Amanda MacDonald at WARC Gallery
- Until May 29, Suite 122, 401 Richmond St., Toronto ( www.warc.net)
Ah, to be an emerging artist - the mad experimentation, the total lack of concern for career and fiscal advance, the injudicious colour combinations, all that what-the-hell, tip-over-the-paint-can freedom!
While I would not wish to be transported back to that primal time (I've grown fond of food and reliable shelter), I can still appreciate the initiate's vitality, and generous doses of good clean fun - both of which are on ample display in Amanda MacDonald's first Toronto solo show XO. Slathered in bubble-gum-pink nail polish, XO is inspired by an unlikely but nonetheless resonant pop-culture totem: the Hershey Kisses candy, with its iconic teardrop shape and signature, fortune-cookie-like paper ribbon.
Musing on the warped messages our culture creates around food - Everything is tasty! Everything makes you fat! - MacDonald offers a suite of mixed-media works wherein spectral images of people eating are obscured by hundreds of crinkly Kisses wrappers. We consume, and are consumed, these panels remind us. Or, perhaps, we eat so much because we feel smothered by food choices, and the endless morality debates that encircle our eating decisions make us neurotic, unable to see past the wrappers.
Yes, this is very literal work, and, yes, the food/body size/consumerist paradigm is well explored territory. But that's what emerging artists are supposed to do - be forthright and blunt, and show us what they've learned. What keeps XO from sliding into a predictable chat to the choir is the abundant, indeed reckless use of Barbie pink.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Pink is a misunderstood colour. Why do people dislike pink? Because it's a happy colour? Think that through.
MacDonald loads XO with enough hot, gooey pink to stun the faculty of any dour art college into giddy idiocy. She has even crafted, as if carefully applying hundreds of minuscule candy wrappers to canvas is not manic enough, 1,000 (yes, 1,000) exact, handmade, concrete (yes, concrete) copies of the candy. Of course, the fake candies are coated in a most unnatural, campy pink.
I'm all for subtlety, moderation and rigour, but every now and then you just have to let yourself go - at the gallery or at the dinner table.
Penelope Umbrico at P/M Gallery
- Until June 12, 1518 Dundas St. W., Toronto ( www.pmgallery.ca)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the mass-consumption critique, Penelope Umbrico offers a peek into the latest technological wasteland with an exhibition called Broken Sets (eBay) - a series of photographs of busted LCD screens she found for sale on various websites.
Apparently, people buy broken television screens for parts - people with a lot of time on their hands. In order to convince potential buyers that the electronics behind the screen still work, the sellers photograph the screens turned on, and the dysfunctional beauty of these warped images has caught Umbrico's clever eye.
Literal mash-ups, these screen saves accidentally replicate modernist abstraction, contemporary video art, dreamscapes and any number of messy schools of painting. As the pixels refuse to pixelate, what arrives instead is strikingly beautiful - a kind of digital waterfall of hard, cutting lines, irruptive solar flare-like hot spots, and sickly, unstable colours. Technological failure is turned into decoration, into mesmerizing, noisy panels of twitchy activity, chrome and flame.
As a record of our particular time and place, Broken Sets (eBay) says a lot about consumerism as a pure activity. Because there are no identifiable objects on the screens, the metaphorical emphasis is not on acquisitions, on objects, but on the act of acquiring. The eBay hunters are purchasing a (broken) promise. After all, how big can the market in spare LCD parts be?
It's the impulse to own, the satisfying click on the Buy button - a satisfaction as fleeting as these fractured images - that entrances.
E.C. Woodley at Kiever Synagogue
- Until May 30, 25 Bellevue Ave., Toronto ( www.kofflerarts.org for performance times)
After two flashy pop-tech culture exhibitions, you'll need some downtime, and nothing will fill that need as anti-spectacularly as E.C. Woodley's exquisite, library-quiet installation Auguststrasse 25. This work takes patience and attentiveness, and rewards whatever you give it tenfold.
Set inside the historic Kiever Synagogue (itself a lovely building, erected in 1927) in the Kensington Market neighbourhood, Auguststrasse 25 recreates a lazy afternoon in a Jewish household in Berlin in 1928. Encircled by plump, polished furniture, books, teacups and candlesticks, a radio playing German songs and broadcasts from the era, newspapers (also recreated from the era) and more books, a young woman in a neatly tailored, muted salmon dress (with perfectly matching earrings - now that is set design!) sits and reads, listens to the music, writes in her diary, then retreats back to her books.
In essence, the actress, who never looks at or otherwise acknowledges her audience, is enjoying a meandering afternoon in a secular Jewish household - an ordinary, perhaps even slothful day, of a kind that would soon be so horribly and irrevocably torn apart by forces antithetical to the intellectual, mindful life presented.
Having just returned from Cologne, where I saw both an excavation of an ancient Jewish neighbourhood and locals nonchalantly selling photos of the 1945 destruction of the city by Allied bombers (Germans live in a perpetual state of crossed histories, it seems), I was deeply moved by this provocative apparition.
As the young woman working the door said to me, "It shows the calm before the storm."