New Century Abstracts at the Art Gallery of Peterborough

Just for the record, I don't really believe in abstraction. We don't see that way; courtesy millennia of Natural Selection, living beings on this planet excel at pattern recognition. Those species that didn't died out long ago. New Century Abstracts, which just opened at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, didn't alter my belief. But then, it wasn't intended to. Carlo Cesta, Cathy Daley, Sanaz Mazinani, Shaan Syed, Dermot Wilson, and Jinny Yu aren't trying to wrench anyone away from the necessarily representational seeing with which we're all biologically equipped. They're just trying to mess with it.



Dermot Wilson, Notches and Spirals

So Carlo Cesta aesthetically reiterates classic 1960s architectural elements with geometrically sculptural forms in Insulated Shed, an installation that incorporates – but of course – a garage door, but which is, alas, aesthetically held in check by its aggressive periodness. The intense optical quality of Dermot Wilson's three large notched spiral drawings invoke the intent of the abstract camouflage patterns painted on the sides of WWI dazzle ships to mislead the human eye and muck up visual information, yet make room for the suggestive charges of other available levels of meaning.

And Sanaz Mazinani's large abstract compositions – two circular, one ovoid – made for visually interesting geometric patterns when seen from afar, but became far less benign, far more politically charged entities read close up at the level of detail. The multiple rings of reiterated imagery comprising Amsterdam/Sidi Bouzid, for instance, includes that of a Tunisian man horrifically immolating himself in an extreme act of political protest that began the so-called Arab Spring.

And like I said, I don't believe in abstraction anyway.


Art Gallery of Peterborough: http://agp.on.ca/
New Century Abstracts continues until January 14.


Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, independent curator, and freelance art critic. He is the author of Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, four books of poetry, and Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War. McElroy lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.