3 – 7 November 2005
Booth #700

Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Exhibit Hall 'E'

An ambivalent hen confronts a rustic and oddly menacing wooden poultry coop in Myfanwy MacLeod’s photograph, Chicken. The title alludes to an aggressive game of showdown in which two players will go to extreme measures in order to preserve their pride. As a mild insult, “chicken” is slang for coward. Does this pullet stand in for the artist? Does she (artist as chicken) thereby bait or hazard the self-portrait-as-trap?

Geoffrey Farmer’s sculpture, 521 Pounds Rescued, is comprised of a pallet stacked with plastic-wrapped, salvaged wooden furniture, placed in The Power Plant booth. Throughout the duration of Farmer’s hearth-focused installation at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, discarded furniture was stripped, chopped up and kindled each day with a broadsheet of workers’ ordinances inked with pitch from the fire of the previous day. 521 Pounds Rescued was resolved formally to escape The Power Plant’s combustion machine: a well-disposed tribute-pile, vaulted and sprung.

Brian Jungen’s new sport-inspired work further collides rules of value and labour. Talking Stick employs an autocad-based mechanical carver to inscribe mass-produced baseball bats with strike slogans and trade union mottos. Germaine Koh’s Un couple de dés melds North American car culture, macho ornamentation and the ready-made weapons of old-world protest. Matched pairs of used cobblestones linked by a decorative metal chain resemble at once the fuzzy dice of automobile decoration, street weaponry, male jewellery (and anatomy), and restraining devices. The title echoes that of Stéphane Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), perhaps evoking some desperate call to fate associated with displays of aggression and acts of protest.

Recent pottery-bearing, painted metal stabiles and Calder-inspired mobiles by Damian Moppett inspire his new sculpture in marble-like plaster and wood. Moppett develops an organic, biomorphic form that fuses the elements of handmade ceramics and modernist sculpture from their conventional opposition. His framed yellow silkscreen, Sasquatch Symposium, enlarges a found flyer in order to brightly endorse the search for the uncategorized and thus, as yet, unreal.

Judy Radul presents two companion works to her major 5-screen projection installation, Downes Point. Forcing tensions between nature and the avant-garde, a text and image work and a video piece reflect on how best to represent the “scene” and the unseen. In a Hornby Island setting, the principal actor from Downes Point gives a speech written by the English producer, scene designer, and actor, Gordon Craig, which he imagined he might address to the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre following his historic and well-documented co-production of Hamlet with Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1909.

Ron Terada’s photographs draw our attention to oddities in the ordinary and selected random diversions. Handmade street signs, chance encounters and visual gags point to the detours in expression that exceed audience expectations—in more ways than one...

Kevin Schmidt’s suite of watercolours, entitled small waves, cold water, depict the simple, unremarkable activities that facilitate surfing—a pursuit defined in culture as sublime by its very short moments of glory. Ian Wallace returns to urban figures and the intersections they inhabit with a group of street works that includes In the Street, Rodney (1986 - 2005), and New York City II, 2001.

Jessie Caryl