Katzman Contemporary – annetteandquebec

I am elated to be recovered from at least a month of labyrinthitis and to stroll up the Rail Path to Miller Street, in the intoxicating heat of this Saturday afternoon in July.

Katzman Contemporary

Part Time, Deep Time by Meghan Price

First let’s think about textiles (domestic, temporal, decorative, familial, utilitarian and in the realm of craft; the human story told in placemats, dresses and rugs) and now geology (just the opposite, encompassing the study of the Earth, the solar system, nearly incomprehensible time frames, confounding forces, speculative theory; a trail of continents, boulders, pebbles to puzzle over.) In her exhibition at Katzman Contemporary, titled Part Time, Deep Time Meghan Price investigates this unlikely pairing and comes up with some fresh and unpredictable objects and images that seem to allude to the groping for understanding of some deep questions through the humble, practical arts.

Metamorphic by Meghan Price

Detail of Metamorphic by Meghan Price

I really liked looking at Metamorphic, the sculpture shown above. The artist hand-stitched geological markings onto paper to create an embroidery of a massive boulder. The manifestation of this eccentric idea is bold and exciting.

Meghan Price takes her knowledge of textile skills into new territory. She weaves wire, layers and folds it, literally bastes it to rocks.

Detail of Erratics by Meghan Price

Detail of Wire by Meghan Price

Installation view of Stratigraphy by Meghan Price

In her piece Stratigraphy Meghan Price creates a sculpture reminiscent of a typical geologists core sample, except this one is made of screen printed fabric, variously patterned and compressed, and looking quite a bit like a towel display at Pottery Barn.

Detail of Stratigraphy by Meghan Price

I recently saw an exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada called Artist Textiles. A number of the most familiar artists of the twentieth century (Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Matisse) were included. In every case the artist textiles were images by these extremely famous artists printed onto fabric. The same images could just as easily been been printed onto bookbags or mousepads. It was like the gift shop took over the Museum. Meghan Price, on the other hand, goes so deep into this domain that it becomes abstract, open ended and encompassing all.

Number Please? scarf by Salvador Dali

Thin Air, Bright Light by Yi Xin Tong

While walking around the gallery I learned that Yi Xin Tong was born in Antarctica. I couldn’t help wondering if his short films (stop action GIFs), made from found imagery of various situations playing out in a dramatically barren, snow and ice landscape, were related to this fact in some way. Do these silent, dreamlike tableau equate to memories of early years in the deepest south?

Installation view of short films by Yi Xin Tong

How to Capture Penguins by Yi Xin Tong

The films, some only a second or two in length, some with a single image which flickers slightly, read as mysterious messages from another time and a stark realm. I like the efficiency at work here, the way so much content and formal nuance is packed into these succinct artworks.

Yi Xin Tong’s carved inkjet prints on paperboard share that sense of ‘less is more.’ Quite literally, in this case, since the artist excavates the boards, tearing out the former depictions to create mysterious and playful new images upon an expressive and unifying ground of swirling striations and gouges.

Piano Factory II by Xi Yin Tong

Arwork by Yi Xin Tong

Off the beaten track and away from the high rents a small group of galleries are staking out territory in an unexpected region of Toronto. According to the Toronto Star this neighbourhood is called Carleton Village and it is bordered by St. Claire avenue on the north and surrounded on the other three sides by railway lines: the CNR/CPR mainline to the west, the CNR railway lines to the east, and the CPR east-west railway lines to the south. Carleton Village may be a little scary at night but during the day its all about auto body shops, humble residences, scrub vegation and a particular industrial park ambience that has an undeniable allure.

View outside galleries on Miller Street in Carleton Village

View in back of galleries on Miller Street in Carleton Village

Jessica Bradley Gallery

At the Jessica Bradley Gallery an exhibition by Tricia Middleton, titled Making friends with yourself, feels strangely like a reference to the gallery exterior, albeit darkly exaggerated. These messy piles of forgotten, encrusted stuff are just the kind of tableaux that lurk along railway lines, highway-off ramps and docksides to be stumbled upon by the unwary dog-walker or middle-school biker.

Detail of installation by Tricia Middleton

Installation View

The signs along a riverbank might say No Dumping but Tricia Middleton knows our world is full of items to be discarded, hidden, eroded, rotted and finally washed away by moving water or overgrown with weeds and more debris.

The cascading wax references memorials, alters, communion with others or the world beyond and furtive spiritual gestures of all kinds and provides another dimension to the work. The faint glimpse of glitter beneath the wax encrusted surface and the purples, pinks and blues suggest the melting and blurring of once distinct ritual objects, desperate prayers and secret meetings.

Sometimes the objects are simply ghastly like various disconnected swollen body parts. These headless torsos or set of legs might be encased in clothing, vestiges of their former existence, and now swarming with indicators of truly repellent new life.

The installations raises all kinds of interesting ideas concerning our consumer society and relationships to things, about waste and value, about pop culture notions of the macabre in relation to marginal forms of spirituality, ideas about what is disgusting and grotesque, nightmarish glimpses of the terrible fates of the missing among us, and about the forgotten people, places and things that exist in the hidden margins of our society.

Katzman Contemporary

Annabella Scondi lived from 1921 to 2005, mostly in rural Northern Ontario. Recognized as a brilliant diarist in her teenage years Ms. Scondi then laboured for decades as a ticket taker at the Sudbury train station. She went on to retreat to “a cabin in the woods” and create a startling body of outsider art, presented at the Katzman Gallery by Braden Labonte and the Cultural Capital Consortium.

Annabella Scondi

An elaboratly produced audio guide is offered to help the gallery visitor understand Annabella Scondi’s influences. The audio piece breathlessly details the evolution and development of the artist as a wounded genius or maybe an elusive idiot savant somehow able to comprehend the complex machinations of the art world and create astute artworks, responding to such varied influences as Brancusi, Duchamp and Bridget Riley.

Unsent Letters to Bridget Riley

Installation view of The Scondi Collection

Personally, I understand the lure of the distant obscure object. Growing up on the Canadian prairies I wanted to know more about, say, Conceptual Art, and studied the relevant publications diligently. Its not an uncommon phenomenon. I have a nephew who, at the age of seven, living in rural Manitoba, became obsessed with the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach, particularly a certain musical passage from that work. He went on to study music composition and eventually attended a remounting of the piece at 2012 Luminato festival. His own music is influenced by this classic avant garde work.

The work on the walls can be a little bland, especially without the audio accompaniement, but Braden Labonte and the Cultural Capital Consortium have created a very interesting piece. Particularly relevant in this era of social media hyper communication where all is revealed instantly the work creates something that we are not quite sure about and as such becomes a kind of meditation on the whole idea of the internationally obscure.

Did Annabella Scondi ever exist at all? One of the recurring images throughout the show is the obscured visage.

Detail from The Scondi Collection

Supposedly her work was all tied up with her self imposed exile subsequent to an early brush with fame (and 30 years at the wicket in Sudbury). What does this show tell us about fame, particularly of the art world variety? The Warhol take on fame, the way he captured and coveted the aura of Lisa Minelli or Marilyn, has morphed through the decades so that movie stars like Tilda Swinton or James Franco covet the esoteric elitism of the performance artist.

Installation view of The Scondi Collection

Was Annabella Scondi created so that she could be unearthed and deconstructed by the art world, ever hungry for the new and obscure, someone who is genuinely unknowable? Or is she real, an accurate cipher decoding and dialoguing with the cultural forces of her times?

Category: Katzman Contemporary

July 4, 2015

November 5, 2014