One of the challenges of being an art critic is that everyone expects you to write negative reviews, just as long as you don’t write about them. Being Canadians and all, our tendency to engage in full-fledged trashing (at least in print) is hampered by our innate politeness, the intimacy of the art community, the economics of funding, and the far-from-cutthroat congeniality of the scene. There are exceptions, but criticism is for the most part supportive and positive. The obvious danger here is that a lack of criticality makes the creative body flabby. As the coaches say, “No pain, no gain.” Which isn’t to say, “Get the hell out of my gym-slash-art gallery!” but to prod artists onward to greater health. As such, negative reviews or, as I liked to think of them, not-entirely-favourable reviews are just as valuable, if not more so, in contributing to the discourse around art. They are couched in an appreciation of the artist’s intents or efforts, but address where the work falls short or takes missteps. They are also a lot harder to write than your standard gushing praise, but here goes… 
An Te Liu
Starting in the back room of Division Gallery’s currently running trio of solo shows, An Te Liu creates monuments to a spent past, but not the one the finished works imitate. The concrete suggests Brutalism and the non-representational shapes suggest Modernism, but the forms are real, functional things: the packing material that fills the space around the consumer electronics they protect. Rachel Whiteread is one touchstone (and maybe too close a comparison). James Carl is another who makes the disposable permanent. The heavy plinths on which the Brancusi towers and quasi-primitive figurines sit are part of a package that frames the non-art sources as art. It risks being reduced to its origins and left a one-liner – the works on paper are guiltier of this – but the heft of the artist’s materials imbue the squat sculptures with an effective authority. 
Patrick Coutu
Patrick Coutu’s sculptures are pixelated plant life fabricated from tiny cubes of aluminum and bronze. The dense stacks of uniform units will intrigue anyone raised on Minecraft, but otherwise feel like scientific models representing objective states. Coutu's fragile wall-hung fabrics manage to transcend the obvious with their patterned but unpredictable array of uncountable threads tracing some sort of order beyond human perception. As a less direct but more poetic response to our super-mediated digital selves, they take the cake.
Scott McFarland is wrestling with technology from a different century, doing his darndest to make something more out of photography. He adds lightboxes, cuts away sections of the image, and flickers the lights. He pairs epic panoramas with slow pans of the same scene on perpendicular video screens. He mounts seamlessly collaged photos of waspy cottagers tending a garden in front of a mirror that reflects a photo on the rear of the frame that depicts the same cottagers in the same garden at a different time. All these attempts to make a photograph not a photograph either obscure or detract from the photograph. While I’m not a purist by any means, I like my interventions to carry the work to unexpected places. Here they draw back the curtain on what’s already there.
Division Gallery: http://www.galeriedivision.com/toronto/exhibitions
An Te Liu, Patrick Coutu, & Scott McFarland continue until December 23.
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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An Te Liu, Patrick Coutu, & Scott MacFarland at Division Gallery, Toronto
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