Jane Martin's Fabulosity: Mask # 1 is a depiction of a radiation mask.
Jane Martin at Red Head Gallery
$4,500-$5,000. Until Feb. 27, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115, Toronto; 416-504-5654, www.redheadgallery.org
The apparently abstract painting you see here - by artist Jane Martin - isn't really all that abstract. What it offers, finally, is not composition or design but information - and information of a crucial kind.
For the painting is, in fact, a radiation mask (moulded to the patient's face) - with writing on it indicating to medical technicians where the therapeutic laser is supposed to point and shoot its presumably burning, healing ray.
The work is one of 18 paintings Martin made - now at Toronto's Red Head Gallery - to pay homage to her late husband, musician Ewen McCuaig, who was diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer in 2000, and who died of it, at age 70, on Nov. 24, 2001.
The title of her exhibition - which is affecting and disturbing in equal measure - is The Roses Are Just Moving Into Fabulosity. "The title," Martin told me on the phone from her home in Toronto, "is something Ewen said, in response to a bowl of cut flowers I'd brought in from the garden - where we both loved to work. The roses were just in bud, but when they began to open, Ewen said they were 'just moving into fabulosity.' His language was changing because of what was happening to his brain. There was a strange poetry in his expression - and an intensification of his perceptions."
Martin's exhibition is made up of paintings of her husband, juxtaposed to paintings of wreath-like and nosegay-like gatherings of roses. The opulent flower paintings feel like moments of respite for the viewer, punctuating the other paintings which monitor, often in disturbing detail, the progress of McCuaig's cancer.
In her artist's statement, Martin explains that during the period of her husband's illness, she took "hundreds of Polaroids of him" (from which the paintings were eventually made). I ask her, as delicately as I can, whether this constant photographing of her dying husband wasn't a bit intrusive - a tad disrespectful, somehow? "He seemed okay with it," she told me. "He liked the idea of a record. When he was finally quite ill, he told someone, with pride in his voice, 'She photographs me almost every day.'" Each photograph being a sort of caress, I guess. Martin says she waited a long time - until quite recently - before she "dealt with the photographs" (to start turning them into paintings). The results are painful to behold, but brave and, in the end, loving.
Elinor Whidden and 12 Point Buck at Gallery 44
Prices on request. Closes today, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 120, Toronto; 416-979-3941, www.gallery44.org
The black, shaky Windshield Wiper Tent set up on the floor of the gallery is a mordantly funny and insistently disturbing centrepiece to Whidden's exhibition, Ford Explorer. For Whidden, the auto industry has already packed it in and we have all returned to the primordial landscape, trudging about through the wilderness like Group of Seven landscape painters, dragging a few car parts behind us as talismanic reminders of what was. For her, the automobile is already archeology. "Whidden's lean-to shelter [the Windshield Wiper tent]" writes Dayna McLeod, in an essay accompanying the exhibition, "becomes a farcical, ineffective obsessive accumulation of car parts of the past in a post-apocalyptic future where nature has regained control, featuring Whidden as the sole survivor."
12 Point Buck, a Lethbridge, Alta., collaborative duo, have filled the vitrines in the hallway next to the gallery with kitschy paper and plaster tableaux of mellifluent scenes from nature, populated by cutesy, wildlife creatures that stop just this side of out-and-out Disneyfication. In their five-minute video projection, Deer Me, a deer-man hybrid (fur coat, rubber deer mask) manoeuvres, none-too-skillfully, through a scrubby brush landscape near Lethbridge. "We hear the footsteps of the cameraperson;" writes McLeod, "they are our eyes as we stalk the deer man on his precarious travels through the coulees leading down to the Oldman River. We hunt him, we observe him and we consume him, boldly assuming our 'rightful' place in the deer man's habitat."
John Macdonald at Odon Wagner Contemporary
$2,400 to $14,000. Until Feb. 28, 198 Davenport Rd., Toronto; 416-962-0438, www.odonwagnergallery.com
Here's a summertime show in the midst of winter: painting after painting of sun-basted, salt-encrusted denizens of beach culture, lying about on faithfully rendered stretches of sand, lounging beside turquoise tidal pools. Macdonald's holiday people swim, splash, dandle sunny children on their tanned knees (some of the children ride recreational ponies), and generally behave as if they haven't a care in the world.
These fortunate people are painted with an astonishing skill. Macdonald wields a virtuoso brush. He wields it so deftly, in fact, that he comes perilously close to being merely illustrative - and therefore decorative. His paintings are escapist, both in subject matter and in technique. They look at first like paintings by Eric Fischl - but they don't have that nerve-wracking sense of social critique that Fischl's do. Macdonald is a lavishly gifted painter. But instead of lightening up, he needs to buckle down.