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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Bicycling Tirana (dvd still), 2003. From Rainer Ganahl's website
I've only seen a few installations of Toronto's Images Festival so far. Rainer Ganahl's bicycle video, Bicycling Tirana at Paul Petro Contemporary Art (still up until April 24) is pretty great; pov at about chest height, cyclist riding into oncoming traffic, mostly with no hands. The mood is oddly calm and transcendent, even as the cars are coming straight for the camera. The other video, simply titled Bicycling also has a strange serenitiy. A cyclist, shot from above, dreamily, lazily, doubles a passenger round and round in a Manhattan intersection, unconcerned as cars whizz by. I recognise this particular cycling frame of mind, a kind of blissful remove from the anxieties of car-drivership, despite the constant proximity of the big metal beasts.
There are some confusing works on canvas, big paintings of website pages about a suicide bomber who used a bicycle, and a painting of the text of an email from a cyclist describing a traffic conflict with a car driver. These paintings are kind of pretty, but I think the labour of depicting the web in paint is a questionable use of time.
My favourite piece in the show is the mail art project, Use a Bicycle. Ganahl, who lives in New York, made his own postage stamps which say things like Al Queda, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Shock and Awe. He sent eight Twin Towers 9/11 souvenir postcards to the Toronto gallery, and they all arrived. In the message area of the card is the simple imperative assertion: use a bicycle. This juxtaposition of human-powered transportation against US conflict in the middle east is both audacious and obvious, a simple beautiful statement about the ramifications of various technologies. Rainer Ganahl is clearly in love with the bicycle, an attitude I comprehend. He has written a good bicycle-related artist statement that you can read here. It was this quote, however, from the Images Festival guide, that drew me into the show. "The bicycle is really -- next to the computer and the radio -- my most important instrument for making it through my life."
use a bicycle, mail art project with self-made stamps (detail), 2004. From Rainer Ganahl's website.