Arthur Desmarteaux and Allison Moore at Open Studio
Until Feb. 18, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 104, Toronto; openstudio.on.ca
Every once in a (too long) while, one stumbles upon an exhibition that is so relentlessly cheerful, so buoyant and full of bonhomie, that one has to ask oneself why the bulk of contemporary art on view is so decidedly otherwise. Bloated profundities sell, I guess (see end paragraphs).
Micropolis 2.0, a paper sculpture/installation by the Montreal-based printmaking/multimedia duo Arthur Desmarteaux and Allison Moore, crams the tiny exhibition space at Open Studio with enough life, colour, clever sight gags and goofily deadpan urbanity to make one forget that the world outside is in a meteorological deep freeze.
The set up for Micropolis 2.0 is simple enough. A narrow shelf runs along three sides of the gallery cube, trimmed with digitally and/or screen printed cardboard backdrops of well-known Canadian streetscapes (Boulevard Saint Laurent in Montreal, Toronto’s Kensington Market). The “sidewalk” space is populated with everything from nervous cartoon raccoons to smiling trees to photo-realist cops on bikes to alien hipsters to streetwalkers. And that’s not the half of it.
The detail in Micropolis 2.0 is stunning. Any one of the dozens of strolling figures could stand alone, so to speak, as a work in itself, and all are animated, figuratively and literally, by an R. Crumb-esque sense of naughty (but never depraved or despairing) humour. Noses are elephantine, teeth shark sharp, legs insectile and flesh tones parakeet flashy. Each character – human, animal, alien or plant – is delineated in sharp, but never cutting, never cruel, twitchy black outline, betraying a doodler’s freehand sensitivity to the immediate as well as an editorial cartoonist’s eye for a subject’s frailties as well as flair.
Meanwhile, the urban topography, the familiar buildings and shops culled from civic centres, is also teeming with life – figures pop out of windows, fly over the rooftops, and perform erotic dances (care of a tiny video screen) in store fronts. I defy any viewer to find a lifeless centimetre in this installation, a moment’s pause in the surreal parade. Busy is just too small a word for Desmarteaux & Moore’s aesthetic. Effervescent works. So does genius, madcap genius.
Jean Bridge at Red Head Gallery
Until Jan. 28, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115; redheadgallery.org
Around the corner at Red Head Gallery, Jean Bridge provides an (unintended) counterpoint to Micropolis 2.0’s bouncy flâneurism.
Bridge’s video installation, Around the Block, projected in three parts, explores, close up and in slow motion, the areas between urban hot spots – the commonplace wire fences, concrete barriers, hedgerows and wrought iron, the brick backs of buildings and the untended, weedy patches of green.
These lovingly filmed sub-spaces – invisible-by-design, connective links that allow the urban wanderer to rest his/her senses and then more easily move between destinations – are indistinct and primarily functional, meant to go unrecognized.
So, for Bridge to film such spaces as if she was making a National Geographic documentary about a rain forest or the Himalayas is not only gently subversive (who decides, after all, what spaces are valued and what spaces remain unnamed, uncharted?), but also just plain weird. Good weird.
Contrary to all the urban-planning-speak above, Bridge is not attempting to romanticize the mundane, not falling into the trap (one that catches too many Canadian artists) of overseeing an abject, dull subject. Rather, Bridge’s projections instill a kind of summery calm, a leisureliness that will be familiar to anyone who likes to stroll without a goal.
However, Bridge’s occasional injections of people into her scanned spaces, via low-res green screen, function as a reminder that even in the most abandoned urban locales, one is never truly alone. As pointed out, in neat parallel, in Micropolis 2.0, even the trees are whispering.
