Rewind: Dedicated to you, but you weren't listening
The Power Plant, Toronto
If this group show were an essay, its thesis would be, "Yeah, whatever, let's get together, then apart." If it were a cake, it would have balding strawberry frosting with a Marcel Duchamp-shaped candle plowed into the middle. If it were clothing, it would be a pair of jeans, thinning unflatteringly through the butt with Julia Kristeva quotes scrawled in ballpoint pen on the kneecaps. In short, "Dedicated to you, but you weren't listening" may seem adolescent, but it is adolescent in the way that we all remain so: rebellious, contrarian, smugly surly and secretly, easily hurt. As one learns early on in the land of slamming lockers and graffitied washrooms, that hurt is mostly founded in relationships—be they to viewers or crushes, corporations or culturati.
This tough-talking conceptualist-styled tenderness speaks most clearly via Jonathan Monk's Searching for the centre of a piece of A4 paper, which locates two film projectors on opposite sides of a small screen. One projects a black dot moving on a white ground; the other, a white dot moving on a black ground. The dots swirl around each other, kissing for milliseconds before parting. While capturing frustrating relationships in concrete form, it also alludes to process; Monk asked two of his dealers to mark the centre of a standard piece of paper. The dealers' repeated attempts demonstrate that their "eye" may not be as finely tuned as either they or their stable of artists and collectors would like to think.
Architectural environments are also given a good talking-to. In Roof Gap (Vancouver Special), Andrew Dadson leaps in slo-mo from house to house; in Neighbour's Trailer, he incrementally adjusts a piece of vehicular jetsam. This art is testament to the proverb "old skaters never die; they just lose their wheels." In this modality, half-pipes are superfluous and Dogtown extends beyond abandoned swimming pools. But the subculture's look-at-me machismo, however reined in and architecturally theorized, is still evident.
Derek Sullivan's Endless Kiosk flanks the gallery entrance and replicates Brancusi's Endless Column. It's plastered with posters advertising shows, gigs, gallery fundraisers and the like. Is each artist (and curator) here just a placard for him- or herself? Is there any point trying to reach kids who aren't already part of the scene?
Well, duh, it's like, yeah, screw off already.
No, wait. Come back.
Fall 2005
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