Due to the recent launch of his newest magnum opus, I've been on a bit of a Matthew Barney kick of late. This seems to happen every ten years or so and I, like most of the art world, get sucked back into the mythology of the 21st Century's most oblique myth-maker. One outcome of this temporary obsession is a bi-directional sense of inadequacy: one looks inward and wonders why I didn't get a football scholarship to Yale, model for J. Crew, and then make a stunning New York gallery debut in my early twenties; the other looks outward and settles for nothing less of an artwork that it be at least six hours long, require custom-built steel smelters, and feature guest appearances by Salman Rushdie and the singer from Morbid Angel. While I'm still wrestling with my disappointment in myself, it only took a visit to Prefix ICA to realize a piece of video art can be a single shot lasting a minute and a half and still knock me on my ass. Take that, Mr. Bjork!
Sylvia Safdie, Web/Auschwitz, Nos 4 and 2, 2011-2013, video
The video in question is one of three by Sylvia Safdie now on view along with a forgettable light sculpture. Curator Scott McLeod and the fine folks at Prefix have made an immaculate projection zone and wisely chose to feature the shortest of these short video works with the largest screen. Sitting in enveloping darkness, one could be tricked into thinking that Pond/Auschwitz No. 2 is much longer than it is or on some sort of loop, but really it's just 93 seconds of rain hitting the water's surface. However, that brief span encompasses landscape, physics, action painting, nature, mortality, the Holocaust (inevitably, given the title), the impossibility of representing the Holocaust, the role and responsibility of the artist, the tradition of video art, fluid/water as metaphor, randomness as metaphor and thing in itself, etc. I could go on because the more I kept looking, the more I saw, the more I imagined, the more I understood, and the more there was to see.
Olia Mishchenko, The Expanded Gardens of Locus Solus (detail), 2013
A similar kind of absorption is experienced when examining Olia Mishchenko's drawings at Oakville Galleries, but where Safdie finds abstraction in nature, Mishchenko makes clear and precise representations that at first appear to embrace nature but slowly, as you work your way through the details and the scale of these large and intricate landscapes, reveal a far more conflicted relationship with rural life. Her depiction of a tree nursery provides the key to this narrative as it shows the saplings bound or manipulated in a variety of ways to control their growth. With this in mind, the bucolic scenes of seemingly progressive communities of people found amidst the shelter of forests or gathered at the water's edge are gradually undercut by the awareness that even within this Edenic architecture, nature is being reconstructed, divided, and redirected through the conduits of humanity's use for it. Which, of course, is how it's always been and always will be. That said, Mishchenko manages the clever trick of throwing you off balance just as you lean close to discover another fascinating twist amidst the underbrush in these postlapsarian gardens of her own invention.
Prefix ICA: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Prefix-Institute-of-Contemporary-Art/361120100088
Sylvia Safdie: The Absent Present continues until March 29.
Oakville Galleries: http://www.oakvillegalleries.com/index.htm
Olia Mishchenko: The Expanded Gardens of Locus Solus continues until May 11.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Sylvia Safdie at Prefix ICA | Olia Mishchenko at Oakville Galleries
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