Rewind: Republic of Love
The Power Plant, Toronto
Love has lent its name to any number of popular films, novels and advertisements. Its meaning should be nearly exhausted. But within its constant use there also lies a pining desire, a constant longing for something more. "Republic of Love," a show of emerging artists at The Power Plant, encompasses both a sense of exhausted meaning and an ineffable yearning.
In Jay Isaac's paintings it appears that the canon, as a means of navigating meaning, is rapidly decaying. His exhausted and ruined landscapes suggest Lawren Harris's foliage turned to mulch. Mingling amid these crumbling historical referents are the figures of a New Age spiritualist aesthetic—rainbows and orbs glowing in opalescent colours. This is a pairing of star-crossed lovers; the spiritual not resting so easily within art as perhaps it did in the days when Harris perused theosophy.
A desire for the lost and impossible also runs through the work of Tony Romano. In Love Song, humble light patterns run across the walls of a darkened room to the sound of a softly sung love song. The lyrics and lights issue from a computer randomization that links a collection of preprogrammed phrases. The work explores the nature of the generic: the song is structured to be lyrical no matter which phrase follows which, and in all the ballads generated the theme is the same—the story of the sun and moon pursuing each other and never meeting.
A sense of irrevocable fate also permeates Shary Boyle's work. Here, through the nostalgic touch of watercolour, she fashions psychological vignettes that structure intimacy under the ambivalent terms of dependency and abandonment. Just as each painted character appears haunted by its other, so Boyle manages to combine the suggestiveness of Gothic literature with the naked emotional honesty of independent comic books.
The intimate sadness in Shary Boyle's work is mirrored in the popular despair of Paul P.'s. His delicate line drawings portray wistful young men, slender, innocent and pale. These portraits are transcribed from porn magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s, showing us men who were intricately sexually knowing but entirely naïve of the AIDS risk they would soon run. In this they are memento mori of another, more innocent, time.
"Republic of Love" does not represent the ecstatic obsession of first love but rather the complex frustrations of love's wane—an unspoken emotional sense of something missing and a longing to fill the gaps.
Summer 2004
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