New Beginnings: Good Vibrations
Jon Sasaki Fireworks 2006 Video still
Hope, optimism, truth, progress: These are just a few of the motivational buzzwords linked to the promise of a new era in political, social and possibly global change recently ushered in by official happenings south of the border. Yet there’s something fundamentally awkward about all of these secular good vibes—we’re just not used to it. That’s especially true in the contemporary art world, where a guarded and mostly skeptical view of any new world order has long been de rigueur.
There are signals, however, that even in the art world a mood swing is in the works. Take for instance “New Beginnings,” an exhibition organized by Pamela Meredith at Susan Hobbs Gallery that sets out to put a pointedly positive spin on the current climate of hope with works by Los Angeles artist Soo Kim and Seattle artist Claude Zervas as well as local artists Jon Sasaki, Ann Dean and Tonik Wojtyra.
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Soo Kim Totters back from the series Superheavies 2008 |
The show opens with a set of five works from Kim’s Superheavies series, in which images of the multi-dimensional glass architecture of Lloyd Wright’s (son of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright) Wayfarers Chapel are bookended by photos of a young woman resting on a glass tabletop. Kim has cut, painted and collaged the surfaces of some of these images in delicate interventions that obviously suggest a time for reflection, both personal and structural. For his part, Zervas makes an elemental play on light and perception with two light box works based on entoptic phenomena—or, things seen but not necessarily visible—and while it may not be intentional, one can’t help but feel the mid-winter weight of seasonal affective disorder lifting in front of the warm glow of his Untitled (phosphene).
Sasaki’s video-performance Fireworks—which features exploding pyrotechnics caught inside a clear box—perfectly captures the barely containable excitement of recent days while his ongoing project I Want to be Welcome Everywhere, Always displays the ceremonial keys to various international cities collected online by Sasaki, making a wry if rightly cynical comment on the value of new doors opening.
A fitting coda for the exhibition comes by way of Dean and Wojtyra’s collaborative neon wall piece cleverly placed in the gallery’s upstairs space. Bathing the gallery in multi-hued light, it spells out this lasting message: Let’s hope. (137 Tecumseth St, Toronto ON)
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Ann Dean & Tonik Wojtyra Let’s Hope… 2007 |
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