Heath Bunting. Identity Bureau, Transferrable Synthetic British Natural Person, 2011; mixed media. Images courtesy of Onsite [at] OCAD University and OCADU Visual Resources – Melissa Jean Clark.

Reckitt, who before moving to London was senior curator at Toronto’s Power Plant, selected only one local artist, Adrian Blackwell, for Getting Rid of Ourselves. No explanation is provided for this strange continental imbalance, which cannot but call extra attention to the lone Canadian’s work, Circles Describing Spheres. Described in the exhibition’s installation guide as an interpretation of an “anarchist meeting circle,” the work consists of a series of wooden circles with adjustable legs that interlock and rise to create different formations. The utility of the sculpture is in its flexibility; it can be configured as a seating area or flattened and packed away.

The piece is intended for use during Blackwell’s planned intervention, also part of the exhibition, titled Let’s Get Lost: The Walking/Reading Group on Dismantling Subjectivity and Space. The event, which promises to enliven the otherwise forlorn-looking sculptural piece, is scheduled as part of a variety of programming associated with the exhibition. Indeed, this extensive programming, which includes artist talks along with reading groups and tours of the show led by OCAD University professors, is the highlight of the exhibition. The gallery should be commended for making such an effort to integrate the show with discursive practices that promise to expand on the issues raised by the artists in their work.

Claire Fontaine. Untitled (Tennis Ball Sculpture), 2008; mixed media. Images courtesy of Onsite [at] OCAD University and OCADU Visual Resources – Melissa Jean Clark.

While the show’s title call is to “get rid of ourselves”—a nod to Bernadette Corporation’s video work Get Rid of Yourselves—many of the works in fact force the question of how to construct oneself in a radical manner. Heath Bunting’s ongoing investigation, Status Project, is effectively a “self” in a box. The piece offers and sets a price for the ephemera of a British citizen, including the person’s cell phone, signature, gas bills, wallet—everything necessary for getting rid of one’s old self and adopting a new identity. Artist collective Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša’s piece is similar. Consisting of a wall painting, three laminated government IDs, and a video and sound installation, the work traces the group members’ decision to renounce their birth names and assume new identities, all under the name Janez Janša.  As with Bunting’s piece, the work brings into relief the concept of selfhood and how this is constituted and legislated through things ranging from government IDs to bills. The traces of selfhood that we leave in the world and online are like skin we are constantly shedding. In our daily lives we routinely discard elements of this identity, while also adding to ourselves through acts like opening a new credit card, getting married, or simply signing for a package.

Getting Rid of Ourselves is noteworthy in that it maintains a playful attitude while at the same time approaching key questions of the contemporary moment. Claire Fontaine’s Untitled (Tennis Ball Sculpture), for instance, involves tennis balls that on closer inspection reveal themselves to have been slit open and stuffed with contraband destined for prison inmates. The work thus evokes a sinister prison-industrial complex that denies basic amenities (for instance, dental floss and batteries) to inmates and raises the question: Can we get rid of social hierarchies that deny such basic amenities to segments of our society? The struggle to answer this question reflects the contemporary crisis of subjectivity that this exhibition strives to address.

Getting Rid of Ourselves is on view at OCAD University through October 11, 2014.

Francis Bacon. Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971; 
oil on canvas; 
198.5 x 147.5 cm
. Museo de Bellas Artes Bilbao 
© Estate of Francis Bacon / SODRAC (2013).

Many of the works in Terror and Beauty were on view earlier this year at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford as part of an exhibition titled Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone. While the collaboration between the British institution and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) indicates a shared interest in underscoring the links between these two artists, the two museums seem to project slightly different narratives. Whereas the Ashmolean exhibition begins with the characterization “…these two great figurative artists whose careers have rarely been linked until now,” positioning the exhibition as a novel curatorial statement, the AGO forthrightly undercuts such an assertion with a large-scale timeline on the wall of the first gallery that maps when and where the artists were born, trained, exhibited, and died. At a glance, this timeline may seem to chart more divergence than overlap between the artists. Yet, as a viewer wades through the copious information on display, points of convergence and interlock emerge—some in the form of major global events like the Blitz in London, which both artists endured, and others more intimate, like group exhibitions that happened to include works by both artists. Indeed, the number of times that Bacon’s and Moore’s works have been exhibited together reinforces the notion that the two were in fact involved in a longstanding artistic conversation, of which this exhibition is only the latest and most explicit chapter.

From there, the AGO divides the work on display among four large rooms, each of which corresponds to one of four headings: Bodies, Blitz, Vulnerability, and Resilience. These terms effectively function as signposts declaring the curators’ vision of how these two artists might be seen as engaging in conversation—or at least how the seemingly parallel lines of their respective practices in fact bend toward certain areas of intersection. For example, the “Bodies” room sets up a particularly powerful juxtaposition of Bacon’s 1971 Lying Figure in Mirror and Moore’s 1956–7 Falling Warrior. The two figures, both of which possess pronounced knees and elbows, writhe in compositional dialogue, despite one being in paint and the other in bronze.

Henry Moore. Falling Warrior, 1956-57; 
bronze; 
65 x 154 x 85 cm. 
Tate Modern, London
 © The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved, DACS / SODRAC (2013).

The show is thick with such works that call out to and echo each other. All around, a viewer encounters voids bounded by the crooks of elbows, mouths agape in sleep or screams, bone structures that modulate and form outer skins, whether molded in bronze or paint. One of the more unexpectedly complementary pairings to emerge is Moore’s Helmut Head and Shoulders and Bacon’s Study for Portrait VI. In each, the artist bilaterally splits the face and leaves a void where one would expect a mouth, resulting in a highly unnerving and disconcerting figure. While the subjects are dissimilar—one depicts a warrior, the other a pope—the horror of the World Wars is plainly reflected in both.

Home to the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, the AGO holds over 900 works by the artist (and is also flanked on its northeast corner by Moore’s outdoor public sculpture, Two Large Forms). After viewing Terror and Beauty, the nearby Sculpture Centre suddenly seems comparably dormant, lacking the buzz and excitement created by the pairing with Bacon—testimony to the success of Terror and Beauty’s curatorial project.

Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty runs through July 20 at the Art Gallery of Ontario 

Mike Nelson. Eighty Circles Through Canada (The Last Possessions of an Orcadian Mountain Man), 2013; mixed media. Courtesy of The Power Plant.

Amnesiac Hide presents four sprawling installations: Quiver of Arrows (2010), Gang of Seven (2013), Eighty Circles Through Canada (The Last Possessions of an Orcadian Mountain Man) (2013), and Double Negative (the Genie) (2014). The pieces are creepily empty–full: full of stuff, empty of owners. Typically, the human characters suggested by Nelson’s constructed spaces remain undefined, allowing each viewer to create her own narrative of the people who have seemingly left these camps behind. However, the works Eighty Circles and Double Negative do invoke specific people, becoming highly personal audits of things and experiences. As a whole, the exhibition flirts with issues related to Canada’s past as a British colony and the continued negotiation of its identity in a post-colonial milieu. 

Eighty Circles involves toothbrushes, bicycle-tire repair kits, hiking boots, books, and rail cards, among many other things, arrayed on a floor-to-ceiling wall of shelving hunkered at the doorway to the gallery as if to forbid entry. All of the items belonged to a man named Erlend Williamson, Nelson’s former collaborator and the “mountain man” of the work’s title, who died while hiking in Scotland (which I might never have known if not for the explanation of a gallery assistant). 

The backside of the wall of shelves serves as a screen for a series of eighty projected photographs of rock circles (small interventions in the landscape, made to contain campfires) taken by Nelson in western Canada. The relationship of these images to the aggregated personal items is obscure. The heat of the slide projector, the nostalgia-inducing shick-shick sound of the slides changing, and the cycle of mundane images make this half of the installation hypnotic. The lack of manmade objects in the photographs is refreshing, especially after experiencing the cluttered other installations in the show.

Mike Nelson. Quiver of Arrows, 2010; mixed media. Courtesy of The Power Plant.

In Double Negative and Gang of Seven, strewn reams of photocopy pages, rocks, and beach flotsam crowd the viewer much as Williamson’s former belongings in Eighty Circles do. The crowding within Quiver of Arrows, meanwhile, occurs at a psychological level rather than a physical one. It consists of a circle of RV-style campers that have been welded together and from which the wheels have been removed. The presence of these immobilized dwellings suggests land-rights issues, congregated as they are in a circle as if to face some unmentioned threat—a modern version of circling the wagons.

The totemic piles within the Gang of Seven installation suggest Inuit inuksuit, while its title references the Group of Seven—a school of early-20th-century Canadian landscape painters. These artists presented an unpeopled Canadian landscape, full of mountains but devoid of human presence or impact. Nelson’s Gang of Seven seems to repeat this trope, presenting Canada as a landscape full of raw materials for art making but void of inhabitants who might lay claim to the land. Within the spaces Nelson has crafted at The Power Plant, the question of the relationship between colonialism, land rights, and artists remains mostly unasked and unresolved.

Mike Nelson. Gang of Seven, 2013; mixed media. Courtesy of The Power Plant.

While Nelson declares this work to explore an ongoing interest in British colonialism and post-colonialism in Canada, in the end the pieces stake an uncomfortably neutral place in this critical discussion. As Toronto continues to “reclaim” the waterfront for development that consists mostly of erecting condos, artistic practices that question land grabs and the fallout of overheated development is all the more necessary. Nelson’s work offers us little guidance in resolving these critical issues.

Amnesiac Hide runs through May 19th at The Power Plant

No, the start to this review isn’t full of typos; it’s my attempt at onomatopoeia to capture the sounds that greet viewers at Nobuo Kubota’s YYZ exhibit Sonic Scores. Kubota is a Canadian multimedia artist who often uses sound in his work. His practice is inspired by an interest in jazz and Zen Buddhism, and Sonic Scores presents elements attributed to both of these traditions.

Nobuo Kubota. Sonic Scores, 2014; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and YYZ Artists Outlet. Photo: Allan Kosmajac.

Kubota’s rich audio recordings—the inspiration for his drawings—play on headphones located at the center of the gallery. His calligraphic renderings of the sounds swirl around visitors as they listen, creating a fully immersive experience. Image and sound compete for attention as viewers attempt to locate where the peaks of sound on the audio pair up with Kubota’s drawings.

It is no accident that Kubota’s drawings recall brush and ink painting techniques; he used a traditional Chinese brush to create the original “scores.” The sketchy lines in the first drawing of the exhibit recall a printout of a seismograph. Five registers of lines huddle together, draw apart, thicken, and thin, scraping across the page. Moving through the exhibit, it becomes apparent that Kubota has improvised these drawings, abstracting them from the original score. In one print he has rotated the original image 90 degrees, reduced it to only one line, and magnified it. This increase in scale makes the nuances of the line visible, as if he is pictorially transcribing the breaths and pauses contained in the voice recording.

Nobuo Kubota. Sonic Scores, 2014; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and YYZ Artists Outlet. Photo: Allan Kosmajac.

Kubota’s engagement with sound and improvisation is the central focus of the show. The scores are stark, almost bleak, in their lack of color or context.  But it is the stripping away of everything except the line that makes these works so sublime. The mini-mountain ranges produced by the swells of the line are soft and undulating from a distance, but up close, the scratchings of the brush are almost audible. Kubota’s visualization and reinterpretation of sounds create a dynamic multi-sensory exhibit that is compact and focused, but also expansive and wandering.

Sonic Scores will be on view at YYZ through March 8.

Geoffrey Farmer. Boneyard, 2013; paper; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Mercer Union, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

A commissioned work, Boneyard features figures—sculptures from the canon of art history—in shades of beige, ivory, brown, and taupe arranged on a flat, circular plinth. I was reminded of the Cast Courts at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). At the V&A, the casts are life-size and were used as study objects to train generations of artists and art historians. These casts represent some of the most iconic Western art sculptures, architectural elements, and monuments. Imagine then that Farmer’s installation is the situation in reverse—instead of being dwarfed by the “canon” at Mercer Union, visitors find themselves giants among reproductions.

The cutouts stand assembled, some even elevated on miniature plinths, but all are only a fraction of the actual size of the artwork represented. Farmer is playing here with scale, reproduction, and one art book’s “canon.” The forest of images stand at attention despite their various contortions (see for instance a listing Christ who seems to have been descending from the cross). Farmer’s shears have removed those details.

Geoffrey Farmer. Boneyard, 2013; paper; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Mercer Union, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

His mash-up of figures is rich with colliding styles; the wide, staring eyes of early Medieval sculptures gaze at the vividly lifelike drapery of late Renaissance torsos. These collisions problematize the narrative that originally ordered these images in the book used as source material for the work. The beauty of Farmer’s complete disregard of context and linear narrative progression is that these figures are freed from their usual work as evidence for some art-historical stylistic analysis or progression in artistic skill; instead, the viewer can imagine the strange conversations that might take place between a stern knight and an angelical putto figure. Farmer asks us to remix and reimagine how images work when all we have to work with are images.

Mercer’s commission and exhibition are timely. Farmer continues the success of Documenta(13) at Mercer, while the commissioning series demonstrates its ongoing support of key artists. More Farmer will be seen in Toronto at his solo show at the Art Gallery of Ontario—part of his Gershon Iskowitz Prize—later in 2014.

A Light in the Moon will be on view at Mercer Union through January 11.

Yam Lau. Tour China, 2013; vinyl print; 8 x 36 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and Hamilton Artists Inc.

Lau’s piece is a large-scale PVC banner—a common sight in urban centers throughout China. In Lau’s home country, these banners have a variety of functions, from advertisements for new housing projects to informational texts put up by the government explaining construction work. Lau appropriates the format of the banner and uses digital images mashed together to suggest the blurriness of ink washes. The unfurled banner can be imagined as a handscroll, overgrown and oversize as if on steroids. This interpretation of the banner is reinforced by the textile “mountings” that frame the central composition. Their rich, reddish brocade patterning is reminiscent of traditional painting mountings, which were intended to prepare the viewer to contemplate the full scroll. Because Tour China is already fully unfurled—a state in which traditional handscrolls were never meant to be seen—these textile images serve instead to bookend the central images and text.

Beyond referencing the format of handscrolls and contemporary banners, Lau pushes allusions to China through layers of stereotypical “Chinese” images and text: a spray-painted character, chai (拆, meaning to demolish); the infamous “Tank Man” photograph from the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre; the limestone mountains of Guilin; and a cartoon female figure dressed in traditional flowing robes holding a fan, inscribed with “Tour China” in a font that evokes the overtly Orientalized signage from Chinese takeaways.

The mash-up of text and images is intended to be ironic, querying our preconceived notions of the mystic and mythic Other that is China, or at least the China of glossy travel brochures. This sense of implied irony is in keeping with Lau’s practice—see, for instance, his donkey-cum-traveling gallery.  But unlike his other China-focused works, which prod viewers to re-perceive spaces, times, and notions of his native country, Tour China’s irreverent mixing of text and image, coupled with the concept of cultural tourism, ultimately renders the piece unresolved. The choice to install the work on the building’s exterior without any signage or additional context leaves this viewer needing more.

Tour China is on view at Hamilton Artists Inc. through February 22, 2014.

Trade Marks, curated by Betty Julian, includes works by Keesic Douglas, Meryl McMaster, Nigit’stil Norbert, and Bear Witness in association with ImagineNative. Photographic works dominate the show. In one of the most striking images, McMaster freezes in time the cyclonic motion of a flock of birds twirling frantically around her head.

Nigit’stil Norbert. Fractured Origin, 2013; inkjet print; 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and Prefix ICA.

For Norbert’s series of photos, the contested nature of Toronto’s geography is revealed in mundane, sometimes shabby urban spaces, devoid of people but inhabited by persistent vegetal growths. Sprouting from fractures in concrete and asphalt, these poplar and sumac seedlings defy the logic of the hard surfaces that typically characterize metropolitan infrastructure. Norbert’s meditation on these places redirects our urban gaze to reconsider histories whose roots extend below the hard surfaces, breaking these surfaces and interrupting the perceived logic of the city. As Norbert reminds us in her work, these non-space spaces are in fact historical locations of indigenous congregations.

The layering of histories and the corresponding visibility of these histories in Toronto also resonates in Keesic Douglas’s series Trade Me (2010). It is in these works that the echoes of Toronto’s garment district are the most apparent, as he explores the interconnected, fractious, and problematic history of textiles, trade, and First Nations in Canada. Douglas appropriates the Hudson Bay Company’s multicolored striped points blanket, staging reimagined sites of trade as well as studio photographs.  In the studio photographs, figures are positioned against a blank white wall, recalling government I.D. photo sessions. In two of the photographs, Douglas subverts the ability to identify the subject, depicting just a hand clasping a bottle of whiskey in one and in another completely draping the figure in the blanket. This unconventional, idiosyncratic head covering created by Douglas takes on another dimension in light of the recent Parti Québécois move to pass legislation that would ban public servants in Quebec from wearing religious symbols. As the debate over the role of head coverings continues globally, Douglas’s veiling forces viewers to confront indigenous histories of textiles and their relationship to deeper structural histories that continue to exert an influence on contemporary Canadian society.

Keesic Douglas. Trade Me #7, 2010; Chromira print; 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy the artist and Prefix ICA.

Given the recent reopening of the newly refurbished flagship location of the Hudson Bay Company on Queen Street, just a few blocks east from Prefix ICA, the  points blanket appears to be on the verge of another resurgence in popularity.  Indicative of this is a website hosting photos submitted by users participating in “stripe spotting.” Photos of babies, pets, engagements, and cottages decked in the iconic stripes of the HBC jostle for attention on the site. Visitors would do well to visit Trade Marks in order to complicate this sanitized version of HBC’s history of trade in Canada. This way, viewers might earn their stripes by observing the subaltern stories bound up in the blanket’s familiar emblematic stripes.

Trade Marks continues Prefix ICA’s commitment to excellent curation, public programming, and challenging works.  With concurrent shows at the Ryerson Image Center and the ImagineNative 2013 film festival, the fall line up of exhibitions echoing the themes and issues raised in Trade Marks is particularly strong and the resulting dialogues are highly anticipated.

Trade Marks will be on view at Prefix ICA, in Toronto, through November 23, 2013.