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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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On Thursday night there were a big pile of openings in Toronto. True to form, I didn't get to most of them. I did go to MOCCA for their fabulously promoted show of Toronto's most loved and hated art trolls, which I can only assume is an answer to the Power Plant's recent, sad attempt to portray the Toronto art scene with the worst-named exhibition ever, We Can Do This Now (discussed on this blog here.
The opening for LoVe/HaTe: New Crowned Glory in the G.T.A. was packed packed packed. I had my badminton racket with me. My hair was frizzy due to a long day of riding around town and attempting to play badminton in the park in the wind. I didn't stay very long and made virtually no attempt to look at the art. From what I could see, the big elegant gallery looked a bit of a mess, which is usually a good sign, as far as I'm concerned.
RM Vaughan and Jared Mitchell collaborated on a series of banners spoofing Toronto's ongoing Live With Culture campaign. These were up near the ceiling so I could see them above all the chatting faces of the various nice people I haven't talked to in way too long. I'm already familiar enough with this project, featuring RM as the stand-in model in slothful track-panted repose, that every time I notice one of the original ubiquitous civic banners featuring tight-bunned modern dancers in mid-leap my first thought is, "Oh, RM and Jared have got their work hanging on King Street."
I was also really happy to see Lisa Neighbour's Hulk again. I wrote about this piece years ago, here when it was first exhibited as part of a Persona Volare show on College Street. Lisa had another great illuminated work, a big necklace made from glowing doggy chew toys. L.M. pounced on it to do some squeezing, in case they squeaked, and then terrorized the poor sweet staff person who gentley and rightly requested that we not touch the art, by proclaiming that she "knew the artist" and that the stricken waif could use her cell phone (L.M. doesn't have a cell phone) to call Lisa and confirm that it was okay. It was the kind of over-crowded scenster opening that seemed to call for acts of cruelty, and indeed, one of the more fragile floorworks, a prostrate peson made of smallish cardboard pixels, was soon carried out, funeral-style above the shoulders of four strapping staff-dudes, because it had been stepped on one too many times.
I have no idea what else was in the show. It all looked a bit scruffy. I normally prefer a rough and clumsy gawky show to one that is primped and styled with high-end polish, so I will go back and take a better look before I make any kind of definitive claim that the thing was badly thrown together. Aside from the works I've described, only two other pieces caught my attention in the midst of the social mayhem. One was a pile of pieces of construction debris, painted orange on one side, that lay scattered on the floor underneath the title wall. This may have been a curatorial design feature rather than an artwork, but I liked it. The other was a big purple balloon suspended in the courtyard with art by Fiona Smythe on its two flat sides. Fiona Smythe is one of those artists who can do no wrong, in my books, but I didn't think the pop/commodity implications of the inflation, nor the elevation, served her normally transgressive, immersive and detailed icons very well.
I also got to the Prefix Photo opening. Details are here.