Candice Breitz: Streep, and Other Hollywood Signs
Candice Breitz Her 1978–2008 Video still
Celebrity spotters have been working up a fever pitch at premiere screenings and posh restos across Toronto during the city’s film festival this month. Now, an exhibition of works by Candice Breitz, opening this week, offers a different angle on obsessions with the rich and famous. Breitz, a South Africa–born, Berlin-based artist, has become internationally known for works that sample and re-edit movie clips featuring stars like Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Cameron Diaz. Also falling under her artistic lens are music fans obsessed with icons like Michael Jackson, Madonna and Bob Marley. The upshot? Celebrity worship isn’t just a pop pastime or a distraction from the dour everyday; often, Breitz indicates, it can be a field for fashioning, sampling and testing out our identities. (Breitz herself demonstrates this in Becoming, a work where she strives to imitate Drew Barrymore and other contemporary movie actresses.) While the Power Plant’s exhibition, “Same Same,” offers a look at many of Breitz’s best-known works, it also notably premieres a made-in-Toronto project, Factum. In Factum, Breitz investigates identity in a slightly different way, showing Canadian identical twins on pairs of flat-screen monitors. The scripts at hand here are penned not by a Studio City screenwriter, but by the ever-present authors of nurture and nature—powers well intertwined with, if not always acknowledged by, our favoured media chimeras. (235 Queens Quay W, Toronto ON)
Candice Breitz Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) 2005 Video stills Courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary / photo Alexander Fahl
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