The enduring appeal of surrealism could perhaps be attributed to the universal experience of dreams (except for a friend from university who claimed to only ever experience shifting fields of colour while he slept). Therein lies its weakness as well, for just as the dreams of others can be torturous in their tedium and irrelevance (as anyone who has ever had a roommate recount their dreams in detail on a daily basis knows), so can art that merely jams together disparate images in an attempt to invoke some sort of psycho-sexual turmoil. Any teen with a pair of scissors, an anatomy textbook, and the latest issue of Vogue can do that. What distinguishes worthwhile artists who mine the less-than-rational recesses of our culture is a sensibility built on recurring themes that generate a greater mythology and a twist in the means of display that anchors the work in the space of the real. 
Jennifer Murphy
Jennifer Murphy has long had a sensibility that draws on a select bestiary, classical figures, and a knife’s edge. I described it as totemism over ten years ago in a review of an early solo exhibition, but it has progressed beyond individual creatures or images created from collaged shards of colour or fabric to metamorphizing multiple entities that overlap or shift from one form to another. In her current exhibition at Clint Roenisch Gallery, the biological kingdoms are united in pictures that combine plants with human or animal parts. The more straightforward combinations are glossy magazine updates of the kind of collages Max Ernst was doing in 1930, but fall prey to reductive readings that equate flora with genitalia. That’s old hat compared to the recombinant figures that paper the gallery walls – pinned ever so gently and at risk of being peeled away – in a constellation of fantastical creations that link beauty and decay. Maybe that’s why she uses plants so often: they bind dirt and decomposition to floral display and reproduction. Other narratives scuttle through the exhibition and come to rest at a black marble platform that holds wobbly towers of thread or dowels alongside an assemblage of driftwood and a long, thin, pink balloon. I’ll leave the meaning of the latter to the chattering classes because the overall effect is one that encourages freeform exploration. The recounting of dreams should begat more dreams, not explanations. 
Valérie Blass
Valérie Blass plays a funny game with body parts in her current exhibition at Daniel Faria Gallery (a remount of a show from Artspeak in Vancouver). Sometimes they are literally bodies, as with a full-size mannequin of woman, and sometimes they are allusions, as with black plasticine tendrils hanging off metal bars to resemble miniature figures in balance or sexual congress. Even when it’s clearly not a human, the implication is that the object is a stand-in or compliment to the flesh. A velvety black sculpture looks from one angle to be monstrous face, but from another is a cat attached vertically to a torso. However, the tail, when viewed from the concave mirror that is part of the support structure, wags like a phallus and takes the place of the reverse figure's nose. Perhaps I’m revealing too much of myself in naming these parts, but Blass – like the surrealists before her – fragments the self to play at the margins of identity. Each work is an invitation for completion while at the same time resisting that invitation. The armature that locks the sculptures in place impedes any complete view; you have to peer around, look up, or peek under, but the figure never coheres. The result is disturbing, but the lesson of artists like Blass and Murphy is that there is a pleasure in being disturbed.
Clint Roenisch Gallery: http://clintroenisch.com/
Jennifer Murphy & Eli Langer: Caravansary of Joy continues until April 25.
Daniel Faria Gallery: http://danielfariagallery.com/
Valérie Blass: My Life continues until April 25.
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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Jennifer Murphy at Clint Roenisch | Valerie Blass at Daniel Faria
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