Rewind: Constructive Folly
Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough
At a moment when bombastic architecture seems uncritically celebrated internationally, "Constructive Folly" is a timely exhibition whose title boldly declares its position. Situating the show in the year-old Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, the curators Christian Giroux and Daniel Young took advantage of the context to raise the provocative question of what happens when artists mediate architectural phenomena. The result is a critical questioning of accepted notions of functionalism and modernist supremacy in contemporary architecture.
The exhibition began on a cynical note with blind, by Adrian Blackwell, in the gallery's glass vestibule. Blackwell shrouded the area with black vinyl, negating the surrounding architecture and obliterating the entranceway; certainly not a hospitable welcome. In contrast, James Carl's Minor Concession, in mimicking the architecture of the on-site Tim Hortons and recycling bins, re-established the gallery's relationship with the building by acknowledging architecture's need to accommodate flows of people and the waste they generate.
Lyla Rye's Project set up an optical illusion using two video projections in the corner of the room. The work made child's play of architectural form as the corner appeared to protrude and recede, breaking open the stability of right angles and the modernist box. Across the room, Galen Kuellmer's Crossways made stark reference to the modernist grid with a backlit, night-view photograph of an apartment building (the printing of the unfinished work was overseen by Geoffrey James and Daniel Young after Kuellmer died in a tragic accident last spring).
Olia Mishchenko's detailed drawings of captivating, incessantly expanding structures gave no indication of ever coming to completion. They relate to a history of visionary architecture, where the artistic imagination, unbound by pragmatic concerns, is allowed to soar beyond mere architectural limitations. The untitled drawn structures are tenuous and fragile and threaten to collapse like a house of cards.
In a different vein, Philip Grauer and David Deutsch's Nightsun series of black-and-white aerial photographs, shot at night from a helicopter in Los Angeles, represented the threat imposed by surveillance technologies, presenting architecture as an agent of control. Two works by the collaborative duo of Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman also hinted at the oppressiveness that is the legacy of modernist architecture. In The Dark Crystal a sculptural object was housed within a brutalist prefab structure reminiscent of high-rises and office towers.
As an indictment of modernist architectural practice, the exhibition succeeded as a provocation, though it suffered mildly from a self-conscious tension between the artists' practice and the curatorial premise, and from the self-satisfaction of answering its own question. It is not surprising that half of the artists were formally trained as architects and have since abandoned the practice in favour of purely artistic pursuits.
Spring 2005
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