Roland Brener
at Olga Korper Gallery
$9,000-$18,000. Until June 17,
17 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-538-8220
The degree to which sculptor Roland Brener's recent death (on March 22) shocked all of us who knew him and who loved him and his work is sadly exemplified by a paragraph in an article I wrote about him just last year for Canadian Art magazine.
I was enumerating the many difficulties Roland had confronted and overcome, the most serious being a bout with terminal brain cancer in 1999 which, I wrote triumphantly, "was supposed to have killed him, but which itself died within him instead, a process the artist seems to have found merely 'very interesting.' " I went on to point out that because, for him, "art end-runs confrontations with ruin," his work always seemed to embody "a certain madcap -- yet troubling -- élan."
The élan is still there, will always be there, but now, with this brilliant and touching posthumously mounted exhibition at Toronto's Olga Korper Gallery, it has darkened and turned bittersweet. Here, in this madcap array of fervent, charming, mordant and yet childlike works, some of them made as late as three months before his death, is the truly embattled Roland Brener: inventive, ingenious, touching, complex and wryly tragic.
It's difficult now not to read them personally. His majestic Wormhole, for example, a large, black, wooden, speaker-like maelstrom out of which are tumbling 12 small digital clocks with exaggeratedly long, red-tipped second hands ticking away madly as they come to us from another place in the universe, is all too easy to read as a route to (and from) a mortality located at some terrible, lonely distance from us. And his superb, toy-like Am I Sinking? -- a see-saw-like construction with a tightrope and, balanced on the taut wire, a small perky personage that I cannot but see as the irrepressible Roland--is a delightful high-wire act in which the tightrope-walker is made to waggle dangerously back and forth when you swing the heavy rock that hangs down from him on a cord. This rock is oppressive, a burden. But it powers the aerial artist's heroic, death-defying performance.
Everything else in the exhibition is lovely, too, and funny and touching: Ghost of Rickshaw, for example, with its delicate, invigoratingly contrived construction of horizontally and vertically fixed sticks, pins, balls and match heads (match heads!) in support of two big, suspended, googly eyes (Roland again), an echo of Ghost of Weeper from 1997. And Other Forces At Work, an elegantly "homemade" radio device which, because of the continual movement of a pendulum and the machinations of a mercury switch (a vial of mercury which slides from one end of a small tube to the other), transmits -- and alternately does not transmit -- live radio broadcasts into the gallery.
And a wondrously poetic piece called Gestures of Life, where thin slices of wood (from a parasitical tree which had attached itself to a second tree) bob unrepentantly on wall-mounted wires. And the extraordinary Desk Job -- a swoopy, art nouveau-ish two-unit piece of laminated computer-station furniture where the sitter (supposing you could ever find yourself in the embrace of this smoothly fleshy, anthropomorphized structure) is confronted with a tray of wobbly rubber controls from which hang a clutch of cut wires -- another sad emblem of the decisive end of communication, of discourse.
There is clearly not enough space here to discuss each of the works in this heady and inescapably elegiac exhibition. Everything is the locus of a sad euphoria. Because everything is profoundly Roland.
Chrysanne Stathacos
at Edward Day
$2,500-$3,500. Until June 14,
952 Queen St. W., Suite 120;
416-921-6540
Everything is spiritualism and rich adventurings into cloud-cuckoo-land in Stathacos's Aura Project, an epic journey into the interior rain forests of mind's meaning, which is thus far seven years along.
What Stathacos does -- or apparently does -- is take biofeedback-fuelled Polaroid photographs of peoples' auras. Her resulting head-and-shoulder portraits, which show her subjects with afro-like miasmas of rich colour clouding about their heads, are supposed to demonstrate something about "the relationship [to quote her gallery statement]between colour and portraiture beyond our usual definitions of race, gender, religion and ethnicity."
Sounds okay. Too bad the aura photos themselves are so tedious. For me, the pictures are muddy (though colouristically rich, in a spilled-ink sort of way) and sort of goofy. Auras don't seem to have all that much form, and the cloud of chromatic unknowing that invariably engulfs her subjects seems either to oppress them or, contrariwise, to lend them a cockeyed joy ("Look, ma, I made an aura!"). It all seems a bit distasteful -- though it's not easy to say precisely why.
Dagmar Dahle at Akau Inc.
$600-$1,900. Until June 17,
1186 Queen St. W., Toronto;
416-504-5999
In her Weaving van Gogh, Dagmar Dahle has contrived a clever, beguilingly sensuous and winning project, in which the Lethbridge, Alta.-based artist, draws heavily, as she points out, on a couple of recent works of van Gogh scholarship that explore the influence of weaving on the work of the much-mythologized Dutch painter.
Reasserting, as one of her source books -- Carol Zemel's Van Gogh's Progress (1997) -- puts it, van Gogh's claim "that women were the ticket to modernity," Dahle examines, by means of her oil paintings and wall-mounted thread constructions, the artist's "life-long interest in craft, labour and decoration as vehicles for elaborating socialist ideals and pantheistic spirituality."
Talking her cue from this galvanizing program, Dahle has set about making paintings that, carefully extrapolating their colours from several of the master's works ( Vincent's Bedroom, The Artist on the Road to Tarascon, etc.), she creates by "dripping paint in threadlike lines of colour," first in one direction and then at 90 degrees to that direction -- thereby creating tweed-like weavings of his colour, abstracted and reassembled. "My 'woven' paintings of his works," writes the artist, "reposition his work through the filter of feminism's interrogation of the art/craft hierarchy."
Dahle's gnarled, knotted wall constructions, also agglomerations of the exact colours van Gogh used in a number of his paintings ( Starry Night, Weaver Facing Left With Spinning Wheel, etc.), are aggregates of coloured thread, wound upon themselves "the way one winds up balls of yarn," transformed now to dense little configurations of variegated colour that look oddly reminiscent of the original paintings -- and which nevertheless steadfastly remain what they are: densities of coloured activity that lie somewhere anterior to craft and maybe even to art.