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Persona Volare

How considerate of the Toronto-based collective Persona Volare to remount their hit Paris exhibition, “Canadian Club,” in the accessible-by-bus (at least to me) rooms of Brock University’s Rodman Hall. Paris, of course, is no St. Catharines, but Persona Volare are always Persona Volare.

Roughly divided into two sections—a more formal exhibition in the Rodman Hall galleries and a series of wonderful interventions plunked throughout the Hall’s many bare rooms—“Canadian Club” matched wits with the viewer at every turn.

In one room, Johannes Zits got cheeky, literally, with a wall-sized video projection that showed him quickly entering and exiting a heavenly blue room, apparently looking for his clothes. Zits’s perky naked bottom flits past the viewer in a split second (no pun intended), like a white-tailed deer’s rump caught in the headlights.

Down the narrow hallways, Lorna Mills played equally kittenish games with words. Her videos, mounted on tall plinths, challenged the viewer’s attention span with a steady, unrelenting stream of nonsensically logical words and phrases. A concrete poem brought to life, Mills’s Scrabble scramble was part logistic breakdown, part overcaffeinated standup and all Dada delight.

Less giddy contributions came from Lisa Neighbour, who lit up Rodman’s front entrance with a huge, gorgeous light sculpture that might be a necklace stolen from a giantess’s jewellery box, and from Carlo Cesta, who decorated a grand stairwell with a series of steel boxes containing glistening sheets of coloured glass (a neat response to the ornate stained-glass window backing the stairwell’s landing). Clever, clever.

Upstairs, things got a little spooky. Lyla Rye’s projection in one of the Hall’s former bedrooms offered a haunting sequence of spectral playtime vignettes. In the video, Rye’s five-year-old daughter, her sweet face taking on what seem monstrous proportions, played aggressively with a dollhouse. As the child poked her big pink hands and bigger, pinker forehead into the dollhouse’s windows, one felt that at any moment one might be picked up and moved to another room by a giant, babyish hand.

A former private mansion, Rodman Hall is now, of course, a very large (and somewhat lugubrious) dollhouse for artists. Rye’s sly video reminds us, by positioning micro within macro, that art-making is rooted in play, lost innocence and no small amount of childish bossiness.

Meanwhile, in the cool, hushed formal galleries, two spectacular works immediately grabbed the viewer: Brian Hobbs’s dance floor–sized sandbox (giantism seemed to be an under-theme in “Canadian Club”) and John Dickson’s stellar cardboard model of a fantasy city.

Hobbs’s play pit, complete with handsomely crafted, Brobdingnagian wooden spools, balls and other toys, was meant to be fooled with (as the sand all over the gallery floor proved). Hobbs even provided the visitor with a Zen garden rake, to make sandy waves and curly furrows in the dunes. As relaxing as all that sounds, there is still something unsettling about playing, especially with dirt, in an art gallery. We are so well trained by Don’t Touch signs and stern security guards that, even with permission, we approach interactive works like this with cautions chiming in our heads. Both an invitation and a challenge, Hobbs’s sandbox created a curious tension, an anxiety out of sync with its humble appearance.

But for pure pleasure, Dickson’s cityscape was hard to beat. Made entirely of plain brown cardboard, this ideal metropolis was packed with miniature replicas of world-famous buildings—a kind of SimCity for architecture nuts.

I lingered by the tiny towers and fabled skyscrapers for half an hour, imagining what fun it would be to set a team of mice loose between, say, San Francisco’s Transamerica building and Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. Beautifully lit, as if caught in the final hours of a long, perfect summer day, and occasionally misted by puffs of ghostly white dry-ice fog, Dickson’s cardboard fairy city gave “Canadian Club” an unexpected but welcome calm, a whiff of dreamy sophistication.

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