Chris Ironside at O'Connor Gallery
- Until June 13, 145 Berkeley St. Toronto ( www.oconnorgallery.com)
Some weeks are full of terribly serious art; some weeks are packed with gentle, sweet art. And some weeks, one falls down laughing (in a good way).
Chris Ironside's hilarious (and yet touching) new suite of photos Mr. Long Weekend features the artist-as-model in a series of works that explore stereotypes of Canadian masculinity - in particular, the hoser dude, that creature made of beer, beer nuts, and beer-branded ball caps.
In a series of images that form a loose narrative, we see Ironside/hoser dude enact a classic Canadian 2-4 weekend: He camps, he passes out in his lawn chair, he lifts weights in his garage, he pees on a tree, he drinks. He drinks a lot. Half homage, half investigation, and all love song, Mr. Long Weekend is sexy, but never porn ridiculous, erotic, but never fetishistic.
There is a deep honesty at work underneath all Ironside's hooliganisms, and no small amount of sincere longing for the cavalier, stunted boy-man - an endangered species in this era of man-scaping and anger management.
Good riddance, some may say, but the decline of the dolt signals the ascent of the micro-managing, overgroomed metrosexual, and I'm not sure that's a fair trade. A world without unreconstructed guy's guys strikes me as a paler, less robust world. And somebody has to go to Adam Sandler movies.
Mitch Robertson at Birch Libralato
- Until June 26, 129 Tecumseth St., Toronto ( www.birchlibralato.com)
Last winter, Toronto performance journalist Nadja Sayej got herself in a bundle of trouble when she dared to ask, in a much circulated YouTube clip, why "conceptual art is so boring."
Nobody, of course, would answer her, because the bitter truth is that too much self-identified conceptual art is grindingly dull. Old-school conceptual art privileges concept over final product, brains over beauty, and, typically, leaves one with very little to actually look at or enjoy.
Mitch Robertson is not your average conceptual artist. He always gives you something lovely to gaze upon, even if you don't fully understand what he's on about. To wit, his latest show at Birch Libralato, A Bit of Luck, features spectral tracings of coins and front-door numbers, a beach ball-sized sphere made from wound black hockey tape, and two gorgeous prints reproduced from early 20th-century star maps.
You may wander through A Bit of Luck, not read a single explanatory note about the making of the art, and still indulge in its innate sensual pleasures - what is more intimate than a work made by gently rubbing a pencil over an object? It's an art massage.
But Robertson's conceptual mah jong is equally pleasurable, because, as in all of Robertson's work, human folly (especially Robertson's own) plays a key role. Robertson is a court jester in the tiny principality of conceptual art.
Exploring popular superstitions, particularly the habit Canadian hockey teams have of embedding a "lucky loony" in the ice, Robertson sets himself several tasks: First, he attempts to toss a handful of souvenir coins over and over until all the coins land tails up. The results of this nearly impossible goal are recorded daily, in rubbings of the coin faces. In another coin exercise, Robertson unravels a package of Olympic commemorative coins and tosses them repeatedly, searching for tails-up landings, until only one coin remains. Again, the scattered results are recreated in graphite impressions.
Chasing the other kind of luck, Robertson drove around southern Ontario seeking out houses numbered 666. With the owners' permission, he made rubbings of the number plates. Mocking the "number of the beast" superstition, Robertson focuses instead on the metal numbers themselves, asking us to look at them as metonyms for the tastes of the owners - thus making comfy and homey the satanic nonsense.
For a conceptual artist, Robertson is deeply invested in the accidental, and in evidence of the artist's hand - both atypical of the genre. Perhaps Sayej should have pointed her camera at Robertson.
Libby Hague at Loop
- Until June 13, 1273 Dundas St. W., Toronto ( www.loopgallery.ca)
Years ago, I saw an exhibition by printmaker and multimedia artist Libby Hague and wondered if I was looking at the nascent stages of an art practice with its boundaries about to explode. Well, call me clairvoyant, because Safety Net, Hague's wacky, cross-media show at Loop gallery, looks like it was hit by a paint, glitter and ice-cream bomb. Bring your own apron.
Dominated by a massive, twisting candy-coloured necklace made from pipe cleaners coated in plaster, and a variety of neon, oceanic paper forms, Safety Net is a stumble into the looking glass - but to call this show trippy does it an injustice, because no hazy stoner could pull off this kind of thoughtful, expertly crafted fantasia.
Stretching her flora and fauna from ceiling to floor, Hague has created a deliciously tilted world, a bountiful cascade of curly, printed paper flowers, nursery-hued dollops and pools, dainty tinsel sprouts, bendy shapes that resemble fat orchid roots, and a miniature archipelago inhabited by surreal plant forms and organic mis-shapes.
Unafraid to be pretty and (methodically) messy at the same time, Safety Net is the boldest example yet of this experiment-driven artist's determination to set printmaking free, let it out of the frame.
Safety Net is subsequently the most incorrectly titled exhibition in town - Hague is working without landing pads, and her slack wire is thinner than dental floss.