Gender divide, past and present
A feminist icon confronts the aging body and an exhibit catalogues environmental ills
Ongoing Scotiabank Photography Award: Suzy Lake: The introductory text on the wall at the Ryerson Image Centre describes the work of Suzy Lake as being at the fore of “female identity and the aging body,” but that’s hardly the half of it.
Lake, who has been working for nearly 50 years, gathers up broad swaths of the gender divide, past and present, and reprocesses it as the frank, absurd, discomfiting and ultimately destructive thing that it is.
A hometown embrace for Torontobased Lake felt long-coming — in international art circles, she’s an icon of feminism and a pioneer of photobased art — until 2012, when the University of Toronto Art Centre convened Political Poetics, a broad survey of Lake’s career. The Art Gallery of Ontario hurried to match and, in 2014, gave us Introducing Suzy Lake, another omnibus retrospective. So, the RIC’s show inevitably treads familiar paths: Lake’s Choreographed Puppet series, a performance from 1976 of the artist hoisted with straps and controlled limb by limb by a pair of men, or an excerpt from 1979’s Are You Talking To Me? the artist’s recitation of Robert De Niro’s menacing monologue from Taxi Driver.
But there are some welcome surprises: ghostly black and white ver- sions of her 2012 series Extended Breathing, in which Lake fixes her feet to the ground and, with a longopen shutter, allows the camera to take in her now-aged body’s best efforts to stand still. Or Sweeping Slip, 1999, a pale flesh-toned garment, its body present in form but invisible, engaged in the so-called women’s work it implies.
On this third go-around, it feels like Lake is now firmly installed as one of our best and rightfully so. But given the context of the current moment — U.S. President Donald Trump’s outward assault on equality, race, religion and gender all at once; a rising chorus of feminist outrage; the sudden, perverse relevance of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — could the timing be better (or simultaneously worse)? At the Ryerson Image Centre, 33 Gould St., until Aug. 13 It’s All Happening So Fast: A Counter-History of the Canadian Environment: This exhibition bills itself as a “Counter-History,” but really, it’s a catalogue of more than a century of high-profile environmental ills ganged up to a nearly overwhelming density.
If the show has any fault, it’s tough sledding as you move from one disaster to the next: mercury contamination at Grassy Narrows, contaminated drinking water at Walkerton and Kashechewan, the tanker train disaster at Lac Megantic, oil spills in Vancouver Harbour, overfishing on the East Coast, pipeline protests stretching as far back as the Mackenzie Valley in 1977 (and the native land claim violations it and so many other environmental degradations enacted), the death of the Don River, melting polar ice caps, nuclear meltdowns, acid rain, clear-cutting on the West Coast . . . the list goes on.
In a dense display of image, text and, yes, even art, this show affirms that yesterday’s disasters aren’t going away so much as piling up offstage, putting each and every new calamity atop a mound of others, teetering precariously on the edge of collapse. As Douglas Coupland, in a decidedly pointed display here of colourful text aphorisms (“Hi, I’m All That Toxic S--- You Store Beneath Your Kitchen Sink”) makes clear, our attitude has long been out of sight, out of mind, but it’s not going away and is much closer than you think.
At the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 15 King’s College Circle, until July 15.