As someone who is faced with the Sisyphean task of putting art into words each week, I often gravitate to work where the content dominates. This allows me to tell a story in advance of my critique, whereas a largely formal creation leaves me struggling to say anything beyond a description of what the thing I’m looking at Iooks like. “Two vertical panels of green and a horizontal strip of yellow” is nowhere near as fun to recount as “an array of intertextual references to post-structural thinkers and their assorted fetishes.” However, formalism still looms large in the world of visual art and I wouldn’t be up to snuff as a critic unless I wrestled with art at its most taciturn on occasion. 
Matt Donovan, Green Honeycomb (detail), 2014, Lego
There is not much to say about Matt Donovan’s work at Olga Korper other than it’s made of Lego and based on patterns. His use of the ubiquitous children’s toy has little if anything to do with Lego as a cultural commodity and everything to do with its as an endlessly repeatable unit of matter. As such, it is a perfect medium for creating the various geometrical patterns that make up his wall-hung creations. Since they work in three-dimensions, they aren’t purely visual, but the closest art historical referent I can link them to is Op Art. What appears uniform from a distance breaks down into pixels up close and the shadows cast by each brick add an impalpable element to something so otherwise inescapably tangible. There is a disorienting effect in walking through the gallery and it’s easy to dismiss this, like the Lego, as a gimmick. However, if one were to run with it, the trippy phenomenology of drones, dream machines, and minimalism (of the hardcore techno variety) might just be the signposts you pass on the way to a purely abstract (in the sense of not being part of this world) Platonic Form – and you can’t get much more formal than that! 
Jamelie Hassan, Poppy Cover (for Holy Roller), 2010
While Donovan’s work could only exist in the rarefied space of a gallery (or seem like alien presences without it), the art of Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner, the two London, Ontario-based artists who have had a creative and life partnership for the past thirty years and are currently exhibiting complementary works of their own at A Space, is practically suffocated within the white cube. Benner’s projects in particular, since they often take the form of gardens, are most suited to the open air. Trapped inside they lack the circulating audience and environmental elements that root them in the local and so inveigle them into place that they almost disappear. I worked for years at Harbourfront and only slowly absorbed the presence of his All That Has Value. Hassan’s contributions work the same way and, while the installation of her Poppy Cover (for Holy Roller) has a definite presence, the image of its 2010 appearance in her hometown draped over a Sherman tank clearly demonstrate how it can best be displayed.
The key to this exhibition is that it is of and about the world and, as such, flush with stories and flowers (note: I’m using it as a verb here) in context. Whereas a so-called formal work professes to sustain its unified self independent of the everyday, these historically inspired and politically engaged acts of collaboration (not with other people, but with nature itself) only make sense as part of terra firma. One puts your head in the firmament; the other keeps your feet on the ground. The nice thing is there is a place for both.
Olga Korper Gallery: http://www.olgakorpergallery.com/
Matt Donovan continues until December 6.
A Space: http://www.aspacegallery.org/
Jamelie Hassan & Ron Benner: The World is a Garden Whose Walls are the State continues until December 13.
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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Matt Donovan at Olga Korper | Jamelie Hassan & Ron Benner at A Space
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