We wonder, in our bemused curiosity (and, we must admit, slight envy), if this some kind of art first: where the gallery itself overshadows the artists it displays.

In all fairness, the show currently up at SPIN is pretty good. We tend to find Manuel Bujold’s urban city-scape photos a tad clichéd in their coarse black-and-white grottiness, but Eve Tremblay and Jeanne Susplugas are certainly worthy of a once (if not twice)-over. Ms. Tremblay’s hyper-theatrical, color saturated photographs are adroitly composed; she is best when she deals explicitly in artifice, so some of her more organically posed pictures tend to miss the mark. Nevertheless, an interest is maintained. And Ms. Susplugas’ tight close-up shots of blow-up dolls engaged in licentious abandon have a strange biological smuttiness to them (this is a compliment).

But the real star here is the gallery, an expansive affair, with three huge lunette windows lining the south wall, endowed with a certain streamlined post-industrial chic. Quite frankly, its successful re-emergence on the Queen West strip is of the stuff that Madonna’s dreams are made. The whole affair reeks of some kind of Hollywood hubris; we must say, the whole disappearance-provoking-confused-gossip, followed by an entrance worthy of a drag queen was pulled off with such aplomb, we can’t help but give a hearty, limp-wristed round of applause.

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In light of the chaotic mess of Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works 2003, the curators of the 2004 edition deserve some kind of parade. Efficient and organized, the event was one of those rare gatherings: just the right length, and one which struck the proper balance between seriousness and informality. Mind you, this is the event we’re talking about, and not the show.

The show was comprehensive, in a sense: the programmed video and experimental film works certainly exhausted the quality gamut. There was much of what we have come to expect from video art these days: pretentious, overly-earnest navel-gazing, nose-picking minutiae, and glib hipster proselytizing. We will spare naming the offenders, seeing as how this is our debut in the land of the written word, and one should hit the ground running rather than bitching (in the interest of entertainment, however, we will merely say this, parenthetically: that immersing your head in the bathtub falls somewhat short of a Revelatory Statement on Human Nature; that synchronizing breakbeats to grainy images of B-52 bombers likewise falls short of a RSoHN; and that only in Toronto can one do a slow motion dance in the middle of the financial district wearing a sarong and some artfully placed toilet paper and have passers-by deferentially step around you without asking just what it is you’re doing).

There was also much that was lovely, that played to the strength of video, that expertly navigated the sometimes alienating waters of experimental film, that had traces of humour, warmth and humanity: Mirha Soleil-Ross’ meditation on birth and destiny via her working-class Quebecois mother, Irene Bindi’s artfully formal dissection of picnic racing, Peter Kingstone’s nostalgia-tinged paean to the young and the horny, Roy Mitchell and Eugenio Salas’ dissertation on queer categories, Gunilla Josephson’s wry exercise in flower arrangement, and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s riff on fame and the desperation of those seek it. These works playfully, subtly engaged video as an evolving medium, and did more than their fair share of carrying the program.

So the New Toronto Works show came and went, and was relatively painless. And relative painlessness is, we think, something more video artists should aspire to more often.

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Can someone explain this gallery to us? More specifically, can someone explain how this gallery has yet to put on a bad show? Even when their shows are bad, they’re still worth seeing. We don’t understand. We’re mystified, we’re jealous, and we love it.

The Artist du jour is one Mr. Mike Bayne, an MFA candidate chez Concordia University, and he is a Small Painter; an Intimist, in art history speak. Vuillard he is not, nor does try to be (to his credit). This isn’t about formal experiments in colour; the little gallery info sheet makes much ado about blending photographic methods and painting and intertexuality yadda yadda yadda. This is fine, although he has nothing much to do with photorealism or photorealists either, beyond the nifty trick of making things look exactly like the things they’re meant to represent. It’s not Richter he’s channeling, but a rather older ghost. He has much more in common with Morandi, Vermeer, and the painters of the Northern Renaissance.

Bayne’s eye for detail is exquisite, and everything in the palm-sized picture plain gets the same amount of attention: bottles, tables, chairs, stoves, pots, pans. He has the Intimist’s eye for turning mundanity into an exquisite theatre of the ordinary. And, like good theatre, what impresses most about these miniatures is their atmosphere. Bayne’s skill is in conveying the still, lethargic, tragic emptiness of these objects left unattended. As if the chair in the corner, bathed in the graceful grey light of late afternoon, has been yearning all this time for someone to sit in it, or the beleaguered stove, piled high with utensils, whose exhausted mood is illuminated through the frazzled, dim electric yellow glow cast by its overhead bulb.

If there is any fault in the show, it’s in the inclusion of an artist statement, too much of which is given over to theoretical justifications. Mr. Bayne’s concepts and themes are almost poetically simple, needing no elucidation; the statement seems to hang there as if in clumsy obeisance to some silly sense of gallery protocol. The work should speak for itself, and the quiet, lonely whispers of Mr. Bayne’s oils are more than capable of doing so.

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Memo to Phillip Monk: We already know there’s a gay art mafia. We didn’t need the Art Gallery of York University to prove it to us. This show is the art equivalent of buying the 600$ scarf because we had some money left over from buying the 900$ shoes: a wee bit of a vanity exercise.

Honestly, the less said about this show, the better, for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that those mafiosettes might find us, bitch-slap us and take away our complimentary pink toaster that we received with our Artfag membership. And to those of you who think that getting bitch-slapped by a bunch of sissies is no great affair, we have only this to say: beware the sting of a limp wrist.

Seriously, though, can one really criticize a show comprised of recycled pieces? It was, in all honesty, some kind of gay art mafia greatest hits show: Andrew Harwood’s sequined revisions of Canadiana (which we might recognize from such galleries as Paul Petro), the Hidden Cameras’ album covers (whose inclusion in this show is perhaps a tad presumptuous), the Misses Laing and Munro’s Virginia Puff-Paint performance (which was, aesthetically speaking, quite pretty, which we think should be seen as a victory of a kind). No surprises, no shocks...all in all, a tad disappointing, lukewarm by virtue of the constant assault of deja-vu from all sides.

Thank god for Keith Cole, though, because without the divine in-transit shuttle entertainment, everybody but heaven knows what a bust the evening would have been.