Jennifer Murphy at Clint Roenisch Gallery Until Oct. 9, 944 Queen St. W., Toronto; www.clintroenisch.com
Contrary to the stereotype, most artists are industrious sorts. And then there's Jennifer Murphy - the one-woman sweatshop.
Twenty Pearls, Murphy's fantastic new set of sculpture-collages at Clint Roenisch Gallery, combine fragility and bombast, the delicate and the spectacular, with unnerving skill (and seemingly limitless patience).
I'm not a big supporter of the Protestant work ethic as a value in itself, but when a work of art is so obviously labour-intensive and yet made to look effortless, even slight or ephemeral, one can't help but shake one's head in amazement and admiration. Murphy weaves hypnotic webs.
Here's her process: combing through old encyclopedias, art books and magazines, Murphy cuts out images of animals, plants, insects, gems, birds, skulls … whatever grabs her eye.
She does not, her gallerist assured me, print images off the Internet: The quality of the printed image thus sourced is simply not good enough.
From this collection, Murphy hand-sews bits together to make large, abstract constructions (in this case, the bulk of the works resemble skulls) - works big enough to fill a bathtub, but so frail they can only be held up with sewing pins.
Murphy's puzzle-fitting is deft, a marvel to watch. The sizes, shapes and colours of her culled sources cohere neatly, with strong internal composition, and are thematically intriguing. For instance, one of her skulls is composed of cutouts of jewellery and gemstones (a Damien Hirst nod?), another from cutouts of mummified heads and early-human skulls. My favourite skull was made with cut-outs of black-furred, feathered and scaled animals.
In The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, a defence of ornament and kitsch, Celeste Olalquiaga describes the 19th-century habit of turning "the novel world of industrialized production [into something]more familiar by shaping it after plants and animals," a penchant that created "organic and mechanical … wish images" (such as wrought-iron lamps made to look like flowering plants).
Murphy's works update this material culture anxiety by trading the 19th-century uncertainty over mechanized production for our current unease with instant, and continuous, image production.
But you hardly need consider all the cultural ramifications of Murphy's beautifully layered artifices, her simulacra leap-frog games, to enjoy the final products. If anything, you'll be too busy propping up your jaw.
Melanie Friend at Gallery 44 Until Oct. 16, 401 Richmond St. W., Toronto; www.gallery44.org
Melanie Friend's photo-based multimedia essay Border Country could not be more timely. As politicos in this country debate what to do with a boatload of refugees from Sri Lanka, Friend examines, with a suite of eerie photographs and a handful of blunt recordings made by refugees in Britain, the calm, institutional brutality of asylum-seeker detention centres - or, as they are rather Dickensianally known in Britain, Immigrant Removal Centres.
Friend never cries shame at the authorities who decide the fate of displaced people, but her photographs are decidedly shame-making. The rooms where migrants are held are lifeless halls, spaces that give only lip service to the value of colour and light. There is no art on the walls, the windows are barred, and the furniture all seems to have come from the same office supply store, in 1977. And the colours Friend does find - in gangrenous-green steel barriers, spoiled-oatmeal-beige carpets, vein-blue upholstery - are at best banal, at worst life-denying.
Intriguingly, the only spaces in which a human presence can be detected (Friend photographed all the spaces empty) are the rooms designated for religious practices. Already housed like criminals, the migrants are further reduced and categorized, turned into mere ethno-cultural signifiers, by bureaucratic misapplications of the tenets of multiculturalism. All the prayer rugs are identical, as if bought in lots.
Border Country is powerful art, and powerful observational journalism. One of the refugees interviewed, "Isaac," tells Friend that the IRC "took my picture, but I don't know what they are going to do with it."
It's a safe bet they won't be putting it up in the ghastly Tang-orange dining hall.
Eva Kolcze at XPace Cultural Centre Until Oct. 8, 58 Ossington Ave., Toronto; www.xpace.info
Next time you're at XPace Cultural Centre, don't forget to slink down to the basement. The low, dark room forces you to stoop and stumble - but the current project, Eva Kolcze's haunted (art) house audio-video installation 775 King St. West, is worth the threat of lumps and bumps.
Kolcze's video appears simple enough at first - a wide shot of the side of a building on which the outline of a demolished, smaller building is still visible. According to Kolcze's research, until 2007, 775 King St. W. in Toronto was the location of a small retail and apartment building dating from the late 1800s. Since it was torn down to make way for a condo tower, all that remains is a greenish-black shadow.
As the video plays, Kolcze enacts a spectral homage, part dance piece and part performance art. Dressed in black, a woman (perhaps Kolcze herself? the didactic materials do not say) traces, on the grassy vacant lot, the outline of the former home and shop. The woman repeats the pattern, and sounds of shoes walking on creaking floorboards can be heard, mixed with construction (or destruction) sounds. Ghosts can be so noisy.
That such a humble structure, missed by few, could be the source of so loving and mournful a tribute is both heartening and revealing. Toronto's history, Kolcze alerts us, is disappearing - and nobody but a lone, silent witness cares to notice.