Liss Platt at MKG127
Until Feb. 4, 127 Ossington Ave., Toronto; mkg127.com
One of my 2012 resolutions is to be more patient. I even have a role model: post-conceptual (more on that later) artist Liss Platt. When not collaborating in the media-fusing collective Shake-n-Make, Platt creates dizzying, large-scale works based on Spirograph patterns, plus slow-mo, deep look/deeper study Super 8 films. Forget patient; Platt is a zen monk staring at a mountain and waiting for it to blink first.
Platt’s work is grounded in, and fuelled by, elaborate literary and mathematical systems, precisely calculated schemes for readings of reality (that’s the “conceptual” part), but is ultimately more interested in material results than theories (that’s the “post” part). Thus, her work appeals to the theoretically minded as well as the visual pleasure seeker (not that the two are always mutually exclusive).
To wit, Platt’s latest exhibition, Constant, at MKG127: a visual diary of a summer spent observing, then re-observing, recording then re-recording, a single object suspended in place while the world around it shifts, both radically and subtly. The object turned subject is a humble one – a swimming raft anchored in a cove, little more than a banged-together flat bed of wood resting on the water. What could be more mundanely Canadian?
Or, conversely, profoundly Canadian? Under Platt’s observation, everything beside, above, and beneath the raft is in constant flux, from the clouds to the tides, creating an abundance of shifting visual information. Looking at her dozens of neatly parcelled, time-lapse photographic captures of the raft – framed together in blocks of images – one witnesses shifts in the backdrop, so to speak, from flat water and clear skies to churning water and fat bellied skies, and everything in between.
The raft, apart from the different grades of sunlight reflected on its surface, remains unchanged, like the proverbial stoic mountain. And the colours Platt finds in the water and the sky – from eggplant purple to orchid pink to linen white to jade green – are unabashedly lovely, meant to both engage and engulf the senses.
The long view enacted here naturally requires a parallel investment from the viewer (though not exactly so – you can’t live in MKG127 for a few weeks, much as you might want to). Take your time with these images, move slowly between the burbling waves and bumbling, chunky-to-razor-thin, colour-changing clouds. Your efforts will be well rewarded.
Martha Eleen & Mary Catherine Newcomb at Loop Gallery
Until Jan. 29, 1273 Dundas St. W., Toronto; loopgallery.ca
Member-run Loop Gallery’s new show, a pairing of separate sets of works by painter Martha Eleen and sculptor Mary Catherine Newcomb, may, at first, appear dissonant.
Eleen’s diary-like suite of oils on wood, depicting the day-to-day life of her differently-abled son Gabe, and Newcomb’s collection of modified natural objects, including a massive sculpture of a rabbit made of live grass and moss, are, well, an odd couple.
But I like odd. I like finding commonalities even more.
In Eleen’s work, the tender, maternal impulse is rendered via a painting technique that is anything but tender. Eleen scratches, scrapes, scribbles over and builds up her surfaces like a squirrel building a winter hideout – it’s impossible to find a square inch of flatness on any given panel, a painterly moment not infused with tingling action-reaction movement and, by extension, anxiety and tension.
