The Globe and Mail

Matthew James William Higginson at Side Space Gallery
Until Dec. 2, 1080 St. Clair Ave. W., Toronto; www.sidespacegallery.com

One would think that in the second year of a stubborn recession (yes, I know, the recession is “officially over” – from Bay and Front to Bay and Bloor), the gallery walls would be filled with art commenting on our economic and social woes. But, no.

Perhaps the art world is still in shock, or the systems that support art (everything from artist-run spaces to commercial galleries) are just behind schedule, as most displays and exhibitions are planned a year or more in advance? Whatever the reason, this strange lack of dialogue only feeds the incorrect notion that art has no social or political value, that art is a mere entertainment for elites.

Well, hands off the keyboard, commenters – all is not yet lost.

While cruising for dollar-store deals on St. Clair West, I stumbled on an exhibition by the multi-named emerging photographer Matthew James William Higginson – an exhibition about people who live in St. Jamestown, one of Toronto’s most misunderstood and neglected neighbourhoods. I hesitate to label this work “activist,” because that would limit its scope, but Higginson is definitely engaged in a social dynamic with his subject, an exchange that seeks to portray the fullness of a community often mislabelled a ghetto.

The first thing you notice about the people Higginson photographed in St. Jamestown is that none of them is positioned as a signifier for “poverty” or “marginalization.” For an emerging photographer to avoid such pitfalls, such literalness, is itself a minor triumph. There’s not a tattered bit of clothing to be seen, not one mud-smeared child.

What Higginson offers instead is a portfolio resonant with images of self-determination. The residents meet the camera’s gaze with knowing (and slightly suspicious) smiles, boastful gestures, distracted, busy glares and even slightly bored bemusement.

A young mother sits on a crumbling bench, propping up her curious child. Her confident face asks, “Why are you photographing me? I’ve got the situation under control.” A woman riding a heavily decorated mobility scooter smirks behind two pairs of thick glasses – as wary of, and experienced with, being watched as any supermodel.

The many elderly people in this collection meet Higginson’s camera with a forgiving impatience, and the children Higginson captures seem to barely notice the photographer at all. Higginson’s centrepiece photograph, wherein mayoral candidate Kevin Clarke proudly displays an enormous, exotic pet bird outside a storefront, perfectly demonstrates the dignity available to anyone when he/she takes rightful ownership of shared public space.

Refreshingly political and yet refreshingly free of preachy over-determination, Higginson’s work neatly straddles the boundary between art photography and journalistic record-making.

We need more of this sort of work, Toronto. Right now.

Howard Lonn at Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Until Dec. 4, 451 King St. W., Toronto; www.metiviergallery.com

Howard Lonn’s much-anticipated new series of oils on canvas, on display at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, is both maddeningly beautiful and cleverly conceived – two qualities that rarely sit together and behave.

On first glance, these paintings, a series of stark juxtapositions, should not work. Lonn has chosen for his core subjects modernist architecture and landscape design, and then punched up his loving tributes to the past with irruptions, if not dam bursts, of abstracted patterning – the latter literally on top of the former. This collision of too-familiar motifs is, in theory, the perfect recipe for one unholy mess, a smackdown more in tune with the gaudy epics of WWE than the elegance of a Greco-Roman match.

But Lonn is too smart to let things deteriorate into cheap, wobbly pyrotechnics. His studies of Mad Men-era design are expertly imprecise, more meditations and improvisations on themes than mere replicas. Subsequently, his dubbing of these vistas with loose abstract forms (cheese-coloured polygons, shiny tubes in primary colours, slick, sharp angles in blood red and toy-gun blue) strikes the eye as perfectly in harmony, if not complementary.

Had Lonn aimed for tidiness in either subset – high realism with the landscapes or slide-ruler sharp geometrical abstractions – the juxtapositions would appear forced, a belaboured intellectual exercise saying both too much and not enough. However, by letting the actual marking on canvas, the drips and slips, take messy precedence, Lonn instead has crafted a gorgeous, eye-popping suite – a collection that sets the emotional impact of nostalgia above the obvious academic and historical connections.

Sandra Smirle at Women’s Art Resource Centre Gallery
Until Nov. 27, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 122, Toronto; www.warc.net

Today is your last chance to catch Sandra Smirle’s haunting shadow puppetry at Women’s Art Resource Centre.

Using table-sized, laser-cut circles of Plexiglas, thick creamy paper cut by hand and a huge 10-foot by 14-foot sheet of Tyvek (an industrial polyethylene that resembles canvas), Smirle crafts topographical cut-out maps of random street corners. She then projects lights through the maps, creating a dancing interplay between the lit surfaces and their crisp shadows.

Mapping, Smirle’s wispy shadows argue, is an inexact science – one as susceptible to the vagaries of perception as any other decoding process. To wit, Smirle culls her maps from imagery gathered by satellites, a system that sells itself as indisputable. But by metaphorically and literally putting the technology under the spotlight, she turns these allegedly infallible geographies into fluttering, ethereal speculations, questions their reliability.

No space is wholly knowable, no matter how many angels we can now count on the heads of pins.

AT OTHER VENUES

Andrew Owen, public art installation
At the corner of Nassau Street and Augusta Avenue

With Stoop Punks, Owen’s latest public “photo-cubic” work, the photographer pays loving, perspective-warping tribute to Kensington Market’s most enduring subculture.

Stephen Cone Weeks at Galerie Lausber
Until Dec. 31, 880 Queen St. W., Toronto

Weeks’s multilayered tableaux sucker-punch the still out of still life.

Small Works at Canadian Sculpture Centre
Until Dec. 3, 500 Church St., Toronto

The CSC gets an early start on the Christmas-season gallery rush with a diverse, affordable group show featuring Mary Ellen Farrow’s suitably snowman-ish, plump stone figures.