How to Review Toronto’s Art Scene in One Day or Less

While the pace of life slows for some in these lazy summer months, I’ve found myself so strapped for time that my only option for taking an overview of Toronto’s present art activity for an upcoming MAP Magazine article was to do all my gallery-going in the space of a single day. Several days after that event, I’d like to officially go on record and say that I do not endorse viewing fourteen exhibition venues in six hours.

The effort is helped, however, when several of those fourteen spaces are housed under one roof. Thank you, 401 Richmond - your ground-level cafe makes smashing coffee and your swanky design book-and-gift store is plenty entertaining when one has to wait for the galleries opening at 11am once the 10am is done and out of the way.

Lisa Dillin, Bear Hug Sleeping Unit

The 10am viewing was Grizzly Proof at Trinity Square Video, and even if I did have to hunt someone down and politely ask them to turn on the lights and video components it still proved one of my favourite exhibitions of the day. All the artists involved were invited to submit responses to Project Grizzly (1996), Peter Lynch’s cult-classic documentary film on Troy Hurtubise’s attempts to construct a bear-proof suit of armour. Hurtubise’s Mark VI suit is included in this exhibition, underlining the visual source of one of the best side-effects of this man vs. nature debate: good ol’ robots.

Aka Kakeda, A Tale of Troyy (detail)

Fact is, I really wanted to see this show just for the bears, without really realizing how well matched a grizzly is to a robot in terms of their hulking physicality - there’s something really fun about that commonality (see Frank Olive and Rudy Shepherd’s rather silly video One Day It’s Really Going To Be Over for a case in point - bear-suited man meets cardboard robot!) that also manages to diminish the human element and, somewhat tellingly, put our hubris firmly in its place. Compared to grizzly bears and robots, our species is every bit as vulnerable as that little girl in Kakeda’s wonderful patchwork-and-embroidery work up there.

Kevin Yates, Bliss

Another highlight was Dusseldorf Redux at Susan Hobbs Gallery, which presented the works of various young gallery artists once destined to be showcased at the now-defunct Dusseldorf Contemporary art fair. The work on display is entirely within the realm of modest gestures, but each one is a meticulous gem of serious craftsmanship of the sort that is often few and far between, such that seeing so many small things of that calibre grouped together was really quite wonderful to witness. Laura Vandenburgh’s series of geographically-inflected drawings are painfully subtle, overrun with the sort of tiny, obsessive marks that manage to convey both fine precision and mad, frenetic impulses, and is well matched with the clean chaos of Krista Bueching’s Proposal for Ruins (#17). I was also impressed by Kevin Yates’ two sculptural contributions, of which Bliss (pictured above) is the stand-out favourite for having simply accomplished one of my favourite balancing acts - the creation of something pretty from circumstances that are highly charged with danger (in this case, the threat of electrocution).

Best Smell Experience: Thrush Holmes Empire, which absolutely thrums with life in such an audacious way that it makes most gallery spaces look sterile by comparison - which is, frankly, probably not so far from the truth. The pervasive odour of oil paint from the adjoining studio space was surprisingly soothing some ten galleries into the day, rich with the reminder of art school and humid summers heavy with paint and Smirnoff Ice.

Worst Smell Experience: Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, which reeked peculiarly of oranges. Not just a pleasant citrus whiff either, but like someone had spilled open a whole freakin’ sack of the things after they’d been used to beat a man to death. You know, oranges.

I made my way back eastward once I realized that smell had become a serious critical concern, ensuring that I stopped back at 401 Richmond to view the Stephen Wright exhibition at the Prefix Gallery, bringing my frantic day’s journey full circle. The results of his residency on board the HMCS Toronto make for surprisingly sedate viewing at the end of a long day, his video filmed from the perspective of a falling rocket providing a sort of static-ridden sublime in its view of the tilting earth. My own view was likely tilting plenty by that point anyway, as evinced by the following contextual view.

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