The danger in asking someone to look closely is that they’ll focus their gaze and lose sight of all that surrounds them. If you want someone to become more attentive to the world, it’s better to ask them to listen closely, which opens the ears and brings in a wider range of perception so that selection is usurped by immersion. There is less control in listening and more reception, less of the subject and more subjection. This relinquishing of authority is difficult since we’re so used to being in charge of meaning, of creation, of the planet. But in the age of the Anthropocene when our behavior as a species is putting all that matters at risk, perhaps the time is right for us to stop telling the world what it can do for us and listen to what it has to say. 
Robert Wysocki, traction
All this might sound like a sermon from a hippie tree-hugger, but the artists in Blackwood Gallery’s current exhibition – with the mouthful of a title: The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared– are nothing of the sort. Their objectivity in depicting the world or in allowing it to behave as it will is cool, calculated, and purposefully alienating. The result is an unfamiliar objectivity that’s been forgotten after decades of self-absorption. Tim Knowles’ ink trails follow creases in folded and crumpled paper but mark their own path. Robert Wysocki’s 30 000 pound pile of sand works its way across the gallery floor at the speed of erosion. Both artists hand over much of the process to the materials themselves (and if this reminds you of pre-hippie mindful music making by the likes of John Cage, I’m thinking the same thing too). 
Kara Uzelman, Magnetic Stalactites
When human hands are more obviously at play – such as in Pascal Grandmaison’s hi-def slo-mo reverse entropy videos or Kara Uzelman’s carefully constructed post-consumer stalactites – it helps to see the artist as a magician’s assistant, someone who is only there to facilitate the trick. Grandmaison’s illusion is of a return to order after a violent disturbance. His systems (water surfaces, decomposing wood) are inherently fragile, so it’s difficult to assess the damage of his interventions – but that’s the point. Uzelman’s additions to the gallery architecture could evoke any number of other things (including the weight of personal history imbued in mass-produced domestic products), but in this context they highlight the material essence of her metal pots and pans that ties them back to elemental forces like magnetism. No matter how long they’ve lived in our homes, they can’t shed their origins in the earth and are called back to it through a physical attraction.
If you do as I did and left the gallery to wander through the campus, taking in the material presence of its striking architecture before getting lost on a trail through scrub brush to the south only to end up on a cliff overlooking the Credit River, then the exhibition’s concerns will travel with you and your senses, piqued by the work within, will be subject to the world without.
Blackwood Gallery: http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca
The pen moves across the earth… continues until November 29.
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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The pen moves across the earth... at Blackwood Gallery
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