How do you break the news to an artist who curates an exhibition that his talents lie in his eye for others not in his own hand? Keith J. Varadi, who also has a solo exhibition on display at Cooper Cole and is responsible for the mind-bending group show in the front space, is someone who needs to be told. His own work is a painfully self-referential, quasi-fictional – but not really, but actually maybe – account of an artist played by the artist himself who takes pictures or appears in videos that end up in the galleries that exhibit the work of Keith J. Varadi. The vexing meta-awareness bleeds into a break up with the dealer who happened to be exhibiting an earlier iteration of this multiparty project, or at least that's what the current gallerist told me, which is interesting as gossip but not particularly compelling as art.
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Wesley Friedrich, Hands, 2013, prop hands, cardboard, wood, hardware, tape
Dream Song 386, on the other hand, the exhibition that Varadi curated is also about him (something to do with the Midwest and fracking), but if you divorce yourself from the weight of autobiography there's a wild and woolly exhibition to be seen. It reminds me of my first experiences of being pleasantly disoriented by art that only occasionally struck me as familiar. The reward here is not so much the individual work as the opening up of possibility when you are exposed to everything from a standard pop art painting of sliced bread to metal rack slung with a row of pristine watering cans based on a similar rack found in a cemetery. The linking narrative is even too abstruse for me to run with, but that can be freeing as well. Ben Fain’s low rent, Matthew Barney-lite prank parade video is the literal central work and its anarchic disregard for hierarchies sets the tone.
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Becky Howland, Love Canal Potato, 1980, plaster, eye, pigment
However, if pressed, I’d identify the anchors of this assembly as two of the older artists who have been invited to the party (since the gallery’s last exhibition also featured elder statesman Gerald Ferguson, it looks like this might be a bit of a thing, and I’m all for it). Alan Belcher has been Toronto-based for decades, but his reputation lies in New York of the eighties and his recent CV is blank when it comes to local appearances. Given the millennial love for all things from that grim decade of my adolescence (it started with the threat of nuclear war and ended with the plague of AIDS), it makes sense that Belcher would return to the fold. However, whereas he shows newer work, fellow elder Becky Howland contributes pieces from the past such as her innocuous but ominous Love Canal Potato. As a creation that begins to grow again if left alone long enough, the tuber she’s hidden away in the corner might just be the true avatar of this confusing dream.
Cooper Cole Gallery: http://coopercolegallery.com/
Keith J. Varadi: Self-Evident Loss continues until April 30.
Dream Song 386 continues until April 30.
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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Dream Song 386 at Cooper Cole Gallery
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