The Canadian Biennial is a showcase for the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art. Every two years it offers the opportunity for visitors to get a close look at what some of the best Canadian artists are doing across the country and around the world. If the main purpose of a curator is to build a collection, as Contemporary Art Curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois said at the media preview for the show, then the biennial is an opportunity for the public to see how well our national curators are doing that job. The exhibition title Shine a Light refers to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and suggests that the artists in the show are modern day philosophers who reveal things that might have otherwise remained hidden. It also handily refers to the function of the exhibition itself, which is to shine a light on the diversity of contemporary Canadian artists and their innovative work taken from a collection aiming to be as representative as possible. 
Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass (detail), 2012 (National Gallery of Canada; courtesy: the artist, Catriona Jeffries Gallery & Casey Kaplan; photo: Anders Sune Berg)
The third edition of the biennial, Shine a Light is more focused than previous editions and alternatively gives more attention to individual artists or gathers several artists’ works together in thematic displays. A few galleries focus on environmental concerns in recent photography. One gallery is given over to current abstraction in painting and sculpture. In another gallery, a fine assembly of drawings brings together fantasy and figuration with cartoonish bravura and bright colour, while confronting viewers with difficult subject matter. For example, Howie Tsui’s The Unfortunates of D’Arcy Island depicts a 19th Century Chinese-Canadian leper colony off the coast of Vancouver Island. The exhibition is also very strong in its presentation of contemporary Indigenous art, from both emerging artists like Luke Parnell to established artists like Rita Letendre, who at the age of 86 is the most senior contemporary artist in the show and is represented by a revelatory work from last year. The exhibition also puts the spotlight on a significant gift that greatly increases the gallery’s holdings of works by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.
Shine a Light also celebrates acquisitions that bring to Canada works that were shown to great acclaim abroad. If you didn’t make it to the 2013 Venice Biennale, now is your chance to see Shary Boyle’s The Cave Painter. You can also check out Jeremy Shaw’s Variation FQ, which premiered at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin last year. Of these works, Geoffrey Farmer’s Leaves of Grass has the biggest impact. Like Walt Whitman’s magnum opus, which the poet revised and expanded over his lifetime, this is an updated edition of a work that was initially shown in 2012 at Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany. The title signals modesty, while the ambition counters mortality. Thousands of images cut and glued to long stalks of dried grass are arranged in chronological order across a narrow length of 124 feet, like a frieze of photographic ikebana or a puppet march of time animated as the viewer strolls by. All of the images are cut from a trove of over 1,000 Life magazines given to Farmer by Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov from their archives. For this installation, Farmer responded to its new home, and increased the size, adding three feet in height and an additional 5,000 to 6,000 images. It would take at least a year to look at thoroughly (it’s up for that long for those so inclined). It starts with dogs and pageant beauties from the thirties and ends with images from an issue on AIDS in the eighties. In between there is everything from booze to automobiles, forgotten product labels and Campbell’s soup cans, celebrities, regular folks, and a looming Oscar Levant. Numerous banners, slogans, advertisements and signs offer endless reading material: the declaration “We all like Ike” is met with a responding “We like Maidenform,” while a giant cover of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” hovers overhead near a “coloured waiting room” sign. The difference in scale of the images, which makes visual sense in the context of the magazine, creates surreal juxtapositions in the installation’s montage and skews significance. Within the visual hubbub I zoomed in on a banner that read “Seeing is Believing.” Leaves of Grass is a fitting continuation of the work of a previous generation of Canadian artists like Trasov and Morris through their Image Bank, as well as General Idea who perpetrated their own inversion of Life magazine to engage with media representation in this country. 
David Hartt, Awards Room at the Johnson Publishing Company Headquarters, Chicago, Illinois, 2011, ink jet print (National Gallery of Canada, © NGC)
In a similar vein, David Hartt’s Stray Light excavates, through a portrait of its headquarters in Chicago, the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) and its legacy, which includes Ebony, a magazine that was deliberately intended to be an African-American version of Life and have a positive influence. Through photographs and a video commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, visitors to the National Gallery can explore what Hartt calls the “singularity” of the modernist JPC building, a highly focused example of ideology in architecture. The funky interior design by Arthur Elrond is out of this world, but an accrual of details root the building in the struggle for civil rights in the United States. The closing sequence of the video shows a series of books published by the company including works by Lerone Bennett, Jr. who wrote, in The Challenge of Blackness, "the image sees, the image feels, the image acts," underscoring the effect that images have on one’s actions and feelings of self-worth. Framed by the curators’ invocation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the works by Farmer and Hartt are exemplary in the way that they encourage us as viewers to take a closer, harder look at the images that make up our world of appearances.
National Gallery of Canada: http://www.gallery.ca/
Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 continues until March 8, 2015.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog’s Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
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Shine a Light: The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery in Ottawa
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