3D printing the next big medium for artists
Opening Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: 3D printing has become an essential tool for industries from architecture to product design, but its potential as an artist’s medium remains largely untapped. Allahyari, who was raised in Iran but lives in the U.S., is at the fore of its promise. Material Speculation, a video work, places 3D-printed recreations of objects of cultural significance destroyed by ISIS in a complicated position between nostalgia, authenticity and the uncanny ease with which things can, at least in form, be restored. Printed in a beatific, silvery plastic resin, the material itself — a petroleum product — serves to complicate matters further, given the specific war of which such objects have been casualties. Allahyari means not to replace but to call to arms: she hopes to make her 3D modelling files available to anyone with a printer, as a gesture of grassroots resistance to the wanton destruction.
Opening Thursday, 6 to 9 p.m. at Trinity Square Video, 401 Richmond St., Suite 376. Until March 19. Sarah Graham, Rebuilding Canada: Wayfinding and maps are a principal fascination for Graham and she’s given them a good going over in recent years: precision hand-carving books full of them, cutting away land and leaving roadways intact like a dense network of blood-carrying veins. Here, she takes her devotion to urbanity into a third dimension, kitbashing contemporary urban forms into fanciful, near-sculptural amalgamations that can be read as idealism or pessimism, depending on your frame of mind.
Opening Saturday, 2 to 5 p.m., MKG127, 1445 Dundas St. W. Until March 12. Isabel Nolan, The Weakened Eye of Day: Nolan, who is from Ireland, makes her Canadian debut at Mercer Union with a suite of works aimed at capturing what some might describe as esthetic experience: that bizarre, inexplicable surge of emotion we sometimes feel when confronted with an object that we feel more than we see. The show takes its title from a Thomas Hardy poem, in which the fading winter sun lays bare both the deceptions of light and the void of its absence.
Opening Friday at 7 p.m., 1286 Bloor St. W. Until April 2.