Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And we were rather enjoying that mid-May rainy cold spat. We aren’t just being contrary; you must know full well of our loathing of the excesses of summer heat, so anything to delay that is welcome. Besides which, the weather here was very British, and British weather suits this city quite nicely.

What we like: the weather letting us hang on to our ability wear a layered wardrobe a few scant moments longer.

How we are: doing our level best to stifle our wanderlust. We simply long for a decent vacation, darlings.

What we don’t like: those gormless fools who insist on wearing sandals in the cold, windy drizzle. Mother Nature isn’t the only one laughing at you.
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When we got wind of the line-up of artists for the “Fantasia” show at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, we did not walk, we ran to the modestly-sized storefront gallery on Dundas West; Fantasia? Shary Boyle?! Daniel Barrow?!! And, after reading the gallery statement and perusing the show, we felt as if Miz Jessica Bradley had made a study of us, our appetites and proclivities, and said to herself, “Self: I will make a show that will please the pretty pink socks off of the Artfag.” Well darlings, consider ourselves pleased. So pleased, in fact, that our pretty pink socks have rocketed skyward and have landed in the fairy dust somewhere along the horizon.

Ms Bradley manages to eke a great deal out of modest means; the space itself is slightly larger than your average corner-grocery, and yet, given the scale and subject of the work, the gallery engenders a kind of intimate coziness that suits the theme quite nicely. Ms Bradley has culled together work by Ms Boyle, Mr. Barrow and the video-art collabo-constellation of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby to explore this theme of Fantasia: inner worlds of make-believe and surreptitious mythology versus the cruel pragmatics of society, the intimate glow of furtive narratives and their inevitable clash with the harsh light of day.

Mr. Barrow ushers us into the gallery with new works: “stills” – geologic strata of sections of drawings collaged one atop the other – from an upcoming performance, entitled “Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry.” According to the plot synopsis on-hand, we find ourselves enmeshed in the interior universe of a shut-in with some kind of disfiguring eye condition. This sad young lad is some kind of Henry Darger-esque figure: failed artist by vocation, garbage man by trade, he collects people’s detritus, recounts the brutalities of his own life, and voyeur that he (apparently) is, witnesses the horrors of others. There is much that is familiar and welcome here: interiority, sad young lads, the admixture of romance, ennui, delicate souls and brutal circumstance; even without the accompanying program guide, the major themes of the collaged drawings are enough to situate us firmly in Barrow-land.

The drawings themselves are comprised of the usual winning elements: that effete line, that careless disregard for perspective, which, in the hands of a lesser draughtsman, would read as clumsy, but gives Mr. Barrow’s off-kilter cosmos a dreamy weightlessness. Each work has its own text panel – carefully scrawled words on the pages of a tome that appears to sag under its own voluminous weight – glimpses of Mr. Barrow’s characteristically arch narration (in fact, that we could almost hear his wistful, resigned drone as we read). The one thing that seems to have changed, this time around, is his palette; gone are his blazing technicolours. In response to the more sordid elements of this particular narrative, the colour key is shifted down a few notches, into a more muted scheme – swollen-zit pinks, oil-slick purples, faded lilacs and ochre-greens. The one disappointment of Mr. Barrow’s work, and indeed, the only disappointment of the show, is the black-and-white silent video that accompanies the drawings. It seems to be a maquette, or run-through for the live performance. It has an admittedly documentary feel and purpose, but, surrounded as it is by all this evocative whimsy, fails to generate an equivalent interest.

Shary Boyle leads us further down the garden path with her miniature sculptures and prints. Again, the work here is no great departure for Ms Boyle; surreal, delicate nymphettes striking various poses abound. This is not to denigrate the work (Heaven forfend!); as per Mr. Barrow, her old tricks seem to be in perfect working order. Ms Boyle’s figurines enact some kind of sickly, nauseated version of a Rousseau-esque pagan mythology. The wall is lined with miniature nature nymphs, replete with vacant “Village of the Damned”-esque stares and eerily pre-pubescent pudenda. The punch of Ms Boyle’s work comes from its reconciliation of seemingly disparate vocabularies: the delicacy of the sculpting (each teeny-tiny finger gesture is accounted for), the gorgeous, ethereal colouring, the scale, are all hallmarks of Prettiness and Cuteness, which is then marred (or, at the very least, complicated) by, if not a vaguely off-kilter sexuality, then outright abjection; in one especially stunning example, a dreamy young man with a raffishly tousled mop of hair gingerly, lovingly drinks the pee issuing like a geyser, in a parade of heavy droplets, from an upturned nymphette vagina, her legs clumsily flailing, rising from the marshy water like a tipsy Arthurian Lady of the Lake.

As much as it pains us to admit it, we weren’t terribly fond of Ms Boyle’s accompanying prints. Most of them were illustrations of the sculptures, and all of them lacked that delicate marriage of opposites that makes her figurines so powerful. The shy physical presence and the consistent treatment of the sculpted figures is believable enough to convince us of their reality. Ms Boyle’s furiously heavy line-drawing vocabulary, combined with their two- or three-toned colour schemes, entrenches her prints in the land of the cartoon, erasing much of their subtlety. There is little delight in the prints; instead, the grotesque takes over, shoving the delicate balancing act of the sculptures curtly to one side.

The show rounds out with “Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure,” Emily Vey Duke’s and Cooper Battersby’s contribution. We would call this video a “discovery,” if it weren’t for the firm (and utterly deserved) deification of Ms Vey Duke and Mr. Battersby as art stars. “Songs of Praise...” clocks in at 16 minutes, and we were rapt for every passing second. Now, ladies and gentlemen, generally speaking, any video (especially a video arranged in a linear narrative) in a gallery setting longer than 15 minutes tends to raise in us suspicions of self-indulgence. Not so here: Vey Duke and Battersby pack the video with a glut of wry humour and lacerating irony, gliding deftly across the thin ice of a rather lofty theme (humanity vs. nature, in both biological and ethical senses of the word) with the pluckiness of an Olympic figure skater. The video proceeds like a rushed tour-guide, ushering us through various scenes. Among others: some nature scenes of birds, accompanied by a pious, self-loathing hymn (“the world is perfect/and we are such fuckups/who ruin everything...but the birds come back/which is amazing...”); a mosaic of traffic-jammed cityscapes, featuring same hymn, different lyrics; a pair of amateurishly animated Raëlian-esque wizards detailing their excited plans for a post-apocalyptic pagan society; and, the unquestioned highlight, the monologue of a beleaguered high-school girl, in which she amicably outlines her plot of revenge against the cool kids (she plans to organize all her fellow social cast-offs into an unpopular gang: rejects of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!). Like Mr. Barrow, like Ms Boyle, it is Ms Vey Duke’s and Mr. Battersby’s recognition and exploitation of dichotomy that makes this video such a triumph; just when it is about to get too lofty, too lost inside its own grandiose narratives, they inject a necessary dose of self-abasing reality to keep things stingingly familiar. And similarly, aside from her impeccable taste in artists, it is Ms Bradley’s recognition of the contrast and dichotomy of her curated theme – that, for every fragile interior monologue, there is a whole exterior world ready to shout over it – that endows this show, as a sum whole, with the crystalline beauty and delicacy of its parts.

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It could be argued that Peter Doig is in the midst of manufacturing quite the Romantic Myth around himself; one might even be tempted to recast his entire life thus far in the mold of said myth. Certainly, we could make a case for entry under the “itinerant artist” file: Mr. Doig’s travels have taken him from Toronto to Europe to Trinidad, of all places. Apropos of this latest geographic shift, one might be tempted to think that Mr. Doig spent a while musing on the life of one Mr. Paul Gaugin, and thought a little tropical transplanting might do the body (and the soul, and the reputation – after all, no one is quite so sought after as the geographic recluse) good. Now, lest you think that we are too cynical for words, we are of the firm belief that this Romanticism suits him quite perfectly, and if that is the wreath he sets on that buzzed dome of his, then all the better for his art, and consequently for us.

It is somewhat fitting (or, if not fitting, then at least conceptually appropriate) that the sketchier aspect of Mr. Doig’s work should find a temporary home amidst the ramshackle ruin of the current incarnation of the AGO. They have presented us with an (ahem) attenuated collection of Mr. Doig’s works on paper, a brief roomful of oils, watercolours, and pastels. Most of the works here are studies – figures and motifs repeat over and over and over, some of which refer only to each other, some of which we might recognize from his larger paintings – and, like any collection of preparations (as opposed to results) there is much that is imminently forgettable. A quick scribble here, a abbreviated patch of loosely figurative paint there; not much is present to linger over, and certainly, if it were edited down to its highlights, it would be a wee show indeed. This is not to say that the highlights are too few. There are many pleasures to be found in the as-yet-unbulldozered walls of the AGO. Furthermore, this is not the Artist at his Finest, and thus not exactly the best arena in which to swing our evaluative sword. So, to continue in our optimistic vein, what is remarkable about this quick little ditty of a show is not a simple matter of weighing Pieces We Like against Pieces We Don’t, but something much more interesting: specifically, how much of Mr. Doig’s particular aesthetic manages to shine through these linseed-oil-soaked leaflets.

Mr. Doig’s aforementioned Romanticism isn’t just any old romanticism, nor is it a throwback or a rehash. No, Mr. Doig has hit on some kind of aesthetic pay-dirt, and exploits it to a marvelous degree. The Informative Wall Plaque of the AGO touches on it obliquely with some misty hogwash niceties about the Mood of his work. But Mr. Doig’s aesthetic is so particular and specific that we feel the need to name it: the kind of Romanticism we find in his work is what we have come to term Hillbilly Weirdness. To elaborate: as far as we’ve been able to figure, his work consists in presenting fairly banal images – men in canoes, skiers on holiday, buildings surrounded by trees – and present them in a kind of sour, backwoods, alien mien, as if they are accompanied by the minor-key plonkings of an out-of-tune banjo. To wit: his canoes aren’t merely canoes, they’re as long as a suspension bridge, painted in rusty, decrepit reds. And their inhabitants look as if they’ve just woken up after having snoozed through the apocalypse, all gaunt, pale skin, and hair like haystacks. It’s that translation into the alien that makes his work so jostling, and it’s that alienness that seeps through, even in the sketches here. A few brief f’r’instances: the series of children playing cricket, where the ash-black of the children’s skin radiates sharply against the hazardous oranges of the landscape; a couple of gentlemen posed shoulder-to-shoulder in Napoleonic garb, who seem utterly foreign and acontextual no matter what background they find themselves placed in (the most successful of these finds the two toffs floating in mid-page, the linseed oil slowly seeping into the paper, as if their antebellum oddity was physically infectious); a house reflected in a lake, or at least we assume so – there is nothing but the orientation of the paper to tell us which is the thing itself and which is the reflection; both are painted in the same hues of chalky, calcified whites and icy blues and greens.

So there you have it; Mr. Doig’s world of Romantic hillbilly itinerancy. Nothing belongs anywhere, everything is slightly off, slightly odd, slightly eerie, nowhere is fixed, calm or stable, and most importantly, everything is possessed of a radiance so seductive it seems dangerous. And yet, touring around the room, this world (even in its lesser aspects) is so pronounced, so involving that there is nowhere else we would rather be.

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If this year’s installment of the Contact festival was any kind of representative of current trends in artistic photography (if we can even maintain such a broad general category to begin with), then photography would find itself in a pretty crisis, indeed. That the festival isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be, is, alas, cold comfort. We’re afraid that no amount of mellifluous phrasing or oblique, tangential paragraphs of introduction can mask the fact that, by and large, the motley smattering of shows that comprise this year’s festival amount to a boring, artless sum. While we did not see every show in every nook and cranny of our fair city (given the odds of finding the next Steiglitz adorning the stuccoed walls of a coffeehouse, nothing could persuade us to hover over someone’s baroquely-named italianate coffee to ogle said walls), we feel perfectly confident in saying that we Made The Rounds; we gazed unto the untidy maw of Contact, and what answered our call was a cavernous yawn. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen: a field report, consisting of lowlights, and, in the interest of balance, a highlight.

The image gracing the festival’s schedule-cum-catalogue cover – a glum little chappie in a bowler hat and platform shoes – piqued our interest. Photographer Marco Bohr investigates the idea of the uniform in contemporary Japan; a rich text, given that this is a culture whose taste for ludicrous streetwear is documented ad nauseam on both sides of the Pacific (viz. Taschen’s tome, Fruits), and whose language includes an indigenous word (as opposed to an anglicization) for “girls who wear Chanel exclusively.” Alas, in “Uniforms” at the Japan Foundation, instead of an investigation of the idea of the uniform, we are given mere illustrations of literal uniforms. Instead of pursuing deeper notions of mass identity, conformity and rebellion, we get a maid’s uniform, a businessman’s uniform, a diver’s uniform, a baseball player’s uniform, posed in manner and in lighting that aren’t even interesting as fashion. Shallow thinking, sloppy execution.

There was much “global imaging” going on at the festival: “Imaging a Global Culture” is the title of the catalogue essay, and “Imaging a Shattered Earth,” a show devoted to this, our dying planet, was on display at the MoCCA. More than anything else, this show demonstrated two things: first, that everybody wants to be Edward Burtynsky, and second, that anybody with a wide-angle lens and access to a decent printer can be Edward Burtynsky. Wall after wall, we are greeted with what amounts to the same Burtynskyesque image (O, the magnificent desolation!) with the same Burtynskyesque composition (cue the saturated colours, steep angles and broad vistas). The only survivors of this inadvertent pantomime wreckage are Robert and Shana Parkeharrison, whose antique-looking photogravures make sly reference to the irrevocability of our environmental tamperings by having Everymen performing arcane and impossible magic tricks: attempting to capture poisonously polluted clouds, dragging an acres-wide field of fresh sod across a battered field.

The photographs of Toni Hafkenscheid at Birch Libralato seemed to be causing much chatter. He photographs tourist destinations in such a way as to make them appear like toys or maquettes (Olivo Barbieri, on display in the Drake Hotel’s front windows does exactly the same thing with Las Vegas attractions; have these two met?). File both of these gentlemen under “Gee Whiz, Lookee What I Can Do.” All this tomfoolery with focus and exposure is not a particularly awe-inspiring trick, nor a particularly convincing trick, and it gets old fast. Furthermore, both Mr. Barbieri and Mr. Hafkenscheid cheat. There’s no particular wizardry involved in making either Las Vegas or rollercoaster theme parks look cheap and plastic; that’s their claim to fame. While we’re bashing the Drake, let us say, of their “Self Absorption and Theatricality in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that the hotel displays the same utter contempt for art for which they have become so dependable. Photographs are strewn across the garish, busy lobby with no regard for the kind of space they actually need in order to be seen properly. As usual, the work is treated as a cute adornment for its surroundings. And which exceptional curator do we have to thank for this? Mr. Daniel Borins. Imagine our surprise.

The one show that did manage to delight and intrigue was Dawit Petros’ “Remix,” at Prefix. His images are simple portraits of fairly ordinary (looking) people in fairly ordinary interiors. The catalogue essay makes much ado about representation, the postcolonial identity and black culture, and all of that is present (to varying degrees) in the photographs. Nevertheless, all of that smacks too richly of an eager critic trying to give us the hard sell. What intrigues us in these images is the clash of aesthetic; these images are so banal, they could have been taken with a Kodak Funsaver, and yet, there is a precision and care in the construction of the environment and the posing of the subjects that suggests a glorious majesty. That grafting of mundanity onto majesty (or vice versa?) creates strange awkwardness, for lack of a better word, that is marvelously seductive, and intelligently mysterious. More’s the pity, both for the Contact festival and for Mr. Petros, who is forced to keep such poor photographic company, that this kind of probing subtlety was in such short shrift.

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