Reuse, renewal and happy unbirthday
Stan Denniston’s Re-newit bashes together opposites, only to find them alike
Ongoing Stan Denniston, Re-newit: At Pearson Airport, there’s a warehouse where several metric tonnes of Inuit-carved soapstone sculpture sit in crates on any given day, waiting to be distributed to an array of gift shops from coast to coast. Soapstone being the finicky thing that it is, a portion of those tonnes inevitably end up in pieces, and that’s where Stan Denniston comes in. Denniston, an unparalleled restorer of Inuit soapstone carvings, is frequently called upon to repair such things, which he does with such aplomb you’d never know they’d been broken.
But his craft is put to far more compelling use in his work as an artist, a new selection of which is now on view at the Olga Korper Gallery. Denniston calls the show Re-newit (say it slowly, get the pun) and the juxtaposition he plies speak to a broader cycle of consumption, obsolescence and waste. Reassembled carvings, often featuring weirdly grotesque regraftings — an arm where a head might have been; severed hindquarters of bears fused to a dome of soapstone in a grisly (if you’ll pardon the pun) parody of a portage — are paired with broken bits and pieces of past-its-prime technology: an ancient flip phone fastened to a bear torso where its head should be, say, or a caribou swimming along the cracked surface of a first-generation iPad. An environmentalist read is the obvious one here; our consumptive, use-and-dispose-of habit creating mountains of waste, threatening northern ecosystems and, by extension, the populations that make these thing.
But there’s something more urgent, and more nefarious, at play here. For decades, indigenous people have been coaxed by various levels of government to churn out representations of their culture at near-indus- trial pace, reducing culture to commodity, and art to tchotcke. Denniston’s work, often hauntingly beautiful, teases out false mythologies for a new era, where a critical mass of consumption and waste threatens not just the planet that sustains it, but the humanity that stands the best chance of crafting its salvation.
At Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave., until Feb. 25 Didier Courbot: On the subject of renewal, Paris-based Didier Courbot has always made creative use of an array number of leftovers, though specifics tend to be the deliberate offcuts from his poetically homely oeuvre. Spindly brass armatures recall Minimalist sculpture but are then subverted to the practical function of stand for his bits and pieces: a drape of leftover paper from another work, ragged scraps of fabric, an odd bolt of lumber. Courbot’s work often takes place out in public, where he displays his odd brand of public works: a bird house installed at a busy intersection in Paris, a jumble of bicycles free for the taking in Tokyo. It helps you find your way through the gallery, where the clearest notion, of finding beauty in the everyday, is reinforced with an absurdist’s impulse to help it along by whatever means necessary. Courbot is nothing if not that helper, propping up the prosaic on its way to the sublime, which he does with an endearing humility.
At Susan Hobbs Gallery, 137 Tecumseth St. until March 18 Birch Contemporary, 27.5: As milestones go it’s an odd one, which I suppose is the point. Still, 27 and a half years in the art business in Toronto is bloody impressive any way you slice it, which is what Birch Con- temporary marks with this show of a solid representation of the artists that have been along for the ride. Artists Cathy Daley, Martin Golland, Toni Hafkenscheid, Micah Lexier, James Nizam, Louise Noguchi, Andy Patton, Ed Pien, Nicholas and Sheila Pye, Kelly Richardson, Mitch Robertson, Richard Storms, Renée Van Halm and Janet Werner join the party here, showing the gallery’s eclectic interests across painting figurative and abstract, photography, performance, conceptualism and almost everything in between. The fact that a good many of those artists find themselves in museum collections across the country confirms the instincts of Robert Birch, the gallery’s founder and force, and a dealer that does right by his artists, consistently and for decades, deserves a happy unbirthday indeed.
At Birch Contemporary, 129 Tecumseth St., until March 18