GTA2021
The title of the big, new exhibition at MOCA is GTA2021. This title “plays on the name of the city’s broad metropolitan area” we are earnestly informed, on the MOCA home page. It wasn’t until I looked at the biographies of the participating artists that I understood why a definition of GTA would be required. Many of these artists have deep connections elsewhere. Places — around the world — are named, where the artists currently live, where they were raised or educated, where they exhibit or find influence and inspiration. Other places and a sense of otherness, are core to many of these artist’s identities and overtly manifest in their work. “GTA” wouldn’t mean much back in their far-flung communities and too, there is the possibility of confusion with a certain popular video game.
What then, does the show say about the GTA? Yes: Toronto is the most diverse city the world! But beyond that cliche, in this context, Toronto doesn’t really exist at all. Instead it has a sort of airport status, bland, meaningless, a place from which to participate in a “global discourse.” A characterless point converged upon rather than a vital place from which art emerges.
21 Greater Toronto artists and collectives address the most pressing issues of our time — and our city.
MOCA GTA2021 brochure
The idea of addressing city issues was not really in evidence. But does that matter? Could be it’s just a marketing glitch. The important thing is there are many interesting things to look at and think about in the GTA2021 show! Here are a few:
On the main floor of MOCA, inserted into the exterior wall, is a sculpture by Ghazaleh Avarzamani. Referencing Islamic screens and patterns, Catholic confessionals and some undefined utilitarian object, the work plays with daylight and shadow and with ideas about private and public, outward and inward and seeing and being seen. Encountering this object upon entering the exhibition sets the viewer up perfectly. This piece is beautiful and thought provoking.
Also on the main floor, displayed in a hard plastic bubble, is a model for a parade float by the collective Common Acccounts.
I wish this artwork was bigger! It’s packed with tiny details and shimmering mini-video displays, but it’s so small that it becomes toylike, hard to look at and to take seriously.
I’m still on the main floor! Walter Scott could not ignore the pillars in MOCA. He half-dressed them and created a complicated installation with a raw, youthful, shambolic appeal.
In the background are hung big, bold, voluptuous, painted curtains by Julia Dault, one of the most well-known artists at GTA2021.
I wandered upstairs and was startled and impressed to encounter the sound installation by Sahar Te, which consists of a massive SUV, a Toyota Tacoma from 2003, this one draped in stretchy black nylon and emitting a deep, throaty, menacing breath. It made me wonder how many incel creeps are roaming the streets of the GTA in their oversized potential weapons of mass murder!
The artist indicates the vehicle beneath the drapery is a 2003 Toyota Tacoma: truly a beast!
Also upstairs, is work by Tony Romano, a Toronto native who is drawn to the imagery and culture of Southern Italy, his ancestral home. Here, Tony Romano fuses fragments of found objects to create a romantic sense of yearning for another place and time. All these pieces have a soft, dreamy, tenderness about them.
Personal ethnic heritage is more often the subject of the art in GTA2021 than Toronto and its problems. Maybe the artists have to look back first, and only then, can they look ahead.
The artist Azza El Siddique used the “architectural plan of a Nubian burial chamber” to create an atmosphere of decay and abandonement. Cultural artefacts and heirlooms lie scattered, looted, broken and water streams down to further erode and destory. Here there evocation of a cultural past feels sorrowful and bitter.
I kept going.
At the back of the third floor I found a screening room. Here are the results of a collaboration. Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko worked together to create a truly original, witty and engaging video titled Surface Rights. I was so happy that I made the effort and rounded the corner of the third floor at MOCA to find this wonderful video tucked away in the most distant part of the exhibition.
This is what it’s all about: The city of Markham has an illustrious past as a leading breeder of dairy cows. A work of public art, in the form of a chrome cow, by the artist Ron Baird, was gifted to the city. From there, everything unfolds.
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko have two pieces in the show. Charity, which you can watch here, is an interactive documentary (jointly produced by the NFB and MOCA) in something called 360 video. “Surface Rights,” a related video, you have to see at the Museum. It’s worth the trip.
I hope one of Toronto’s most celebrated cultural ambassadors makes his way down to MOCA to check it out.
annetteandquebec 