In Markham, art exhibition offers uneven lay of the land
Landslide promises to pitch possible futures for this sprawling suburb, but sprawls too much itself
An irregular row of sunflowers snakes through the grassy back acres of the Markham Museum, which is populated by relocated buildings rescued from various former farmlands long-since repurposed into strip malls and subdivisions.
It’s tempting to consider the sunflowers either an ad hoc horticultural nod to the booming suburb’s agrarian past, or a decorative seasonal choice on the part of museum staff, soaking up the remaining warms rays of sun as fall drifts towards winter.
It’s neither. Like everything else here in the museum’s 25-acre back lot, it’s art — these flowers courtesy Glynis Logue — the likes of which the Markham museum has rarely seen.
At the end of last month, the museum, given, as many regional museums are, mostly to folksy exhibitions of local lore and occasionally perplexing objects from their archive — on a recent visit, the shelves displayed a pair of golf shoes and a yard stick — changed completely.
Landslide, an exhibition of 31 artists or collectives — all of them living, most of them young — took over, repurposing heritage buildings and inculcating the museum’s display spaces.
The theme, or its intention at least, is spelled out in the show’s subtitle: Possible Futures, but you have to stretch more than a little to find buy-in to even that remarkably broad notion across the dozens of works here. At best, Landslide is a mess of delights with the occasional boring, or well-intentioned and even, here and there, spot-on.
Let’s start with the last one first. The museum’s 25-acre plot is already an incoherent hodgepodge of refugee buildings from various stages of Markham’s evolution as a city (curator Janine Marchessault described it as a “development fallout shelter”). The museum would resist its characterization as a cutesy pioneer village, but it did, at one time, have actors in period costume churning butter (no longer, I’m assured). So to come across Frank Havermans’ work is the kind of bracing snap-to moment this setting so desperately needs.
Inside a weathered old barn, Havermans has tied in to the building’s original pulley system and extended it to support an explosive structure of black rods that pierce the barn’s hide and poke into the sunshine outside. It’s dramatic — violent and visceral, like a parasite co-opting its host’s functions and eating its way out from within — but also to the point.
That tangle of rods contains a representation of Markham’s original town square, clearly visible, with development exploding chaotically from every point.
That’s a possible future — or an actual present, at the rate farmland has been consumed out there on the edge of the GTA in the past decade. Would that the rest of Landslide has focused its priorities similarly, or at all. This is less a cohesive exhibition than a collection of neighbouring projects, bound by little more than location, and in some cases, not even that.
Some took on particular purpose of individual buildings. Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman, installed in the blacksmith’s shop, present cutsteel sculptures and correlating ab- stract paintings. They’re clever, gorgeous and sharply made, but what they have to do with even the broadest notion of what Landslide intends, I can’t guess.
Tucked in the old slaughterhouse, Phil Hoffman installs a series of film pieces recounting his own personal history with the abattoir industry — his family owned a meat-packing plant in Kitchener, Ont. — and the result is intimate and cleverly installed (you view the films through exterior peepholes). It’s one of Landslide’s home runs, and there are a few, but it bears almost no relation to anything other than the building it inhabits.
History appears, inevitably, throughout, but in a scattershot way. This doesn’t make it unengaging; far from it. All Purpose, an installation by the trio of Sean Martindale, Lisa Myers and Yvan MacKinnon, wraps up the intersection of colonial and First Nations cultures in a mannered, disturbingly sanitized presentation of bland foodstuffs: Flour, sugar, salt, lard and milk. That they happen to be European imports to our home on native land, to borrow a phrase, is highly intentional.
Landslide deserves huge points for ambition, but it surely would have benefited from a judicious edit
Refined and enriched, but also stripped of textures and essential nutrients, it’s a tight little critique of what’s wrong out here. Some, though, are merely pointless, and here’s the bad following the good: Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s installation on “rape cul- ture” (their term), as augmented and perpetuated by social media, sticks out as a disembodied diatribe that no amount of shoehorning should have made fit. Worse, it serves to undermine efforts like Aron Cohen’s, who grew flax with a local farmer to make his own paper, on which he’s printing his own, slight version of a “Markham Almanac” using an antique press he found on museum grounds. Cohen manages to jell several relevant impulses here in one go: Tilling, sowing, reaping, all on his own, he transforms labour into information in a poetic gesture that’s literally rooted in the soil on which he stands. If that’s not a quiet, revolutionary act to prioritize the particularities of place against the genericizing force of big box retail and fast food, I don’t know what is.
Landslide deserves huge points for ambition, and a proper autopsy should help the Markham Museum to chart a path forward to relevance and real engagement with the world transforming on the other side of its fences.
But it surely would have benefited from a judicious edit. Points of revelation abound, but it just doesn’t hang together in any meaningful way. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a terrible metaphor for Markham in full. The city, with its acres of parking lots and Costcos, prefab houses standing shoulder to shoulder across from still-tilled farmland, is a mess; a show in similar disarray, good, bad and ugly, seems only apt. Landslide continues at the Markham Museum to Oct. 14, with extended evening hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.