Geoffrey Farmer

In his suggestively titled US debut, “Bacon’s Not the Only Thing That Is Cured by Hanging from a String,” Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer plays the damaged and delicate against the faux architectural, employing a collage logic that, while stylish, happily never settles into a comfortable groove. Known for a mercurial refusal of fixity and completion—many of his works are designed to change over the course of their public lives—Farmer produces objects and installations that rope found images and forms into a dance of shifting reference and formal tension. In this exhibition, the Vancouver-based artist shows extracts from one distinct series alongside a number of other individual works, all of them colored by a likable feeling for the sheer fun of shoving one thing up against another.

Occupying the main gallery is a forest of hand-built lampposts purportedly inspired by a line from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) concerning the satellite’s apocryphally deranging effect on mental health. Each painted wooden post is decorated with a selection of found and adapted bits ’n’ bobs and topped with a colored bulb. No individual component is particularly distinctive, yet the whole set feels rather spooky and—appropriately—slightly unhinged. Pulling Your Brains Out Through Your Nose, 2011, installed in the gallery’s first room, is a cluster of precariously taped-together magazine clippings suspended from chopped-up coat hangers. Again, the artist employs research (his allusion here is to mummification) as a springboard into something altogether more plastic and poetic than the term generally suggests.