Robert Bourdeau
at Corkin Shopland Gallery
$5,500-$7,500. Until Sept. 1, 55 Mill St., bldg. 61; 416-979-1980
Even though his beautifully precise, immaculate photographs tend mostly to depict abandoned or inactive industrial sites or, in this current exhibition at Toronto's Corkin Shopland Gallery, a couple of noble edifices of the past, the veteran Ottawa-based photographer Robert Bourdeau is no industrial or architectural archeologist.
For although the detailed grammar of his photos (their struts and boilers, staircases and railings, smokestacks and pillars) are always historically instructive, he sees his majestic dead-tech subjects, which he began photographing in 1990, as structures that are curiously alive, mutely eloquent and very much in a state of transition.
I was in France with Bourdeau in 1998, sent by Canadian Art magazine to write a feature about his photographing derelict shards of the once-great Senelle mine in Longwy, east of Metz (the territory Emile Zola immortalized in his grim epic, Germinal). I watched for an hour while he readied himself and his giant Kodak Master View camera, preparing to photograph a huge defunct blast furnace lying on its side in the middle of the once thickly industrial valley.
Bourdeau pointed out, from under the canopy of his camera, that it was not the documentary aspect of the work that engages him, but, rather, the "powerful formal poetry" of these titanic objects. He invited me to look at the image of the blast furnace, now hovering upside down on the big camera's ground-glass lens: I could see then how the furnace lay prostrate between horizontal bands of sky and cradling grass, and how it appeared to have a rubbery sort of bend in it, so that, as I reported in my article, "it's swooning into the ground, iron to dust." As Bourdeau noted at the time, "This thing was full of fire, and now it's going back to earth. Pretty elemental."
For the Corkin Shopland exhibition, Bourdeau is showing two bodies of work: 12 quietly thoughtful, subtly gold-toned photographs of Toronto's historic Distillery District (where, by the way, the Corkin Shopland Gallery is located), and a suite of five particularly sumptuous photographs of Paris's Grand Palais, designed for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and now under what appears be eternal reconstruction.
Essentially a time-honoured classical skin and façade draped over what was, in 1900, still a revolutionary, glass-clad, iron skeleton (like that of its vertical sister, the Eiffel Tower, designed 11 years before for the Exposition Universelle of 1889), the Grand Palais is an architectural pivot point between the belle époque that preceded it and the age of strident, war-torn modernism that would follow it. Bourdeau has incarnated this operatic moment of cultural poignancy in photographs that are simultaneously delicate and hearty -- employing, for the first time I can remember, colour photography to do it. The interesting thing about Bourdeau's use of colour here, however, is how little he has actually proclaimed it. The Grand Palais still looks as golden-brown as the photographer's usual toning makes all of his prints, with only a little flush of fleshy pink here and there -- a sort of architectural blush that gives the superb hall a kind of breathing reality.
Kathy Dain at Peak Gallery
$6,800 each. Until July 16, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
The fact that Brantford, Ont.-based artist Kathy Dain's new paintings -- exhibited under the title Plain Song -- are made up of hundreds of small, painted, nipple-like bumps of wood arranged in close-packed formation on grounds of a different colour might not fire your imagination. These are exceedingly cunning paintings, however, and a great deal more than the sum of their descriptions.
Dain's little wooden bumps (the artist calls them "domes" and figures there are 2,912 of them per work, or 41,000 for the whole show) are arranged in subtle patterns that are eventually discernible, if you squint your eyes and relax. The domes are painted so that they bear a residual colour fraying out from their ostensible colour. This makes the viewing of Dain's dotted panels a lot more absorbing than it would be otherwise.
Each of her paintings is a diptych -- with coloured panel juxtaposed to colour panel: green and white, red and violet, and so on -- which further complicates what first seem to be dismayingly ingenuous paintings. And, of course, her paintings are enormously labour-intensive. "Everything I make involves acts of repetition that can take months," Dain writes in her gallery statement. "It is sometimes boring, often exhausting, and ultimately meditative," a sequence of states, she says, that keeps her "centred and content." And you can see how it would.
Ping Qiu at Peak Gallery
$2,200-$3,200. Until July 16,
232 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108
Showing at Peak with Kathy Dain is Ping Qiu, a Chinese artist currently working in Berlin. Ping Qiu's exhibition is a very cunning one. Her fundamental image -- the emblem upon which she builds her whole exhibition -- is the hand.
But not just the hand per se. Ping Qiu employs the hand -- usually her own hand -- as a model or template for an inventive number of creatures and configurations.
When she casts both of her hands in bronze, for example (as she does in three of her pieces for the current exhibition) and makes a "double hand" by joining the two of them at a single wrist, the resulting fanning-out of all 10 fingers then begins to look like a crab, a spider, a fluttering bird -- images she employs in myriad ways in her work.
In a performance piece the artist enacted at her opening, she made a number of castings of her hands in chocolate, for example, and then proceeded (ouch!) to cut off the fingers with a butcher knife and offer them to the crowd -- an act that was in equal measure darkly funny and savagely evocative of acts of political and/or religious punishment.
She uses rubber gloves as an extrapolation of the hand and uses them, moreover, with remarkable lyricism. In one photo-work, you see a serene pond with gatherings of yellow rubber gloves masquerading as lotus blossoms floating on its surface. In another, a cluster of pink lotus-blossom rubber gloves floats languidly down a Venetian canal. Sometimes her rubber gloves turn sinister and coruscating, as when she strings together spider webs of cord and affixes rubber-glove spiders at their centres.
In a catalogue published in Berlin, there is even a photo of Ping Qiu dressed in a red rubber-glove dress, the rubber-glove "hands" clinging to her shoulders as straps and almost surreptitiously caressing her breasts and tummy. After Ping Qiu, it's hard to look at rubber gloves in the same old way.