Works from cremated remains convey tenderness
Spring Hurlbut, A Fine Line: For some years now, Hurlbut has been working with what at first blush might seem a ghastly artistic material: Cremated human remains, often of those closest to her (her subjects have included her late father, and her late husband, the artist Arnaud Maggs).
Where the departure into gruesome assumption is an easy one to make, the work itself pulls you back and holds you fast. Ghostly, spare, minimal and undeniable beautiful, it instead instead conveys an uncanny tenderness: A tribute to a life lived, and a human being cared for enough to persist, in compellingly gorgeous effigy, after death.
Opens Oct. 20 at Georgia Scherman Projects, 133 Tecumseth St., at 6 p.m.
With the video Sum and selected previous works. See georgiascher- man.com/Exhibitions.html for more detail. Derek Sullivan, On Filling In: Sullivan, a Toronto-based artist whose high-conceptual work has often focused on the book — their forms, contents, symbolic heft and, sadly, fading presence in an increasingly digital world — marks a homecoming of sorts with On Filling In, an exhibition of new drawings made at a residency in Paris, and an intervention in the upstairs library of the Susan Hobbs Gallery, the Sobey Award finalist’s new creative home.
Among the dispersal of top-rank artists from the closure of Jessica Bradley Projects last year, Sullivan and his heady oeuvre lands at Susan Hobbs well-matched by a roster of the like-minded. On the heels of his beautifully mysterious exhibition at Oakville Galleries last fall — a murder mystery, of sorts, complete with shallow grave — Sullivan continues his fascination with Modernism and its failings — a purity of thought so polluted now by too much information, much of it of the worst kind, that a tangible volume remains a life raft bobbing atop the gathering digital waves.
Opens Oct. 20 at Susan Hobbs Gallery, 137 Tecumseth St., from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information see susanhobbs.com/current. Fay Nicolson, I Love Your Euclidean Stance: Nicolson, a widely shown young polymath of a British artist makes a Canadian debut not within the walls of a museum of artist-run centre but within the walls of Towards, an happily undefined curatorial/publishing/exhibition/bigthinking art space in Toronto’s west end.
A natural relation of a proliferating species of fluidly spontaneous art spaces here in town — see: the Loon, Roberta Pelan, AC Repair Co., 8-11; the list keeps growing — Towards joins their ranks with the similar priority of forging international links between the city’s up-and-comers and their confreres abroad.
Nicolson, with her mash-up approach to images and form as necessary hybrids, fits the bill, as does Towards as another platform for the much-needed cross-fertilization of art and artists from here and afar.
Until Oct. 29 at Towards, 87 Wade St., Suite B. For more information see towards.info. Roger Ballen, Theatre of the Mind: Ballen, a South African photographer who made his name early on with lascivious-seeming portraits of brutish Afrikaaners — the Dutchdescended white South Africans who dominate the country’s rural byways — and the ogling view of people not able to define themselves brought as much scorn as fascination.
As the years rolled by, Ballen became drawn increasingly to more abstracted representation of the squalor occupied by his early subjects, and those later images are haunted by a more oblique dread that flirts with the sublime, however dark.
A hefty selection of those pictures, then and now, are on view at Izzy Gallery,1225 Bay St., until Nov.19. For more information see izzygallery.com .