Stephen Bulger Gallery: http://www.bulgergallery.com/
The Death of Photography continues until February 2.
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