Mark Dion's The Life of a Dead Tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.Tom Arban/MOCA
With many collaborators, the American artist Mark Dion located a dead ash in Orangeville, Ont., earlier this month, chopped it down in segments, excavated its giant root ball and installed the whole tree on saw horses inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. The assumption was always that the white ash had been killed by the emerald ash borer, and when I dropped by the gallery this week, a student who is working on the exhibition had just discovered another larva from the deadly insect inside the bark.
My first question for Dion, however, was that old cliché: Is it art? He provided a rigorous reply.
“Art is a really good place for things that are not articulated in other forms – melancholy, mourning and loss. I can’t say I know the solution to globalization and invasive species, but I do want to articulate the loss,” he said, explaining how global trade has helped insects spread through wooden shipping pallets or nursery stock. “Art people might say this is science, but science people would never say that. … There is no hypothesis; things aren’t being studied in a rigorous way.”
The tree, he said, “feels a little like an autopsy or a morgue, or those images of a plane crash and they have to piece it back together. It is that language of catastrophe that I want.”
Dion says the installation conveys a 'language of catastrophe.'Tom Arban/MOCA
The tree may be dead, but it is teeming with insect life, which University of Toronto landscape architecture student Alexandra Ntoukas is extracting while the entomology department at the Royal Ontario Museum is photographing the bugs as they are found and providing hugely magnified images to hang on the gallery wall. Dion has also created a kind of fantasy entomology lab where visitors can peer through the glass at equipment and specimens – and where Ntoukas can actually do her cataloguing.
The lab cleverly situates itself at the intersection of function and fiction, while the odd spectacle of the felled tree inside MOCA’s old industrial space is startlingly beautiful.
The Life of a Dead Tree continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 158 Sterling Rd., Toronto, to July 28.
You may dimly recall that sculpture used to be a form largely associated with representing the human body, preferably nude. An artist exuberantly juggling her posts and her isms, Montreal’s Valérie Blass returns in that direction in inventive ways, creating novel pop sculptures centred around the body. For example, she hangs a mighty industrial chain from the ceiling and then encases its mid-section in a tube of heat-shrink plastic printed with the image of a pink body suit: The lumps of the massive links now read as a human form.
Blass was the winner of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2017, an honour that includes the offer of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario some time in the subsequent two years. A small exhibition of entirely new work is the happy result. That pink body suit, a thrift-store find, is a recurring element. In The Mime, the Model and the Dupe, she poses it moulded as though a body were wearing it, sitting on the floor beside another similarly moulded pair of pants. The two non-present figures appearing to be watching a TV, that also isn’t shown: The one in pink holds a chip bag; the other rocks back on high heels.
This technique of shaping the empty clothing into three-dimensional sculptures (by means of moulding it on casts taken from actual bodies) is used again in Those Who Do Not Ask for Anything, one particularly engaging piece. It features a white metal step-stool of the kind found in many kitchens. A big blue Ikea shopping bag hangs from it; peek inside and you find some packages of standard consumer goods – more chips, cotton balls, sponges, a cardboard drink box. There is a figure of sorts sitting on the step-stool, or at least a pair of cut-off shorts and one pink boot. The other boot is sitting on the floor at some distance, as though its wearer had tossed it aside.
Both the suggested narrative of a return from a shopping expedition and the absences recorded by the work – the woman who isn’t there; the nude who isn’t there – linger provocatively in the gallery.
Le parlement des invisibles is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto until Dec. 1.
If we pull down all of the statues of colonial oppressors, what are we going to replace them with? That is more or less the assignment given artists from five North American cities that belong to the High Line Network, a gathering of urban reuse projects that includes Toronto’s Bentway.
So if you head down to Fort York, you will find that the Bentway, the reclaimed space underneath the Gardiner Expressway, is now a gallery of poster; each concrete pillar is plastered with another artist’s concept for a monument for the 21st century. Many of these are simple – let’s celebrate the turn-of-the-century American labour organizer Lucy Parsons, an anonymous suburban skateboarder or a mother reunited with her child at the U.S.-Mexican border – or simply didactic. And most of the participating artists are American, giving their projects a certain distance from the very local space they are animating.
But occasionally a weirdly wonderful idea bubbles up for some physical yet impossible monument, like Phillip Pyle’s wry wood-and-metal abstraction Broken Obelisk Elbows or Judith Bernstein’s creepily phallic drawing ironically entitled Horizontal. For Toronto, An Te Liu borrows an architectural fantasy by the 18th-century French artist Hubert Robert, an intimidating landscape of ruined monuments that includes the Great Pyramid at Giza, and adds both the CN Tower and one single remaining pillar of the Gardiner. A post-Gardiner future? The effect is simultaneously creepy and hopeful.
New Monuments for New Cities is on until Aug. 30 outside the Fort York Visitor Centre in Toronto.
Live your best. We have a daily Life & Arts newsletter, providing you with our latest stories on health, travel, food and culture. Sign up today.