Some exhibitions get metaphorically under my skin, but Penelope Stewart’s immersive installation at the Koffler Gallery literally entered my body. This physical absorption hits you as soon as you step into the gallery and inhale the fragrant air. The rich odour of beeswax draws you closer to her main structure: a cube within the cube panelled with squares of gold, brown, and yellow. The experience of this added sense, one that you have no choice but to subject yourself to, heightens your self-awareness and tunes you in to the material conditions of the work you’re about to explore. As with silence and John Cage’s 4’33”, you come to understand that you’ve been smelling every other exhibition you’ve ever seen but only now (except for those super-thick Kim Dorland oil paintings) realize that it has an impact on how you see the work – if only in this sense that it is clinically and intentionally absent. Smells, like noise, are traditionally kept out of art galleries. 
Penelope Stewart
But Stewart doesn’t leave it at that. There is a cornucopia of wax items awaiting you on the other side of the door set in the cube you are so feverishly sniffing. Those objects hang down from the ceiling likes vines and spill out from the open end of the room you find yourself in. The interior walls are patterned and mottled with flowers or candlesticks. The floor is piled with buttons, spoons, dishes, goblets, doorknobs, and a collection of antique keys. The accumulation doesn’t represent an abundance so much as an obsessive accumulation of the odds and ends a hoarder – or an artist – would gather. On the one hand they all could simply be part of a still life. On the other there must be an underlying logic to justify all this fabrication and repetition. These are the things themselves but replicas and fragile ones at that. In his Meditations, Descartes conducts an experiment with wax to demonstrate that the mind’s perception takes precedent over the senses. The world is not just something to be seen, smelled, and felt, but something to be understood first. According to Descartes, this knowledge is what connects us to the divine. Can something similar be found here? You’ll have to smell for yourself. 
Elisabeth Picard, Volute 1 & Volute 2, 2013, dyed zip ties
Speaking of the stuff that art is made of, the compact three-person exhibition at Lonsdale Gallery is anchored by three different kinds of unique material: red thread for Amanda McCavour, ribbons of dried acrylic paint for Robert Davidovitz, and zip ties for Elisabeth Picard. McCavour is represented here by a single cloud of hovering lillypads that risks being forgotten, tucked away as it is at the front of the gallery. She needs to wrest more control of a space to avoid being relegated to the status of decoration. Davidovitz’s work looks from a distance like paintings of grids until you get close enough to see the weave of strips of paint. The soft order and mushy pixels that emerge hover at the border, which is generally disregarded in most painting, of liquid and solid matter. They are formal curiousities but should be studies for something more ambitious. Picard also uses repetition and slight variations – in her case with dyed zip ties – to created sculptures that resemble organic forms like coral or microscopic creatures. The contrast between the utilitarian, mass-produced objects that are so common as to go unnoticed and the flowering symmetry of her delicate things certainly grabs your attention. The challenge (as it is, I supposed, with display cases in natural history museums) is mounting and lighting them perfectly. What seems elegant and otherworldly in a professionally shot photograph is in danger of looking like some carcass washed up on the beach in person.
Koffler Gallery: http://kofflerarts.org/koffler-gallery/exhibitions/featured/
Penelope Stewart continues until August 31.
Lonsdale Gallery: http://lonsdalegallery.com/
Burden of Proof continues until August 10.
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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Penelope Stewart at the Koffler Gallery | Burden of Proof at Lonsdale Gallery
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