AN OPENING, A CLOSING AND A FINAL FAREWELL
Mercer Union gets cosmic, Ydessa Hendeles comes home and Diaz Contemporary says goodbye for good
Coming
Mercer Union, Astral Bodies: Hot on the heels of Mystical Landscapes, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhaustive take on cosmic flakiness to be found in early Modern art, comes this, a contemporary companion. Astral
Bodies chooses just four artists, not the dozens to be found downtown — but the notion of seeking divinity and enlightenment, not in the scriptures, but the land and heavens themselves, holds fast.
Shary Boyle, along with Shuvinai Ashoona, Karen Azoulay, Spring Hurlbut and Pamela Norrish, imagines the divine through an array of highly personal lenses: Boyle, with an otherworldly porcelain work, here features a delicate figure cradling a reflective planetary orb (“God’s Eye”) and Ashoona, who is Inuit, with her fantastical mash-up drawings that fuse sci-fi fantasy to Indigenous mythology.
All is not so out there, though. Hurlbut, whose recent work using ashes, often of her loved ones, offers an earthy transcendence, grounding our imaginings of what might lie beyond, with a tactile tenderness for what’s left behind. Opening Friday at 7 p.m., 1286 Bloor St. W. mercerunion.org.
Going
Ydessa Hendeles, Death to Pigs: Last month, a monumental opening in a tiny space took place at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, up near the corner of Bathurst and DuPont Sts. Monumental, because it was the first Toronto solo exhibition — officially, at least — of local legend Ydessa Hendeles, whose private foundation gallery on King St. served up worldclass contemporary art exhibitions from her own remarkable collection for more than a decade before it closed in 2012.
Hendeles closed the foundation, at least in part, to take up what many had come to believe for some time: That her unique eye for the display of disparate objects, honed over de- cades as a gallerist, collector and curator, was really the work of an artist in her own right. Since that time, Hendeles, now largely New York-based, has been wearing her new title with increasing comfort. A major solo exhibition at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art last year seemed to seal it: Ydessa Hendeles, artist, could no longer be denied — even by her. Death to Pigs, which unsettles, and deeply, works the same discomfiting magic of Hendeles’s larger works. The lowly swine — ubiquitous, commonplace, taken for granted; nonetheless consumed, brutalized and fetishized all the same — becomes a symbol for a litany of human ills. Using things as disparate as images from children’s stories to an anatomical model of a sow to a chilling video of pigs being readied for slaughter, Hendeles makes reference to folk tales, the Manson family murders (from whom the title is drawn) and George Orwell, among others, to gather echoes in our culture of a theme as old as humankind: The deflections the human mind makes, all too easily, to make atrocity possible and the horrors that can come of it.
In this era of Trump, one can consider one’s self duly warned. Death to
Pigs runs until Dec. 10 at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, 1069 Bathurst St. becontemporary.com.
Gone
Finally, a lament: Diaz Contemporary, one of the leading galleries in the city the past decade, closes its doors on Saturday for good, the victim of — what else? — condominium development. Its fate seemed written earlier this year, when the abattoir across the street finally shut down for good, making its low-slung, cinderblock building — ideal exhibition space and home to some of the best the city has seen since it opened 11 years ago — a hot development target. Diaz was recently told its lease would not be renewed as its owner pursues development opportunities.
Make no mistake: This is a significant event in the cultural life of the city. With a roster of eminent senior artists (Gary Neil Kennedy, Kim Adams, Kelly Mark, James Carl, Elizabeth McIntosh), energizing up-and-comers (Joseph Tisiga, Eleanor King) and the most recent Canadian representatives to the Venice Biennale (BGL), Diaz has been a vital part of that cultural life. Now, as it stands poised to close its final show of works by John Massey, it serves as a symbol of a city’s cultural life fading from independent-minded endeavour to big-box sameness, hand in hand with ever more condos. Diaz Contemporary closes permanently on Saturday at 6 p.m.