Dan Perjovschi (until Aug. 15) and Stitching Community (until Sept. 6) at the Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park, www.rom.on.ca
It's time for me to forgive the Royal Ontario Museum.
I have ranted, I have raved … and it's amounted to nothing. The Michael Lee-Chin Carbuncle is here to stay, a freighter-load of ugly I must get used to, as one does so many unpleasant things in midlife.
Furthermore, my aversion to said structure has kept me from seeing many quality exhibitions, and that has to stop. How pleasing, then, to re-enter the ROM after a year's absence and find one large topical exhibition, and two exquisite historical micro-exhibitions on the same day. All is forgiven.
Dan Perjovschi's Late News appears, at first, to be little more than a collection of childish doodles cluttering up the artfully angled walls of the Roloff Beny Gallery. And, to some extent, that is exactly the impression the artist seeks to create. If you stumbled into the space and thought it had been besieged by vandals, you'd understand one of Perjovschi's key points - namely, that the preciousness of institutional art presentation deserves a good smack, a thorough tagging with a Sharpie.
But when viewed as a whole, Late News, rather ironically, approaches the very sort of epic, solemn art the artist wants to parody. Using a crude, fast and cartoonish style of illustration, Perjovschi comments on big issues, from our recent Olympic fever to the financial meltdown of the past year, from egg-headed art theories to Toronto idiosyncrasies.
Of the last of those, my two favourites are an image of a panhandler, who has only a few coins in his hat, sitting beside his dog, whose hat is full. In Toronto, it's easier to care about cute dogs than messy homeless people. In another drawing, titled Culture of Diversity, a multihued group of people stand together. How nice. Note, however, that each character is plugged into his/her own music device, thus simultaneously sharing a space while living in isolation. If nothing else, Perjovschi has a keen eye for his surroundings.
It's too easy to dismiss Late News based on the installation's rough appearance, on Perjovschi's aggressively populist, almost to the point of pandering, stick-figure style. The bigger question is: In an age of instant messaging and instant information, are Perjovschi's clever art attacks any less meaningful, less fortifying, than the information provided by traditional media?
A better counterpoint to Late News than Stitching Community, a tiny exhibition embedded in the Canadian rooms of the ROM (head for Benjamin West's melodramatic The Death of General Wolfe, then take a left), would be hard to imagine. This quiet but powerful exhibition celebrates everything that is the opposite of the noisy world Perjovschi skewers.
Composed of a selection of quilts made between 1848 and 1976 by women from the North Buxton, Ont., community - a town built by former slaves who escaped to Canada - Stitching Community deftly explores the connection between shared labour (quilts are assembled by teams of women) and shared aspiration, without ever resorting to maudlin metaphors or cheap hardship-is-character-building pieties. Rather, the making of these spectacular quilts must have been great fun - a time when women got together to gossip, laugh, and gossip some more.
The quilts themselves speak volumes. Made with a precision it would be difficult to match by machine, the quilts are examples of geometric abstract art that will bring joy to even the most retentive minimalist. One quilt in particular, a dynamic 1880s "log cabin" quilt (i.e. one decorated with alternating light/dark fabrics), is topped off with a jostling layer of jet-black fabric diamonds. The diamonds are defiantly bold, like tiny shields against the cold, and perhaps, given the time period, against other outside threats. Talk about Black Power.
Another quilting motif on display is the "signature quilt," a kind of fabric census. Signature quilts were made to commemorate community, with the primary decoration being the copied-in-stitches signatures of the residents. In bright red or inky black thread, dozens of names ring out, challenging the vagaries of history, of memory.
When you go to the ROM, you expect to see precious art on display, but rare are works that speak so directly of, and to, an entire culture. Stitching Community is a family album in cloth.
Art School (Dismissed)
Until Sunday, 180 Shaw Street, www.artschooldismissed.com
Schools are often considered "second families" by the children who attend them (with parallel horrors and joys), and a temporary exhibition on view this weekend seeks to rekindle that creepy-happy classroom nostalgia.
Art School (Dismissed), curated by Heather Nicol, features works by more than three dozen artists and artist collectives, all of whom have one thing in common - they also teach art. What is unique about this event is that, instead of simply making art about schools or pedagogy in general, the artists were asked to make art within a school - namely, the decommissioned Shaw Street School, a lovely old pile of brick and glass that would not be out of place in an Archie comic.
Multimedia artist Sandra Rechico, who teaches at the University of Guelph, is showing 2 Is > 1, a collaborative work with Colette Laliberté of the Ontario College of Art & Design. Like the best site-specific works, Rechico and Laliberté's installation was inspired by objects found on site.
"When we went into the school, we found a number of discarded workbooks for what was probably Grade 3 math," Rechico tells me, "so we took some of the graphic symbols from those workbooks - circles, hexagons etc. - and we used those as a kind of language, to create two works for the walls. We also incorporated the plugs and other holes in the walls, which were in really bad shape, and used them as connecting points."
The second half of 2 Is >1 was created in response to a vacant spot where a chalkboard once held court. "There's a ghost outline of the board," Rechico says, "so we created a three-minute stop-motion animation on an OCAD blackboard and are projecting it over the blank space where the old blackboard used to be."
Toronto has a long history of site-specific art and theatre events, Rechico notes, but the challenge is always the same - to not let the art play second fiddle to the space: "The really important thing with site-specific events is not to get too literal, and not to get too complicated. Take one simple thing and work with it."
You see, you learned something already.