While Desmarteaux and Moore celebrate the hallucinatory appeal of a city’s pedestrian traffic, Bridge meditates on the dreamy, happily undemanding alleys, passages, and microclimates. Same coin, two sides.
Here’s hoping a smart curator will put these artists together in a shared space.
Marc Audette at Gallery 44
Until Feb. 11, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 120; gallery44.org
I wanted to like Marc Audette’s Art Class 010, a series of photo-based works and an installation at Gallery 44 – and, as pure eye candy, his imagery is unquestionably appealing. Everything I like is present in Audette’s exhibition: vivid colour, performance-derived images, an inherent theatricality.
But there’s an unwanted, too familiar (to me, at least) tone to the show, one of self-importance. The work presents itself as far more profound than it actually is, and that kills the buzz generated by Audette’s otherwise impressive staging.
Audette poses sexy models on top of, around, or coming out of a banged-up table with a hole cut into it, then lights the models in lurid purple, lime and cobalt. Sometimes the models are also draped, or entangled, in a white fabric, or have lengths of police tape attached to their limbs. It’s all very circusy, very Québécois. La danse et la vie … etc.
Why, then, do the models look like they’re about to be executed by a firing squad? Why is the lighting so menacing, so arch? Why is the table photographed as if it’s a butcher’s block?
These images, derived from play and experiment, present the opposite – melodrama and academic frigidity. Lighten up, already.
IN OTHER VENUES
Murmurs at Gallery Arcturus
Until Jan. 30, 80 Gerrard St. E., Toronto; arcturus.ca
Chock full of spectral figures and haloed after-images, this sensual group show looks exactly the way late afternoons in January feel – haunted and striving to hold the light.
Khalid Thamer at the Burlington Art Centre
Until Feb. 19, 1333 Lakeshore Rd., Burlington, Ont.; thebac.ca
Thamer’s paintings play hide-and-seek with the viewer, burying personal and primal symbols underneath slow-burning embers of flame-coloured paint.
Joscelyn Gardner at Station Gallery
Until Feb. 12, 1450 Henry St., Whitby, Ont.; whitbystationgallery.com Gardner’s luscious, deftly crafted prints, depicting flowers, roots, and elaborate body ornaments, fool you at first – what she is presenting is a history in symbols of the healing practices used, and cruel tortures endured, by enslaved Creole women.
