Spring has finally sprung here in icy old T.O., and with it, the perennial event that is the Power Plant's spring show. Typically a more subdued affair than, say, the summer launch -- one of the best art parties of the year, cocktails and canapes in a lakeside tent, and open to all comers -- this spring's offerings are among the best I've seen in years.
Let's start with The Welfare Show, a series of installations by Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen (Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (Norway). There's an elegance to the pieces, and a chilliness. With good reason, too. The Welfare Show, as the name might suggest, is an exploration of disenfranchisement -- the experience of powerlessness at the foot of power, the state.
You enter through a set of swinging hospital doors, and find yourself in a sterile, white-walled hallway, where patients -- alarmingly life-like dummies, actually -- lie in mute in their hospital gurnies. Next, you enter a room with hard institutional seating. Number tags denoting places in line are scattered on the floor. A red light, indicating who is next to be served, flashes double zeroes. Then, onward to the gallery's large southwestern room, where a doorway marked 'administration' is sits a good 12 feet above the ground. Its access? A crumbling, un-ascendable staircase. Starting to get the point?
There is a certain obviousness to the show, it's true. But I, for one, was grateful for it. These gents have a point to make about the forces that shape and control our contemporary reality. With no small degree of grim humour, they incapsulate the frustration we've all felt trying to navigate the arcane mechanization of institutional phone systems, bureaucratic agencies, or simply trying to negotiate the structurs that define -- and confine -- the necessary activities of our everyday lives. It's a wonderful revelation that the show is as amusing as it us profound: The Welfare Show sets up an obvious dialectic of 'us and them', but, with humour, gives 'us' the pleasure of release: Rallying around our shared experience of helplessness at the hands of our in-built bureacratic power structures and sharing a laugh that, in all its absurdities, we are not alone. For all its chilly presentation, at its centre is a very humane warmth. And that, above all, defines the show's worth. A final gag? The brick smokestack that serves as signage for The Power Plant -- its name is inscribed on in big block white letters stacked vertically -- has been changed to 'The Powerless.' What might commuters whizzing by on the Gardiner Expressway think? Something, hopefully, as they indulge in our tax dollars, wearing away another layer of tarmac on the daily drive, like good little lemmings skirting the edge of the cliff.
Now, on to the next. Past the very good, and very big Welfare Show is a very small and even better exhibition of the works of Shary Boyle. Yes, that Shary Boyle -- the one that should have been chosen as Ontario's representative for the Sobey Prize. Once again -- and as if she needed to -- she proves why. Lace Figures, a display of 15 hand-made porcelain figurines that Boyle has created using the wonderfully anachronistic technique of 'lace draping,' is a triumph - a macabre romp through the well-groomed field of repressed Victorian decorative convention. Think Royal Doulton meets Tim Burton meets schlock-horror producer Roger Corman: the figures, all untitled, feature every manner of whimsical perversion: Multiple arms and eyes; a severed head held the figure holds serenely in its own hands, complete with gristly neck stump; flowers growing --- and unwelcomely so, judging from the expression -- out of an arm.
Like The Welfare Show, there's nothing hidden here. Boyle simply takes the traditions of a quaint, repressed decorative form and turns it loose, infused with all the visceral indulgences it sought to keep under wraps. There is a palpable delight in this liberation. The exhibition is cleverly designed, with the 15 kept under glass on display tables that sit at almost eye-level; the effect is something of a rogues' gallery, a collection of rebels who refused to let the conventions of a form restrain them. They're contained now not by their forms, but a glassed-in prison, to be gawked at in all their disturbingly primal splendour. They're the centre of a scandolous spectacle, not a bauble in a cutesy parlour. And they couldn't be happier.
A final note: As this site is fast-becoming a Shary Boyle newsletter, it woudl not be complete without a mention of her show at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. Called Fantasia, it features Boyle's drawings and sculptures alongside the work of Daniel Barrow, Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke. It closes April 29.
I'm sure these artists are unaware of each other but when I saw Boyle's work I immediately thought of Melbourne artist and conservator Penny Byrne's figurines.
See here: http://www.ssfa.com.au/artists/41/
Posted by: margie | June 16, 2007 at 09:35 PM