Opening Night at Octopus Project III: PUSH/PULL

Mostly according to plan, I did in fact make it out to Toronto’s Distillery District for the opening of Octopus Project III: PUSH/PULL, among the other open-studio activities bustling throughout the Case Goods Warehouse on the occasion of Artscape’s Doors Open weekend and Doors Open Toronto. For added flavour, I attended in the good company of my parents and aunt - lovely people who have taught me much over the years about critical honesty. They’re smart, common-sense folks who don’t mind calling out bullshit when they see it, and I find their insights refreshing, uncannily accurate, and well worth repeating.

In short - there was some great photography on show. There were also a good many disappointments, as is to be expected in any open exhibition.

My mom (pictured above in all her skeptical glory) did dole out praise where due (shockingly, this included her own daughter’s work) but alternately followed my progress with camera and notebook with such commentary as ‘Oh, c’mon, you’re not noting that down.’ And yes, I did take an interest in Tracy O’Dunn’s Somnabulist, even if it was a fairly conventional Dadaist retread of conjoined objects with explicit surrealist concerns for dream narratives. Somehow, though, I doubt that was the root of my mom’s issue with the meeting of a white pillow and crystal doorknob as an art object.

Perhaps predictably, many of the artists took a dualistic approach to the theme, generating oppositions as the starting points of visual tension. And while the tug-of-war pictured above (among other things) is a more explicit example of the trend, it’s also evident in Agata Ostrowska’s typewritten diptych, aptly titled Push Pull and featuring two facing blocks of obsessively typed text following the conceptual train of the show’s theme with frenetic logic.

Renee Nault, Tides, 2008 (left); pictured with Kim Baker, Balls, 2006.

For my part, I was drawn to more subtle iterations of the theme, such as this lovely drawing by Renee Nault with its own tensions between incomplete ink washes and precisely rendered lines. The choice of a wave in a state of ebb and flow shares a tangental relationship to the theme, and the drawing plays well to this fluid strength in a manner that is deceptively simple in execution.

The opportunity to witness such one-off results in the context of a much larger show is the genuine source of any excitement found in something like the Octopus Project, for the viewer as well as the artist. The single-work response is by necessity an object in isolation from the typical parameters of an artist’s practice, and remains unique each-to-each once collected in a show such as this. Seeking out the singularities in a corridor of these responses certainly takes more time, but is well worth the journey.

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