Lewis Klahr (USA)
Lewis Klahr is a "master collagist" who lifts images from old comic books, Life magazines, and mixes them with found objects (playing cards, squirts of grape jelly) to evoke American life in the fifties and sixties - oddly enough, a period mostly before his birth (he is 36). These images are juxtaposed and disordered in a way that reveals the social conditioning we grew up with, while at the same time creating almost heartbreaking nostalgia. Consider Pony Glass, where images of innocuous, red-haired Jimmy Olsen from the Superman comics are clipped out and juxtaposed with sexual temptors of both genders. There is no speech, only cartoon balloons filled with random bits of copy from magazines of the period. In a typical image, Jimmy Olsen suddenly sprouts an enormous phallus through the front of his trousers. Much of the material is homoerotic. But Klahr has a wider, more dreamlike agenda, where hermaphrodite transformations take place against dated architectural fantasies of salmon-coloured stonework and acrylic paintings. It's tacky and heartbreaking. - R.C.

(Sept. 10, 8:00 PM, Varsity 7; Sept. 11, 1:30 PM, Varsity 7)