A painting by Anne-Laure Djaballah
Anne-Laure Djaballah at Muse Gallery
Until Nov. 4, 1230 Yonge St., Toronto; www.musegallery.ca
Gazing at Anne-Laure Djaballah’s new suite of paintings at Muse Gallery, I was plagued by an admittedly weird, nostalgia-driven question: What were those little creatures in Fraggle Rock, the ones who obsessively built and rebuilt tiny towers, called? Someone out there knows.
Djaballah probably remembers them. Indeed, she might be one. The Montreal-based painter’s wondrous pileups in paint carry enough frantic, congested action to shame the busiest urban planner. Layering architectural forms and diagrammatic lines over erasing patches of mixed colour, and then repeating the process, Djaballah gives her canvases the halting, piecemeal dynamism of stop-motion animation.
For a painter intrigued by urban landscapes and the collision of functional and domestic architecture (Djaballah’s artist statement describes her fascination with Montreal’s “packed alleyways, shipping yards, oil refineries”), Djaballah wields a rather sparkly palette. No cinderblock greys here, no cold steel blues.
Instead, Djaballah blends opaque azures with chalky whites, floral pinks with coral reds, wet nail-polish shimmer with bruised purples. Her rough brushwork is sweetly counterpointed by twitchy applications of caking oil stick and thin lengths of pencil lead.
Some viewers may find Djaballah’s work too busy, but I find the majority of her works perfectly balanced. When a cluster of building blocks and bent plinths threaten to overwhelm a work, Djaballah simply wipes some of them out with semi-transparent, almost monochromatic (there are always under-colours) swathes. Yet, she never covers over the good stuff, and this leads to canvases highlighted by moments of watchmaker-precise interplays of line, filled shapes and negative space.
In the last decade, Djaballah has had fewer than a dozen solo exhibitions. For all you buy-early types, here is some fresh real estate.
Duke & Battersby at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects
Until Nov. 13, 1450 Dundas St. W., Toronto; www.jessicabradleyartprojects.com
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby (better known as simply Duke & Battersby) are modern-day witch doctors – by which I mean they use primordial totems and actions to provoke insights into how we live now. Come to think of it, that more or less sums up the medical industry anyway.
In their latest multimedia exhibition, Duke & Battersby continue their career-long exploration of animal-human interaction, but up the ante with a blunt, yet resonantly poetic video portraying a knowing (yes, I mean that in the biblical sense) relationship between a woman and a female ape.
Now, before you go calling the morality police, a proviso: The video, entitled Lesser Apes, is tastefully done, with the shared sexuality of the ape and the human being presented in a fragmented, referential manner, one so remote from the physical interaction described that said exchange is practically an abstraction. This is not an art- house equivalent of one of those “Fido gets too excited” clips on YouTube.
What Duke & Battersby are really discussing is human loneliness – how contemporary life, lived in an asexual, asensual bitstream, breeds a yearning for the tactile, the inexact, the furry and the pungent.
As usual in a Duke & Battersby video, Duke provides the narration and sings odd, incantatory songs throughout. Also per usual, the video is not a linear narrative, but a mash-up of Discovery Channel-style found footage, mumblecore low-fi dramatics, performance documentation, and the duo’s sparkling, inventive animation.
Lesser Apes, longer than most of their previous works, may well be Duke & Battersby’s masterpiece, as it assembles, and then brings joyful, wacky life to, all of their pet obsessions: wildlife, domesticated animals, Duke’s own madcap sha(wo)man persona, dissociative cognition, mortality, and the body as site of both horror and delight.
