Paddy Johnson over at Art Fag City (now ArtFCity) wasn't kidding when she retweeted her agreement with fellow New York critic Karen Archey that the current exhibition pictured on the Tomorrow Gallery website looks amazing. The handful of jpegs therein depicts a wired space linking freezer cabinet to modified sound devices to a puddle of condensed water and a floor stain. Filled as it is with the kind of semiotic triggers (gear, noise, obscure systems, live grasshoppers) that get me riled up, I headed right over.
Ben Schumacher & Carlos Reyes, A Salted Quarterly: Notes from the Why Axis, 2013, installation detail
I remember entering with trepidation the industrial zone where Tomorrow is located about a decade ago to visit a shady friend of my brother's, but nowadays I'm here all the time, dropping off my daughter at the gymnastics club across the street. This desolate strip is soon to become a neighbourhood unless the nearby Nestle factory can stop the encroaching condo development, but successful art galleries (namedropped in the New York Times, no less) are only bait for the gentry.
This intriguing exhibition by Ben Schumacher and Carlos Reyes isn't going to help as it slyly alludes to forward-thinking urbanism through an outline of Toronto's skyline and underlying links to the relentless construction in the downtown core. There's a lot more going on – what with the melted-plastic-comic-book-printed symmetrical forms encasing audio boxes and a scattering of miniature Eiffel Towers (not to mention a gorilla glove and the aforesaid grasshoppers) – that, in the best (and the worst) of the art of paranoia, is as likely to add up to nothing as it is to something.
Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Glob, oil on MDF panels
Further up the street and in another of Toronto's quaint oases of industry in the midst of residential bliss is the Toronto outpost of Montreal's Division Gallery. The space is big and high and full of promise. Out of the two current exhibitions, a reunion of sorts for the members of Winnipeg's teen idols the Royal Art Lodge is necessary viewing this summer (the other exhibition is a group show of contemporary Chinese artists that is more miss than hit). Works from the original five (minus Drue Langlois) reveal different degrees of refinement from the practices they established a decade ago. Adrian Williams has cleaned up the most and contributes ink and varnish illustrations that could have come straight from a classic children's book. Jonathan Pylypchuk continues to make puppet psychodramas out of junk. And Marcel Dzama's vaguely nostalgic scenarios are still wrought in the brown tones of root beer syrup (though not actually painted with such). Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber's playful but twisted and brightly coloured collaborations are the clearest progression from the zine aesthetic of their past to their professional careers today. The elders of TRAL have all grown up. The new generation at Tomorrow might want to pay a visit to see what's in store.
Tomorrow Gallery: http://tomorrowgallery.info/
Check website for current exhibitions.
Division Gallery – Toronto: http://www.galeriedivision.com/Royal_Art_Lodge/RAL_EN_TO.html
After the Royal Art Lodge continues until August 31.
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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Ben Schumacher & Carlos Reyes at Tomorrow | After the Royal Art Lodge at Division Toronto
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