Nature in Newfoundland, needlepoint and diversity nods
Contact photo fest continues takeover at Koffler Gallery, Prefix ICA, Textile Museum
Ongoing 2Fik, His and Other Stories: For 2Fik, a Montreal-based artist born in Paris with Moroccan parents (he came to Canada in 2003), the storied cultural mosaic of the Canadian experience came suddenly to vivid life.
In his large-scale photographic tableaux, he started to reimagine the totems of European culture — paintings by Monet and Velazquez, say — through the multivalent lens of Canadian diversity, gleefully transforming monuments of old-world privilege and homogeneity into cheeky reflections of contemporary difference.
Spicing up the show is a brand-new work, made at Honest Ed’s Warehouse during its final days, of one of our very own dusty old totems: Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe, depicting the heroic demise of the British commander during his forces’ obliteration of French resistance in Quebec once and for all.
West meant to depict a defining moment of British colonial dominance — a vanquishing of difference for all time.
Almost 250 years after West, 2Fik puts on view, by way of response, an array of diversity, from ethnic to gender to sexual preference, that lets you know how times, quite radically, can change.
At the Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw St., to June 4. Michael Snow, Newfoundlings: As pre-eminent as any artist can be in this country, Snow, 87, remains a highly present and productive force. A devout Torontonian, he has nonetheless spent summers at a modest, electricity-free cabin in Newfoundland for decades, where he works just as tirelessly as he does the big city.
At Prefix ICA, a sampling of his video works made there since 2000 beguile: Sheeploop, whose title is for the most part self-explanatory (you might have seen it projected on the dome of the old McLaughlin Planetarium for Nuit Blanche, way back in 2006, of sheep grazing in, well, a loop); Condensation (A Cove Story), a mesmerizing time-lapsed view of changing weather patterns in a rocky inlet; and In the Way, an aerial view of a gravel road ceding, finally, to grass and flower.
But really, it’s a showcase for Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids), a simple, spare and hypnotic video of a curtain billowing and falling as the wind gusts to and fro in Snow’s cabin. It’s been seen here relatively often, both at the Power Plant and Luminato, but it’s also surprisingly compulsive viewing, making any return a more than welcome one.
At Prefix ICA, 401 Richmond St., Suite 124, until July 22. Katherine Knight, Portraits and Collections: Knight unpacks a faded cultural history with this show, focusing on the voluminous collection of needlepoint stuffed into a Nova Scotia home.
150 years ago — note the significance of the number — the form was the Tamagotchi of the era, a bona fide mass-culture craze that faded, as most do, with the next big thing’s arrival.
Outdated aphorisms, some amusing, some inscrutable, adorn the walls from baseboard to ceiling joist, performing a kind of ritual haunting from a time before — one we assume to be less complicated, but in the intimations of some, was anything but.
My favourite: “Knowledge is Power,” in crimson, gothic script. Some things never go out of style, and in this moment of factual panic, truer words were never spoken.
At the Textile Museum of Canada, 55 Centre Ave., until June 25.