Knowing that Volker Seding's new exhibition of photographs from his Architectural Series consists entirely of vertical, black and white prints of the façades of old urban buildings in no way prepares you for their impact. The fact is, this virtuoso German born, Toronto-based photographer, whose latest work is now at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, can make you feel you've never looked attentively at a building before.
Part of it lies in the astonishing detailing afforded by Seding's high focus. And part of it lies in the way that detailing is delivered to the viewer by means of the photographer's truly exquisite printing. This is the kind of printing whereby the photo is somehow or other taken beyond the realms of normal vision to a point where there is now more to see in the photograph than was originally seen by the naked eye. This is probably impossible, but that's how it feels. A kind of strange surrealism haunts these brilliant photographs -- a surrealism that is close to the word's origins: sur-real, or more than real.
All this is probably far from Seding's objective which, presumably, is to document these burnished, sometimes genteelly down-at-the-heels buildings -- like Toronto's Massey Hall, The Cameron House on Toronto's Queen Street West, mouldering loft buildings in New York and Havana -- with a certain loving objectivity, and with the organizing and categorizing passion of an anthropologist.
The fact is, however, that gathered into the deep gaze of Seding's big camera, these venerable old buildings come on like human subjects -- unique, flawed, quirky, crumbling and yet indomitable. What presence they embody! And what stories they hold -- scarred at street level by their intercourse with the world (graffiti, signage, broken windows), and left quietly to themselves above ground (dark, silent rooms, tattered blinds, empty windows). $1,200-$2,000. Until June 9; 700 Queen St. W.; 416-504-0575. Harold Edgerton at Jane Corkin Although they are firmly rooted in the high-speed, stop-action technological processes he developed in 1931, early in his life-long teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the stroboscopic photographs of Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) have a good deal of gleeful, almost boyish exuberance about them -- the source of the wonder they bestow.
Who is not still enchanted -- the recent wizardry of digital manipulation notwithstanding -- by Edgerton's magical Milk-Drop Coronet (1957), where, in falling onto a red surface, a single drop of milk splashes into the freeze-frame form of a creamy, porcelain-like diadem? Or his raucous Shooting The Apple (1964), aka How to Make Applesauce at MIT, where a speeding bullet is strobographically halted in mid-air, having just blown to hell the sacrificial fruit -- a piece of unforgettable technological slapstick.
My favourite Edgerton is his Bullet Through Balloons from 1959. What is so compelling about it, for me, is the way the mischievous bullet, having ripped its way through three white balloons, leaving one in tatters and the others with horrible yawning gashes like Pac-Man's jaws, now hangs suspended way over at the right side of the photograph -- where it appears to be quietly looking for more mayhem. $3,000-$6,235 (U.S.). Until June 30; 179 John St.; 416-979-1980. Catherine Beaudette at Loop The strongest part of Toronto painter/collector Catherine Beaudette's exhibition Classified, is the part represented by metal tables and wooden shelves bearing certain collections of objects -- like the smooth, gnomic stones brought together for her museum-like presentation of Rocks That Look Like Eggs, for example. What gets problematic is when Beaudette plays artist more fiercely than she seems really at home with, drawing and painting these kinds of objects on big sheets of free-hanging paper -- as a series she calls The Book of Knowledge. Here, depiction is everything and, well, nothing. What it comes to is a step backward, away from the imminence of her object-collections; to commit them to paper is to drain her rocks and shards and faux-eggs of all of their energy, forcing them to languish in some ill-defined realm of experience we may as well call aestheticism. Or dandyism. $400-$1,500. Closes today; 1174 Queen St. W.; 416-516-2581. Napoleon Brousseau at DeLeon White The centrepiece of Napoleon Brousseau's new exhibition Get Well, at the spacious and still unfinished new DeLeon White gallery, is a ceiling-high, columnar tower made of 70 sheets of the artist's charcoal drawings, which he has now recycled by smearing them all over with chocolate and beeswax. The whole tower rustles and breathes because of a large ceiling fan just above it. Rich with chocolate, it poses a presumed challenge to our meaningless love of luxury, proposing instead the salty tears of moral renewal. The chocolate drawings are $200 each (with 20 per cent going to Amnesty International). Until May 21; 1096 Queen St. W.; 416-597-9455.