Artist taps into tension of these nervous times
Christopher Willes captures the Trumpian era, in sound, while Nick Ostoff showcases unremarkable domestic objects
Opening Andrew James Paterson, I Stand Corrected/Collected: Paterson, a pioneering artistic polymath whose long history in the Toronto art scene spans music, performance, video and the written word, serves here as both a vessel and a symbol for a budding generation of grassroots internationalism currently being cultivated by a broadening array of Toronto artists, curators and, increasingly, dealers.
Case in Point: Paterson’s exhibition is the natural extension of a book published jointly by Milan-based Mousse Publishing and Kunstverein Toronto, the local arm of an ambitiously bootstrapping enterprise with outlets in New York, Amsterdam and Milan. Paterson, as known as an artist as for his decades of service at the Cameron House, helps provide a bridge from then to now — a feature too long missing from the city’s gleefully eclectic, sometimesdisconnected art scene.
Opening and book launch Dec. 9, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., Cooper Cole Gallery, 1134 Dupont St. Christopher Willes, Every sound is a small action and broke world: Sturm und Drang being the MO of political speech in these Trumpian times, Willes, a musician and artist whose compositions transgress into experimental sound collage, arrives on point with a show that taps into the nervous tension of a suddenly anxious era. In his work, Willes explores sonic influence on the physical — both body and space. His 2015 project for the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Reclining Figure is a Model Listener, had audience members lie prone on plinths in the gallery’s Henry Moore Sculpture Centre. At 8-11 Gallery, which is tiny and mostly subterranean, the effect might be menacing, but take note: the artist’s ambition is to embody, through sound, the more noble impulses of “collectivity and compassion,” which, given the tenor of the moment, would be music to anybody’s ears.
Opening Dec. 10, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 8-11 Gallery, 233 Spadina Ave. Accompanied by a book launch, start very quiet and get very loud, with contributions from Willes, Christine Sun Kim and Hildegard Westerkamp. Ongoing Nick Ostoff, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out: In a thinning herd of top-end contemporary art galleries in the city, many victim of a forbidding real estate market (Diaz Contemporary, one of the best, shut down last week for good, the victim of condo development) a new one comes as welcome pushback. Christie Contemporary, the eponymous venture of art-world veteran Claire Christie, opened last month and picks up the torch with established artists like Ostoff, whose solo painting show opened there last week. The abstract-seeming compositions here belie their true nature: each of Ostoff’s works are tightly observed renderings of unremarkable domestic objects — a mirror, a mark on a wall — seen closely enough to transform them into the unrecognizable and, divorced from their workaday function, ideally the sublime.
Until Jan. 28 at Christie Contemporary, 64 Miller St. Kelly Wallace, Unman: Wallace, who lives in London, Ont., has a practice that, to my knowledge, is utterly unique. His lead drawings, at turns both ghostly and rigid, like a shattered landscape enveloped in mist, are the product not of studious sketching and shading but an array of tightly packed vertical lines. Altering the pressure on the lead along each line’s length achieves the forms that emerge, often of sheafs and shards, piled along the bottom of the frame. They’re frighteningly precise and as captivating from afar as close up, where the meticulous labour implied in them is as dizzying as the image itself.
Until Jan. 28 at Georgia Scherman Projects, 133 Tecumseth St.