print September 1992

Eldon Garnet

Eldon Garnet’s photographic tableaux explore the relationship between nature and still-life painting. Aptly titled Vanitas, 1992, each of the three triptychs in this exhibition focuses on the artificiality of the still-life genre. Ironically responding to our obsession with the environment, Garnet suggests that a fine line can be drawn between the estheticization of nature in traditional still-life imagery and in “green” politics: between the way in which each fulfills our desire for the “nautral.”

Foregrounding and isolating single animals in each of his photographs, Garnet dramatically lights

print Summer 1992

Renée Van Halm

Renée Van Halm’s large-scale sculptural works challenge Modernist conventions by incorporating marginalized artistic practices that have fallen outside the high-art canon into an ostensibly Modernist framework. For Van Halm, the marginalized consists of decorative flourishes, conventions that acknowledge the presence of the individual, and genres overlooked by the Modernist machine. Slowly moving away from her large-scale outdoor, architectural sculptures of the ’80s, Van Halm has fabricated measured and distilled works that comment on their own status as art objects, subtly challenging Modernist

print May 1992

Allan Harding MacKay

Allan Harding MacKay situated his recent installation, Source/Derivations II, 1992, within the historical framework of Canadian painting, examining the relationship between depicted nature and real experience. MacKay has based 35 variations on one primary source, a widely reproduced painting by Lawren Harris, created around 1930. This exercise attempts to sever ties with the landscape painting tradition, presenting instead a facsimile of nature for our investigation.

Harding’s enterprise begins with Isolation Peak, one of Harris’ most popular works, a classic scene of a single mountain peak

print March 1992

Roland Brener

Plastic funnels and tubing, small radio speakers, steel armatures, and simple electronics are all incorporated in Roland Brener’s sculptures. In the two large works that are the focus of this exhibition, Brener uses rudimentary “basement workbench” technology to perform simple tasks that mimic human endeavors. A few tears falling from the eyes of a robot or a nearly subliminal computer-generated sound program suggesting the sounds of a forest incite reflections on human experience, rather than simply a meditation on the effects of technology.

Brener’s relationship with technology is that of the

print February 1992

Barbara Claus

In “Entr’ouverture,” an exhibition of enlarged details of photographs taken in unnamed European graveyards and charcoal drawings based on Minimalist structures, Barbara Claus explores memory and its erosion.

Claus selects subjects—a tablet in the shape of an open book, cast-iron angels that stand guard in a cemetery, and an abandoned grave site—characterized by a sentimentality that permeates the exhibition. Their surfaces, flooded with gray light, read as details of a larger whole. Expanded in scale, these photographs have an authority that transcends the individual object. Together they serve

print January 1992

Robert McNealy

Sifting through the remains of history, Robert McNealy presents an inventory of images that are at once political, subjective, and presented in a nonlinear fashion. This archaeological approach has characterized McNealy’s practice throughout the ’80s, and it is the recurrence of associations, easily mistaken as random, that reveal themselves here. In Four Rooms (A Home), 1991, McNealy delves into middle-class aspirations by playing off the structure of the exhibition space—a spacious turn-of-the-century home surrounded by expansive grounds, which has been converted into a public gallery. Each

print November 1991

Joanne Tod

With the diversity of art media continually stretching boundaries, how is it that we continue to laud painting as the vehicle that will transcend the mundane? Why do we allow it to be the arbiter of the collective psyche and reap the benefits of a sanctioned art form? Over the past decade, Joanne Tod’s paintings have been taken as the barometer of Toronto art practice, so often characterized by ironic detachment and moral didacticism. Yet, while many artists have worked to escape the hierarchy that privileges painting, Tod’s survey exhibition intentionally feeds the mill.

Adopting the tradition

print September 1991

Michael Snow

For the past thirty years, Michael Snow has adopted diverse media to dissect the mechanisms of the perceptual process. This newest group of paintings reflects ironically on the conventions of the medium. Absent is the influence of the camera (Snow is known first as an experimental filmmaker); this time he is approaching painting on its own terms—as a practice implicitly freighted with a set of historical conditions that preface our reading of individual works.

Snow uses the methodological conventions of pointillism and realism in order to undermine their pretensions of historical significance.

print Summer 1991

David Craven

In his recent works David Craven attempts to reconcile his ongoing interest in issues of language, authority, and the demarcation of territory with his roots in formalist abstraction. Contrary to those artists who are now investing abstraction with subjective, expressive qualities, Craven is applying the mechanics of formalism to the sculptural and narrative conditions already extant in his works. The echoes of lyrical abstraction that typified his painting of the mid ’70s are still present, but now his objective is larger.

Craven’s paintings function as a conceptual unit, with the canvases held

print April 1991

Iain Baxter

Artwork addressing environmental issues may have found its antidote in the wall constructions of Iain Baxter. Calling upon a variety of domestic and industrial objects that range from kitchen knives and silk plants to steel and glass, these works galvanize many of the problems when art and politics meet. They serve as a remedy to the monolithic rhetoric of government officials and well-intentioned marchers who choose to speak with a collective voice.

Relying on the blackest humor, these eight works traverse the globe, acknowledging environmental infractions. All the major tragedies are represented

print March 1991

Irene F. Whittome

Irene F. Whittome’s Musée des Traces (Museum of Traces), is an artist’s museum—a site for the perservation of objects and the restructuring of the past. Filled with selected artifacts, the Musée des Traces adopts the physical structure of the museum, to serve as a repository of the artist’s experiences. Reconstructed as an installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Whittome’s Museum evolved between 1985 and ’89 and was first exhibited in an unused garage in Montreal. In its current form, the installation serves as a museum within a museum, mirroring our desire to order and identify while

print January 1991

Roland Poulin

The presence of Roland Poulin’s monumental, laminated wood sculptures is both formidable and disconcerting. Dense human-scale blocks penetrate the viewer’s space in an assertion of their physicality. Consisting of forms built up through a slow process of layering, covered with dense nuanced color, and then carved into, these two multipart works acquire a strong material presence that Poulin highlights by exposing the rough grain and edges of the wood. Intersecting planes and shifting related colors play tricks on our eyes, causing the spaces to advance and recede. It is this physical presence,

Linda Genereux