Geoffrey Pugen: Sahara Sahara at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art Until March 27, 952 Queen St. W.; www.mocca.ca
I was not an early adopter of the video works of Geoffrey Pugen. His fresh-out-of-art-school projects about animal/human hybridity I found a bit thin and obvious, although well executed (the man knows his way around a lens). But, lately, I am coming around.
Last fall, Pugen unveiled Bridge Kids at Gallery TPW, a multi-channel installation about telepathy, the future, and magic rocks, starring only creepy kids. It was as weird and wonderful as it sounds. Pugen's latest work, Sahara Sahara, on display in the MOCCA lobby, is a kicky tribute to grind-house women's revenge films from the 1970s, such as I Spit on Your Grave, or Big Bad Mama, with a bit of Mad Max thrown in for fun.
Displayed on two flatscreens (with slight time/image variations between the two), Sahara Sahara introduces us to a gang of sexy, tough young women who, for reasons unexplained - but, one suspects, because the victims asked for it - ride around on bicycles beating up annoying, leering men.
The women live in an abandoned RV, in a scrubby forest, and when the men regroup to attack their hideout, the film becomes a full-on action flick. Fists fly, weapons are employed, fake blood flows, and the great Johanna Householder, la doyenne of Canadian performance/video art, appears in the bushes, like a watchful owl, decked out in Yoko Ono wrap-around sunglasses. What more do you want in a five-minute film?
Of course, Sahara Sahara begs these questions: Are we watching a straightforward action short, a well-made piece of pure entertainment unburdened by the parenthetical provisos of art? Or is this a meta-film, a film about action films, and thus loaded with all sorts of questions about representation, homage, reclamation, etc.? Or, is there no difference any more? (Furthermore, I could not help but be reminded of Laura Cowell's 1990s Super 8 shorts, the motherload of dykes-on-bikes, rough and raw DIY cinema.)
Mainstream, big-budget action films now constantly refer to other action films, employ inter-textuality as both a nod to the informed audience and as intra-filmic nods (or simply due to lack of originality, as an act of poaching). Maybe Pugen is arguing that the tropes of the action film are so exhausted the only thing left to do with them is celebrate and capitulate to (but not mock - Sahara Sahara does not feel like an ironic shrug) their very emptiness? Perhaps all we have left is art about art (to infinity)?
That's a lot of semiotic punch for a short film plunked, almost as if it were an afterthought, in the back end of a gallery lobby, just beside the bookshelf. Pugen is earning his early hype. His new work deserves a larger, more considered presentation.
Dancing Through Time: Toronto's Dance History From 1900 to 1980 at the Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market Until July 2, 95 Front St. E., second floor; www.stlawrencemarket.com/gallery
Balletomanes and living-room dancers alike will be intrigued by Dancing Through Time: Toronto's Dance History From 1900 to 1980. I have three left feet and bloated ankles, and I loved it.
The visual culture that supports dance performances - everything from the costumes to the playbills - is rarely presented as a genre in itself, but Dancing Through Time offers viewers a near-century's worth of material to engage. Naturally, there is a lot to plow through here, so I suggest you take the chronological approach, and let the inevitable narrative - how Toronto grew from an outpost of European dance to a hotbed of home-grown contemporary dance - be your guide.
The playbills, posters, and newspaper clippings are a goldmine for anyone with an interest in 20th-century commercial design, and students of the politics of body size will be fascinated to see what constituted a "dance body" in 1911 - the shift from healthy, even stout and sturdy ideals, as evidenced by dancers working before the First World War, to wispy and skeletal standards (starting in the 1950s), is marked, and alarming.
The exhibition is speckled with great finds: a mid-century dancer's pink makeup box, complete with her good-luck charms and half-used makeup, sits open, ready for opening night. A skimpy costume design for a male dancer, created by painter Harold Town in 1964, is less an outfit than a collision of fabric panels, silver alternating with cobalt. And Phyllis Osborne's costume designs, again from the 1960s, are fantastical, lurid and primitive, works meant to turn the dancer's body into a moving element, a flicker of flame or splash of water. Yma Sumac could have taken some lessons from Osborne.
In these days of alleged restraint and austerity (funny how that all depends on which team you play for), a time when the city's arts community will undoubtedly be confronted with the tired and illogical arguments about art as a necessity v. art as a luxury, an exhibition that chronicles the very tangible, inarguable contributions of a critical mass of artists, people who built and grew an entire culture via public investment - and made it last, and thrive - could not be more timely.
Mayor Ford and allies, consider this your invitation.
AT OTHER VENUES
James Gardner: Paintings in a Room at LE Gallery Until March 27, 1183 Dundas St. W.
James Gardner's debut solo exhibition, Paintings in a Room, makes goofy fun of a too-reverential, gallery-standard format: the holy white cube housing a monster, awe-seeking painting.
Gardner creates miniature rooms containing miniature paintings, and then warps the scenario by layering plywood, splints, wood filler and adhesive underneath his maquettes; thus giving the hallowed presentation format he mimics a burping, ridiculous, belly-over-belt-buckle sloppiness.
Intentionally awkward and bratty, Gardner's works let all the mess under the finesse slide and bubble down the gallery walls.
Alysa-Beth Engel: Meditation at Liss Gallery March 29-April 3, 140 Yorkville Ave.
You don't really look at Engel's teeming, waterfall-like paintings, you fall into them.
Graphic Details at Gladstone Hotel Until April 17, 1214 Queen St. W.
This collection of "confessional" comics by Jewish women is a mixed purse of hilarious anecdotes, bitter revelations, and jazzy, seam-busting graphics.
A. Shay Hahn: New Paintings at The Wilson 96 Until March 31, 615 College St.
Hahn's creamy paintings of axe-wielding, storm-swept ladies are as Canadian as a hangover cure (but far more appealing).