Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

It’s not often that a gallery show has as strange a public ambassador as Allyson Mitchell’s does. But that’s the feeling one gets while ambling past the picture window of the Paul Petro Gallery, and coming nose to nose with Ms Mitchell’s fuzzy diorama-dignitary: a life-sized squirrel, propped up on its hind legs, nose sniffing the air expectantly, decked out in neon pink fun-fur, with a mini-ecosystem of shag carpet to keep it company. It’s all the very picture of cuteness, until one’s eyes meet the six white felt teats, popping out of its exposed underbelly like swollen buttons on a double-breasted jacket.

That mixture of oddness and (not so) innocent fun could very well be a fitting summary for what awaits beyond the gallery’s front door, albeit in miniature form. It is inordinately difficult for us to find the words to adequately capture the ambiance of the installation (well, darlings, it was bound to happen sometime), so let’s just stick with ‘overwhelming’, shall we?

Carrying her penchant for the fun-fur pelt over from her exuberant exploration of Playboy cheesecake, Ms Mitchell has decided to focus on what might well turn out to be some kind of standard bearer of lesbian erotica: the Lady Sasquatch. The gallery is decked out like the grotto of a licentious Cougar, and stepping into it, we feel not unlike Dr. Livingstone stepping into the wilds of the Amazon. We are surrounded by wall hangings of the brood in various states of sexual congress: a voluptuous, monobrowed scarlet and fuschia vixen caught in a delicious moment of self-abusive repose; a mammoth golden-retriever-blonde (with an amusing ‘70s-era Gloria Steinem shag hairdo) giving her tawny lover a bit of forceful encouragement in the arts of muff diving; two cheeky beauties, looking over their shoulders as they skip hand-in-hand into the dappled light of the forest, presumably in pursuit of more illicit pleasures; in short, Hustler for the animal kingdom, all rendered in shag and fun-fur, natch. And this is just what’s on the walls; what immediately grabs the eye and assaults the senses are our unquestionable favourites: two colossal, multi-teated Yeti-ettes – a shaggy blonde and a mulleted grey-and-black “Silverback” (who bears an eerie resemblance to Rae Dawn Chong in “Quest for Fire”) – caught in some kind of mating ritual, frozen in mid-rut. And, as if this wasn’t enough, lite lounge-disco cascades softly from a record player in the corner.

So, once the visual assault of fun-fur abates, the question remains and lingers: what to make of all this? Well, the obvious answer is that Ms Mitchell is taking us further down the path of her “Deep Lez” mythos, further exploring the iconography of that strange, perplexing animal known as the Lesbian in the Wild. And that’s certainly true, but the deeper truth is that Ms Mitchell has ensnared us in a tangle of associations that’s as knotted as the shag adorning the walls. Lady Sasquatch stands proudly atop what amounts to a dog-pile of lesbian and feminist issues and iconography. Let us attempt an explanation by way of illustration: here before us is a foray into lesbian iconography and desire done in fun-fur (connoting the soft, the pretty, the feminine) and shag carpeting (1970's suburban domesticity, which, when paired with issues of sexuality, invariably recalls feather-haired cheesecake pin-ups, wife-swapping parties and copious minge), diligently, immaculately sewn together (quilting circles, the craft movement, paging Judy Chicago and Faith Ringgold), and exemplified by the immense Lady Sasquatch, licentious Sapphic beast (unbridled female sexuality as devouring and uncontrollably voracious, paging Camille Paglia). The pelted dioramas may be impressive, but it’s the theory that knocks you out.

The real achievement of the show, the thing that transforms our polite golf-clap to standing ovation, is the balancing act involved in pulling it off, and Ms Mitchell sashays briskly across one hell of a tightrope. To be sure, this is a devilishly brainy romp through the forest, but it’s that tension between the conceptual breadth and depth and the ribald jokes, tittering nostalgia, sly irony, and carefree exuberance of it all that makes it worthwhile. The theoretics of the show have the potential to be suffocating, but, to her resounding credit, Ms Mitchell navigates them with the ease and confidence of a little girl playing hopscotch; the sense of lightness, of fun, is pervasive and infectious. Moreover, the Sapphic antics and pin-up nostalgia are never allowed to outshine the thematic intelligence. Everything is in tight harmony, and what is more, everything is here to be enjoyed, whether it’s the bawdy beasts or the feminist musing. And quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, in sauntering through the Paul Petro gallery, we are hard-pressed to think of anything more enjoyable than a voluptuous eight-foot, multi-mammaried, femmulleted Lezzie beast in full strut.

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We have always taken a particular interest in Daryl Vocat. Aside from the fact that his name is among those mentioned as one of those who might be behind our little endeavour, his continuing interest in boy’s-own culture and boy’s-own stories is of some fascination, as his interpretive glance is always accompanied by a roll of the eyes and a snicker or two. These totems of nascent masculinity form a leitmotif in Mr. Vocat’s continually expanding oeuvre, and watching them rear their queered heads in one print series after another never ceases to amuse; hence, our presence at Art Metropole for the presentation of another folio of prints devoted to the crashings and bubblings of pubescence, this entry entitled “A Boy’s Will.”

The entrance hall (for lack of a less grandiose-sounding descriptor) is lined on either side with prints: “A Boy’s Will” is displayed opposite the “Scout” series. The “Scout” series opens with a rather officious portrait of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and a rather contentious homo himself. A darkly shimmering Baden-Powell emerges from an aquatinted haze, looking for all the world like a mound of polished bronze, gazing evenly and purposefully into the distance, a quote of his – “I have had the luck to lead two distinct lives” – floating next to him, written in a child’s scrawl. This is a fitting overture to the rest of the series, as its proud dualism contains the thematic and formal structure of what is to follow. And what is to follow? A suite of pictograms and left-over boy scout manual illustrations, bits of salient text (“Draw a Line to Divide,” “Be Prepared”), and roughly textured photographic imagery (most of it subtly or overtly homoerotic) juxtaposed, superimposed, and altogether wrestling for pictorial dominance.

“A Boy’s Will,” different though it may be in technique (screenprints as opposed to “Scout”’s etchings and drypoints) employs the same visual stratagem: cheekily altered boy scout manual illustrations. The tone is slightly different as well; “Scout” is far more austere, whereas “Boy’s Will” is prankishly lighthearted. It imagines a boy’s society based on mischievous play, of flouting rigid authority, of flying the pirate flag – like an instigation of a world-wide slumber party. The manual illustrations are tweaked to show boys playing with a Ouija board, tattooing each other, taking slingshot aim at passing cars, indulging in a bit of nude massage. This juxtaposition of the institution and delinquency, of societal expectation and personal fantasy, is the double life, not only of Baden-Powell, but of all Arcadian boy’s culture in general. This is the tangle that arises out of institutional boy’s-own culture; all that male-bonding jargon – of shaping rough clay etcetera – processed through the lurid, sweaty uncertainty of pubescent manhood, and resulting in a kind of Spartan code for the junior teen set. It’s precisely that potent, confused mix of rigid militarism, Arcadian innocence and emergent sexuality, laid out page after lovingly rendered page, that gives Mr. Vocat’s prints their depth and resonance. Like an expertly voiced harmony, each of the aforementioned strains are paid their honest homage, and thus, we can trace their parallels, their overlappings, and their occasional tangles.

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This might sound a wee bit strange coming from our mouth, but that never stopped us before now: the whole idea of an Award is becoming less and less something that one is willing to get behind with any kind of enthusiasm, at least (or perhaps, especially) in the Visual Arts. Far too often, the Art Award is an exercise in righteous self-congratulation; the converted showering the preacher with hysterical praise, all the while patting themselves on the back for having the wit and good taste to recognize good preaching when they see it. A brief f’r’instance: the only thing that remains prestigious about the Turner Prize is the size of the cheque given to the winner (let’s just say that whoever dreamed up the idea of having Madonna present the award might well be a greater cynic than us). Here in the wild hinterlands of Canada, the closest equivalent our Art Institutions can muster to such hyperinflated grand-standery is the Sobey Art Award, sagely administered by the Sobey (yes, that Sobey’s, of grocery-store chain fame) Art Foundation. The goal of the award is to cull together a short list of artist by region (Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies and the North, West Coast), pare that down to a shorter list of five finalists, and the crown the winner from that five; like a kind of Canadian Art Idol, sans the screaming fans and obsequious host.

The Award is a biennial affair, and the hosanna-esque tone of high-minded solemnity that permeates its catalogue is somewhat laughable given that the damned thing is only 3 years old. “Curators must choose,” avows the Right Hon. Ray Cronin, Chair of the curatorial panel, and goes on to wax with booming gravitas on the hallowed difficulty of such a task, on selecting the finest of the sumptuous meats of which our rich cultural stew is made, and on the unimpeachable majesty of the Sobey Art Foundation. They have, as it turns out, “ focused our attention on Contemporary Canadian Art with a new acuity.” Well, thank heaven for Sobey’s, lest the rest of us be made to focus with an outdated acuity.

And what of the show itself? Well, when the vastness of MoCCA is filled with exemplary work by Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Althea Thauberger, Marcel Dzama, Germaine Koh, and Greg Forrest, one can’t really go wrong. Mr. Forrest ushers us into the show with his cast bronze Stanley Cup squatting atop a washing machine. We aren’t overly excited by his sculptures, but there’s enough rakish misanthropy there to pique our interest. Mr. Gauthier – the winner of this competition, FYI – is represented by three of his kinetic installations; machines constructed out of detritus (measuring tape, traffic cones) that drag various thicknesses of graphite along the walls via a system of motors, pulleys and aluminum rings. The sound is amplified so that, as the constructions are going about their vaguely erratic business, one hears the graphite making its slow scrape across the plaster. The result is phenomenal. The marks made are a conglomeration of ghostly lines that form either distended overlapping triangles (as in “Marqueurs D’Incertitude”) or columns of wavering vertical smudges (“La Course”), like someone lit a series of fires up the wall. The intersection of the concrete and the ephemeral, of cold efficient machine and the delicate warmth of its tracings is profoundly tactile and deeply haunting.

Marcel Dzama is represented by...well, the only thing he has to represent him: his usual assortment of fairy-tale figures and Busby Berkeley Beauties gone strangely sour, rendered in sharp, scratchy ink and diluted root beer syrup. Reams of drawings line the walls, their subjects floating acontextually in the middle the vast blankness of the page; in contemplating Dzama, one is, of course, always tempted to think of Winnipeg, isolated and stranded in the wind-blown expanse of Manitoba, breeding these sardonic, whimsical oddities (our personal favourite has to be a brown-coated, fist-pumping Nosferatu hollering into a microphone, entitled “Dracula Giving his Message of Hate to Canada”).

Ms Koh makes a disappointing showing with two works which fail to properly encapsulate the nature of her nomadic quest for identity: a mutating self-portrait project, in which, every year, she paints over last year’s self-portrait; and an installation of eight years worth of her own hair, strung together like a follicular timeline. “Fête” (the hair-piece) is shrewd enough, and pays honest homage to the fact of life’s general mundanity, and the importance that that forces on the otherwise banal objects we choose as totems of our passage through time. Her self-portrait, on the other hand, suffers from its mode of presentation: the 2004 edition is accompanied by shabby photographs of its previous incarnations, and the whiff of undergraduate cleverness wafting around it is a little too strong for our nose.

Ms Thauberger rounds things out with her video piece “A Memory Lasts Forever.” Conceived of as a collaborative opera, Ms Thauberger worked with composer Robert Massey and enlisted the aid of four adolescent girls, trained in some way, shape or form in either writing or music. Structured around a particular memory of Ms Thauberger’s – of finding her dead dog floating limply in her swimming pool – the opera repeats the one scene four times, as each of the girls take turns being the protagonist of this domestic tragedy. Owing to the amateurish look of the video and the inability of the girls to act plausibly, the work never quite makes the leap into opera, and instead lurches along only to fall somewhere between soap opera and precocious high school play. Not that we’re criticizing – this particular brand of failed histrionics manages to suit the material quite well; anything more polished, and the project would run the risk of seeming disingenuous and irretrievably snooty.

So what is to be concluded from all this? After all, no one, least of all us, should be begrudging Mr. Gauthier’s well-earned success, nor the good company of his fellow nominees. Bitching about Making a Spectacle is a uniquely Canadian phenomenon that simply must be dispensed with, if we are ever to jettison our collective reputation as The Little Country That Might, If You Ask Politely and Wait Your Turn. Whatever our issues with the dubious writing skills of the curators and the self-important pomp of the catalogue entries, the fact remains that a little competition does an art scene good, especially one as politely reluctant to self-advertise as the Canadian art scene. If this is what it takes for Canadian art to speak up a little louder on the international stage, then so be it. The Art Award becomes laughable only when one begins to take it too seriously; when one begins to look to it as a barometer of trend and style; when it becomes little more than an opportunity to appear fashionable and forward-thinking (as opposed to actually being forward-thinking), to pay lip-service to already-inflated reputations. That is how one ends up with something like the Turner Prize, whose only functions now seem to be, on the one hand, the dispensing of cash like some kind of pedigreed ATM, and on the other hand, giving a nation the chance to shake its collective head at the ludicrous insularity of an art scene gorging itself on the fattened reputations of its young.

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