Beth Stuart at ESP
Until Oct. 30, 1086 1/2 Queen St. W., Toronto; erinstumpprojects.com
The day before I saw emerging painter Beth Stuart’s new suite of paintings at ESP, a friend told me about a radio documentary she had heard wherein a physicist posited that, within a generation, technology will allow humans to penetrate whatever veils separate us from the multitude of parallel realities that surround our reality. Heady stuff.
Then, I saw Stuart’s paintings, and I got a glimpse of what these future transitions might look like. The future looks bright (and lurid, and stringy, and prone to pregnant pauses). Bring on the transporter beams!
Stuart’s presentation strategy is simple enough: She pairs non-figurative paintings featuring striated, patterned diagonals and lengths of gooey stretched shapes with paintings featuring large, solid and opaque blobs and impenetrable dark patches. She also cuts the tops of her canvases so that they tip ever-so-slightly inward, bend into each other. The paintings are arranged so that the space between the leaning canvases is minute, transitional.
The result is akin to two different (but related) worlds meeting, folding into each other, corner to corner; one world kinetic and skittish, in flux, the other hard and fixed, encased in dark ambers. The flow between the paintings is at times alarming, at other times soothing or simply baffling. But I would argue that it is the moment of transition, the cognitive and visual leap between the two types of depicted realities, that is the true hook here.
Maybe we won’t need to bother with that forthcoming cross-reality highway (who could afford it?) We’ve already got Stuart to take us on the ride.
Ken Nicol at MKG127
Until Nov. 12, 127 Ossington Ave., Toronto; mkg127.com
Ken Nicol is the Canadian art world’s secret weapon.
As the fabricator of choice for many of our international talents, Nicol’s work is almost constantly on view, if only to the informed. (A note of explanation: Sometimes artists hire other artists to actually construct the work in their heads – writers use editors, after all.) And now it’s time to take a good look at what Nicol makes for himself.
Nicol’s new show at MKG127, entitled Hundreds of Things, is a hilariously sweet enacting of obsessive-compulsive habits, via the intertwined acts of collecting and assembling.
Beginning with the number 100, Nicol offers the viewer such off-kilter treats as Sculpture made with one hundred beard hairs, which is exactly what it says it is, and looks like a wire pot scrubber about to meet its last pot. Or, My name written one hundred times by people I’ve never met, a collection culled from addressed-to-Nicol packages, which, when mounted in a single frame, looks as if it was done by someone with dissociative identity disorder – one of whose “alters” has a keen sense of humour.
My favourite work is the set of four photographed sculptures made from Pringles chips – next time you look at a tube, you’ll notice that the label advertises “100 chips in every can” – sculptures that layer the iconic, ovate chip shape vertically then horizontally, thus making a potato product weave, tuber macramé. The sculptures come in Regular, Sour Cream & Onion, Salt & Vinegar and Barbecue colours/flavours; a selection of hues/titles that, oddly, does not combine to equal 100 letters.
Also included are number games played out in different coloured inks, on grid paper, a metal sculpture that weighs – well, you can guess – and a tiny wall-mounted sculpture made from 100 corners cut off 100 exhibition invitations – corners cut to create a 100-degree angle between the vertical and the horizontal sides of the invite’s rectangle.
