John Heward at Peak Gallery
$5,000-$20,000. Until July 1,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108
Veteran Montreal painter and drummer John Heward tends to see things pretty much as they are, and it will come as no great surprise to anyone at all familiar with his work -- with his visual art, with his improvisational music, or with his taut, spare writing -- that he has titled his new exhibition simply Painting.
It would be entirely in the spirit of Heward's brand of minimalism merely to say that this new exhibition, now at the Peak Gallery, is just that: paintings. More specifically, however, it is a selection of paintings in black ink on heavy, unstretched swatches of the artist's trademark white rayon, loosely pinned up on the gallery walls (the artist's trademark way of hanging them). There are four paintings in the exhibition, and they are all called Untitled (Gesture). The gesture in question has supplied each of the white cloths with a single configuration -- a black, rough, calligraphically frayed "V" shape in its middle.
But of course simply stating that isn't going to be quite enough. And besides, there's more work in the exhibition: In addition to the four paintings, there are also three large works that also share one title: Abstraction. These majestic pieces lie somewhere -- I was going to say fall somewhere, which would be literally true -- between painting and sculpture or installation (or architecture). Each of them is a soft cloth pillar made of a number of rayon cloths on which Heward has previously painted. Their sculptural presence comes from his having gathered the cloths into a single vertical object (having knotted or folded or somehow slung them together) and pinned it to the gallery ceiling. The intermingled cloths tumble together from the top of the gallery to the bottom, where they finally (sometimes) acquire a tenuous footing by slightly bunching up on the floor.
The abstractions are cunningly contrived to change their appearance radically in the course of your time spent with them: Each of them reveals a bit of painting here and a bit there (a sudden black circle on one side, a passage of brick-red near the bottom on the other side, and so on) as you walk around them. They may look more or less furled, but they stretch out luxuriously and sensuously in time and through space.
But what of the untitled V paintings? What are we to make of them? "I've heard all the interpretations," Heward says with a mock-weary fall in his voice and an inextinguishable twinkle in his eye. Interpretations? Oh, right. About how people keep seeing things in them: seagulls, eagles, vultures, wishbones, peace signs.
Of course you know perfectly well that all such desperate image-identification is going to be irrelevant to Heward.
He calls the paintings "gestures," after all. No, what matters for Heward is the improvising. The act. The expressive doing. And the Vs? Well, the Vs are simply what have been left behind -- this time. Their task is to proclaim: "John Heward was here."
Tyler Clark Burke at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects
$250 each. Until July 1, 1086 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-537-8827
Tyler Clark Burke, local indie queen, illustrator, producer (she founded Three Gut Records), impresario (of her floating music/art/dance party, Santa Cruz), performance artist and writer, is currently exhibiting a delicately wrought passion play in glass called Shimera.
This intense, symbolically saturated progress takes the form of 17 small glass cubes in which are encased the artist's own drawings, now laser-etched in 3-D. These cubic "scenes" unravel a complex, Jungian, almost Dante-esque mini-epic that traces the perilous journey of woman who apparently (in cube 01) dies, ascends (to somewhere or other), and who will become "a Standing Bear."
As Standing Bear, the woman undergoes a number of startling transformations (she and her bear divide, reunite, get "boxed in," and so on) and perpetrates a few outlandish acts, one of which seems to involve (it's not entirely clear) the dispatching of her opposite player in this arcane dance, Trepanation Man (trepanation being the drilling of a hole in your skull, which, whatever medical relief it might assist, presumably lets your consciousness escape like a release of steam).
According to Clark Burke, Shimera is derived from her nostalgia, as she puts it in her artist's statement, for "the manufacturing of memories, both true and false." It derives, more particularly, from those kitschy little 3-D laser-cut glass cubes you see in souvenir shops, with tourist-iconic items (like the CN Tower) inside. "These miniature cubes," Clark Burke writes, "have become the perfect avenue for my death obsession. I love the idea of fleeting energy locked into glass blocks which capture phantasms forever. Their glass is my brain," she continues, clearly warming to her task, "with laser beams melting and displacing molecules to leave little scars as memories of heat."
You might expect, after all this self-ballyhooing, that the cubes themselves might come off as sparkling little anti-climaxes. Not at all. Each of the Bear-filled, Trepanation Man'd cubes is an unfailing delight.
Moira Clark at Xexe Gallery
$250-$6,500. Until June 30, 624 Richmond St. W., Toronto; 416-646-2706
I've always enjoyed painter Moira Clark's work because it was continually so guileless, so innocent. She tended to make big, rich, non-representational paintings (occasionally a stylized still life would creep in) that were made up of flat planes of clear, saturated colour. They were never edgy, avant-garde works, but they betrayed the artist's own joy in making them and that was always infectious.
It still is. And the sheets of bright rich colour are still there. But now the paintings are informed by a certain kind of complication: Her exhibition, titled Red Ochre and Blue Grey, which sounds as if it's about pure painting technology, is, in fact, about her recent sojourn on the northeastern shore of Newfoundland (a land, the artist assures us, to a great extent defined by the colours red ochre and blue grey). But this means that Clark has set herself the task of somehow recreating, as she puts it, "the essence of a place through colour, rhythm and pattern," the last two qualities presumably carried by the grids that structure her paintings. The trouble now, however, is that there is suddenly a program in the pictures: Long Shore, for example, is clearly a stylized cliff. Fogbound, in its geometric gathering of greys and soft yellows, is, well, fog (and fog is not well embodied by geometry). Now, there is an unsettling gap between Clark's subject and her treatment of it. And this gap generates a surely unwanted sentimentality.