Condo porn and becoming Sophie
Ongoing Daniel Young & Christian Giroux, Tangerine Panther: For a duo whose likely best known work is called Infrastructure Canada, a hypnotic, meditative film piece now owned by the National Gallery of Canada about, well, infrastructure in Canada, Tangerine Panther seems a little off key. Grabby titles have rarely been their thing (see: 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot, another counterintuitively compelling film work), so why the turnaround? Consider, perhaps, the context. Tucked into 8-11, a tight window-box gallery on a strip of Spadina Ave. in Chinatown that increasingly feels like the city’s last bastion of un-condoized urbanity, the machismo bluster makes a little more sense.
The works, a pair of slickly made structures composed of cubes of coloured acrylic panels and industrial steel shelving, read almost as tawdry fantasies of cookie-cutter develop- ment run amok; the high-modern forms of Mies van der Rohe, say, reimagined as porn. As sculptors, Young & Giroux have always been drawn to the quiet esthetics of banal and workaday things.
They’ve also been keen observers of urbanity and how a workaday antiesthetic has shaped our cities to a point, at best, of suffocating blandness. Here, in a glass-box gallery pinned to the crumbling facade of a careworn Victorian, Young & Giroux call out our city’s haphazard development for what it is: tawdry, gleefully crass, predatory and ever-stalking.
At 8-11, 233 Spadina Ave., until March 29. Iris Haussler, The Sophie La Rosière Project, Chapter III: For years, Iris Haussler didn’t really have to contemplate what she might do for an encore because every exhibition she made was her last.
Haussler, who elevated subterfuge to high art, would slip into a new skin for each outing, crafting entire re- alities for her various surrogates to inhabit: Joseph Wagenbach, an addled, elderly German immigrant, whose tiny house in Trinity Bellwoods he filled with wax-effigy horrors; or Mary O’Shea, the teenage Irish house maid who, in the 19th century, filled the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange with tiny objects — cries for help, across the ages.
Sophie La Rosière was born of Haussler’s vivid imagination too, but she’s sticking around, maybe because she’s a little different. In the past, Haussler would vanish completely, taking any notion of artifice along with her.
So complete were her deceptions, for all any of her viewers could tell what they were seeing was real: remnants of real lives lived, actual traumas endured.
From the beginning, Sophie’s role was less an open wound than a narrative vehicle for some bigger ideas: about art, gender and the marginal space occupied by women in the really big deal of Modernism. Sophie, a gifted painter able to move deftly across modern movements, became tangled in frustration and heartsickness both, moving her to destroy her works and abandon her studio in the French countryside, never to return.
Or so the story goes. The Art Gallery of York University recreated Sophie’s abandoned studio last year; simultaneously downtown, Scrap Metal Gallery hosted a full-on forensic of Sophie’s oeuvre, complete with x-ray scrutiny of the works she defaced in her emotional collapse.
With the work recovered, the research done and the dust settled, the art world does what the art world does: it makes a tidy show of the work itself, which at Daniel Faria Gallery is a beguiling, dizzyingly visceral (and more than occasionally naughty) thing.
Haussler, a sculptor and conceptual artist, had to teach herself to paint to become Sophie and she had to get very good at it. The paintings are technically accomplished but emotionally charged, fully realized and assured. It’s her best trick yet: a possession so complete there’s no way of knowing where Haussler ends and Sophie begins.
At Daniel Faria Gallery, 188 St. Helens Ave., to April 29.