Jean-François Bouchard: Exile from Babylon

by Emese Krunak-Hajagos

Jean-François Bouchard’s exhibition Exile from Babylon at Arsenal Contemporary Art is part of Toronto’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. CONTACT is the largest photography festival in the world, showcasing more than 180 exhibitions in the GTA from May to August.

In this solo show, Montreal-born, New York City-based artist Jean-François Bouchard documents a squatters’ camp in the Sonoran Desert in California. People who live here reject modern American society – Babylon as they call it – and are looking for alternative ways of survival in the face of homelessness and addiction, escaping the legal system or pursing libertarian ideals. They live in a very unfriendly land without running water, electricity or garbage removal in tents, shanties, shipping containers, crumbling recreational vehicles and even dens dug into the ground. They know each other by nicknames only, and appear and disappear under strange circumstances. Their search for fulfillment and absolute freedom comes at the cost of great personal sacrifice.

Jean-François Bouchard, Desert Life, Quadriptych C, 2022, from the series Exile from Babylon
Jean-François Bouchard, Desert Life, Quadriptych C, 2022, from the series Exile from Babylon

The seemingly straightforward narrative is misleading as the photographs are challenging. The first few images that depict the community in this vastly empty landscape in daylight, are very bright, even blinding as they are presented in lightboxes. These pieces are almost white because of the extreme heat and the absence of any vegetation. The barren land has a few dying trees and the residents are wandering, mostly by themselves or with dogs, seemingly as wild as their owners, surrounded by debris – creating a post-apocalyptic scene. These people’s lives are no longer supported or even tolerated by society, so they are forced to live on the periphery. The photographs are brutally true – but the documentation ends here.

Jean-François Bouchard, Desert Life, Quadriptych B, 2022, from the series Exile from Babylon
Jean-François Bouchard, Desert Life, Quadriptych B, 2022, from the series Exile from Babylon

The rest of the photographs in the larger section of the exhibition, depict trees at night – and Bouchard abandons documentation and continues telling the story of the cruel reality metaphorically. The contrast of the bright daylight images and the darkness of the night shots is very dramatic. These mostly dying trees, decorated with thrown out objects and debris that either residents or the harsh desert wind have placed around them and on their branches, create ugly – sometimes even creepy – images that are still beautiful. The metamorphosis trees go through in the night is indeed magical and mesmerizing. What we look at are no longer dying trees with bare branches and useless objects or garbage around them. Everything changes into something different, like in a fairy tale, the creepy becomes eerie.

Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #1, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon
Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #1, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon

These dying trees become mystical at night, under the magic touch of sunset or twilight, the starry or stormy sky or the total darkness. Because of the light box technology, both the strong orange of the sunset and the shiny brightness of the stars catch our eyes and for a moment we enjoy their peace. In Tree of Life #1 blue, a night colour, highlights the tree and the rugs flying in the wind. The atmosphere is sad and lonely juxtaposed against the rather beautiful sunset. In Tree of Life #2 the artist lights the tree in white, that reminds us of the pureness of snow. It is already night and the stars are coming up, while the dying sunset lingers on the horizon. Trees always tell us a story about many things. This is an old tree having lived a harsh life in the desert, heavily abused by the strong winds and burdened with debris. It has been badly treated by both nature and humans. A hard life, much like that of the people there.

Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #2, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon.
Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #2, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon

The absence of people is important in these photographs as the trees are the focal points. Tree of Life #9 is a little bit different with the addition of an elegant cupboard in front of the tree that somewhat modifies the atmosphere. It seems to be twilight; we can see stars but the sky is not dark and a little orange light of sunset lingers. The light coming from the front lights up only the top of the tree but strongly reflects off the glass doors of the cupboard. Where did this furniture come from? Although it has seen better days, it is beautifully crafted and antique. How did it get here and who left it? Surely, like the people who live here, it didn’t deserve this terrible fate.

Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #9, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon
Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #9, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon

Trees are very important creatures both in our lives and in myths. We usually associate trees with natural beauty, relaxation, peace — their fresh air nurtures us. In mythology they have a more complex meaning. Some tribes considered them sacred, and even looked on them as gods. They believed that trees could tell stories, see into the future and cause miracles. Old Celtic legends talk about putting a priest in a young tree so the trunk enclosed him in time and fed him with its syrup. The priest became part of the tree, spoke for the tree, creating a sacred communication between nature and human. And, of course, there is the Tree of Life, the symbol of every living thing.

It is also a scientific fact now that trees have a strong communication system and support each other in difficult times, be it natural disaster or illness (Susanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin Random House, 2021). The death of a tree indicates something has gone wrong in their community.

Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #6, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon
Jean-François Bouchard, Tree of Life #6, 2022. From the series Exile from Babylon

In Bouchard’s photograph the Tree of Life #6, the tree is dead. Similarly, the people living in the Sonora Desert are as good as dead to the American society.

Images are courtesy of the artist and Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto

Bice Lazzari: The Mark & The Measure (Selected Works from 1939-1978)

by John Mendelsohn

Bice Lazzari, Senza Titolo [Untitled] (Q/435), 1972-3, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 163.2 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang
Bice Lazzari, Senza Titolo [Untitled] (Q/435), 1972-3, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 163.2 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang

New York has a rare opportunity to see the work of the Italian modernist Bice Lazzari (1900-1981). The Mark & The Measure, the title of the exhibition at kaufmann repetto, organized with Richard Saltoun Gallery, captures the essential elements of Lazzari’s art – an intimate touch and an intuitive sense of visual structure. Together they combine to create works of unusual delicacy and power, animated by a musical pulse and emotive overtones. Over time, Lazzari’s abstract work evolved from gestural paintings, to strongly material pieces, to rhythmic, minimalist statements.

Lazzari wrote, “In paintings, I love light, space, rigor, structure, synthesis … and a little poetry.” The work in this survey exhibition, spanning the last four decades of her career, displays all of these qualities, and a pervasive, personal sense of mystery. This feeling is conveyed in the title of Laura Cherubini’s essay, Bice Lazzari: The Inner Life of Signs. In her essay, Cherubini points to specific influences on the artist’s work, and to a “lucid and epiphanic condensation of memory” (quoting Marisa Vescovo), that her work embodies.

Bice Lazzari, Sequenza 3 [Sequence 3], 1964, tempera, glue and sand on canvas, 107.3 x 118 in. . Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang
Bice Lazzari, Sequenza 3 [Sequence 3], 1964, tempera, glue and sand on canvas, 107.3 x 118 in. . Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang

Among the memories that shaped Lazzari’s paintings are her years working in the applied arts of weaving, textiles, mosaics, and murals, collaborating with Italian architects and designers. This work liberated Lazzari from her early training in figurative painting, opening her to the possibilities of geometric design and abstraction. The creation of continuous visual fields and an awareness that art was one with architectural space would go on to inform her paintings. Particularly resonant of this period is Lazzari’s Untitled from 1949 (the titles are translated from the Italian), a minimalist grid in deep red and black tempera on paper.

Beginning in the 1950s, Lazzari was able to devote herself to painting, first to geometric abstraction and then to gestural works, such as Night Writing, a storm of agitated, slashing strokes. Collage 1, with its blocky, emphatic forms and raw texture seems informed by both the “matter painting” and angst of post-war Italy’s Informalism.

Lazzari was born in Venice in 1900, where she studied the violin as a child. She moved to Rome in 1935, where she lived for the next five decades. Music’s ongoing influence emerged after a period of crisis, in the new direction Lazzari embarked on in 1964. There is a sense of fugitive feeling embedded in the physical surfaces of these works, such as Testimony, an atmosphere of tonalities that emerge from the surface of tempera, glue, and sand on canvas.

Bice Lazzari, Senza Titolo [Untitled], 1967, tempera on canvas, 108 x 118 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang
Bice Lazzari, Senza Titolo [Untitled], 1967, tempera on canvas, 108 x 118 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang

Similarly, in the powerful Sequence 3, a series of seven dark lines recede in perspective, suspended in a field of striations, that itself hovers like a vignette in a dream. The effect is that of an existential declaration of both individual agency and enveloping impermanence.

From the late 1960s, until the end of her life, Lazzari’s work incorporated the structural, the musical, and the lightness of material form in works that are by turn spare and intense, minimal and maximal. Untitled from 1967, paradoxically dense and subtle, is a dark, minimally woven field with extremely fine lines of lighter weft, divided into three columns by two warp lines in red and white.

In Untitled (Q-435) from 1972-73, dark space is traversed by tonal bands, the lightest of which is demarcated by a sequence of light and bold backslashes and dashes, alternating with blocks of emptiness. It is unaccountably moving, like a message in transit, sent out in the night, with and without hope of being heard.

Bice Lazzari, Acrilico n.6 [Acrylic no. 6], 1975, acrylic on canvas, 107.3 in x 118 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang
Bice Lazzari, Acrilico n.6 [Acrylic no. 6], 1975, acrylic on canvas, 107.3 in x 118 in. Courtesy of Archivio Bice Lazzari and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York and Richard Saltoun Gallery London / Rome. Photo: Kunning Huang

Acrylic no. 6 from 1975 is both like the score and the playing of a musical composition, whose notes are fine and finer lines in black and red, shivering with the slight vibrato of the artist’s hand. A strict sequence is established, and then interrupted by two small, surprising anomalies that resonate in a vast white silence.

As Bice Lazzari wrote, “everything that moves in space is measurement and poetry. Painting searches in signs and color for the rhythm of these two forces, aiding and noting their fusion.”

Bice Lazzari: The Mark & The Measure (Selected Works from 1939-1978): kaufmann repetto, 55 Walker St., New York – May 12-June 17, 2023

Eric Sanders: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum

by Steve Rockwell

Eric Sanders, 10 Million Dollar Baby, 2023, acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas, 19 x 16 Inches
Eric Sanders, 10 Million Dollar Baby, 2023, acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas, 19 x 16 inches

In his June, 2023 Tokyo Metropolitan Museum solo exhibition Eric Sanders tackles themes of time, history, and timelessness by directly referencing photographer Eadweard Muybridge. By 1887 Muybridge had become one of the most influential photographers of his time, driving both artist and scientist to examine the nature of movement more closely. Through his technique of “freezing” human and animal locomotion, photographers might depict movement as a series of still images, and importantly, unleash the potential of motion pictures. Sanders and and his “Star Walkin’ 7” painting neatly covers this historic reference by printing the familiar sprocket holes of a film strip, here depicting images of his wife Anna walking.

Eric Sanders, Star Walkin’ 7, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches
Eric Sanders, Star Walkin’ 7, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Sanders emphasizes “freeze-framing” by combining body movement and liquid immersion. In “Blinding Lights (1)” it’s a yellow splash, the body falling backward, a screen image of the figure uniting with paint into a split second freeze, as if fossilized in amber for eternity. The moment is an example of the heads-or-tails coin of time, with “heads’ it’s now, and “tails” forever – a reminder that a milli-second cannot be severed from countless millennia.

Eric Sanders, Nude Descending Staircase No. 2, 2023, acrylic on canvas stretched panel, 60 x 40 inches

Gerhard Richter’s “Woman Descending the Staircase” is directly referenced by Sanders in his “Nude Descending Staircase,” here the angle of the stairs resembling the railroad track to infinity schematic, sometimes used in illustrating perspective and spatial depth. The hooded, but otherwise nude, figure carries an aura of mystery as she appears in a shroud of mottled yellow and black. It’s impossible to not be reminded of Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” giving the Sanders “Nude” a double, but necessary, historic reference. It’s clear that Sanders wishes to “run the table” of art linkages, since Muybridge was first out of the gate.

“In these paintings I engage with, and work against, the traditional artist/muse relationship,” Sanders states. If I read this correctly, the artist wishes to give Anna, his wife, greater self-assurance and independence of spirit than we might normally ascribe to the muse of art history. The cinematic aspect of this group of works rises to the fore, especially when read as a whole, and Anna is clearly its star.

Eric Sanders, Inverted, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 108 x 144 inches
Eric Sanders, Inverted, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 108 x 144 inches

Sanders having limited this work to monochrome palette and suggestive titles in groups of “freeze” images opens up the possibility for the viewer to ascribe filmic possibilities to the exhibition. “Bulls on Parade,” an acrylic and charcoal on canvas, whether suggestive of protagonist or antagonist symbolically, conveys a full-frontal charge of energy towards the viewer. “Blinding Lights” and “Inverted,” are splash and explosion of yellow and magenta respectively, while “Bad Bitch O’clock” a catastrophe of some sort.

Eric Sanders, Electric Love, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Eric Sanders, Electric Love, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

A series of small print-based works drew inspiration from Muybridge again, and might serve as staccato punctuations to any work in the 12” x 16” acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas board series. Each have suggestive titles such as “The Butterfly Effect,” “Way Less Sad,” and “It Ain’t the Same as it Was.” A simple narrative might be: Woman (10 Million Dollar Baby) walks down staircase only to tumble into turbulent water, where she battles an unseen foe. An acrylic and charcoal on canvas titled “Unchained” suggests a rescue with an eventual happy ending through “Electric Love.”

This first international solo exhibition by Eric Sanders is open-ended with a raw edge, capturing something of the background turbulence that culture and society is undergoing at the moment, and should resonate with a viewer from a diversity of points of view.

Eric Sanders Solo Exhibition: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. Opens June 14th, 2023.

Costas Picadas at the Tenri Cultural Center (New York)

by Jonathan Goodman

Costos Picadas, Biomes and Homologies -BRAIN, 2023, print 8" × 20" on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist
Costos Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, BRAIN, 2023, print 8″ × 20″ on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist

Costas Picadas comes from Greece, having been brought up in a family of doctors. But, eschewing that way of life, he decided to become an artist and studied in Paris before moving to New York City, where he now lives and works. A few years ago, his paintings were messy affairs, being taken up with dense overlays of rounded globular forms, much like the cells you might see in a microscope. Often, too, scribbles would make their way across the picture plane to the white sides framing the composition. The results were energetic and entertaining, as if the painting had forgotten its own boundaries.

But quite recently, Picadas has become a bit more restrained. His current works make use of similar drop-like forms, but the overlay of skeins of line is mostly gone. In consequence, the artist has moved more closely to classically defined abstract expressionism, an idiom so powerful it still effectively supports current efforts in the genre.

The ab-ex movement was enabled to a good extent by the efforts of foreign-born artists, and so Picadas is working within a decades-long tradition, It no longer makes sense to characterize this work as evidencing the original cultural influences on the artist practicing the style, Instead, the vernacular has become thoroughly international. The efflorescences of Picadas’s paintings are understood at once as joining the efforts of previous artists in New York.

Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, Biome 3, 2022,  mixed media on canvas . Size 48x48 
Image courtesy of the artist
Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, Biome 3, 2022,  mixed media on canvas. Size 48×48 
Image courtesy of the artist

Yet there are differences, too. Remembering the medical background of Costas’s family, we can imagine his imagery as coming from pictures taken with a microscope’s magnification. The works are hardly compositions for doctors to study, but perhaps there is a trace of medical rigor to be found in the pictures. In the painting Biome 2 (2022), globules in white, with designs within them drawn in a very light gray, drift across the entire composition. They are painted on a grayish wall of bricks. In the lower part of the work, small splotches of black dot the areas between the globules accompanied by pale green, inchoate forms and even a single golden form. This piece surely looks like a slide of some foreign bacterium. The surface, which is busy, carries the interest, although we are unsure about a precise meaning beyond the dense arrangement of diverging shapes.. In Biomae 11 (2022), a black vertical column acts as the major support of the image, but light blue-gray lines, forming circles and rough, undefinable forms, cover the dark mass rising upward. Thinner lines adorn the sides of the column, whose brute force is softened by the embellishments.

Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies -Lung, 2023, print 8″ × 10″ on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist
Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, Lung, 2023, print 8″ × 10″ on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist

In a separate but strikingly effective group of works, Picadas uses a computer process to generate imagery closely aligned with the body and with nature. The work is small and figurative, but exquisitely detailed in ways that emphasize not only the overall gestalt, but also the sharp details. Lungs (YEAR?), Costas posts a highly detailed, highly realistic vision of the organs of breath: a trachea moves down the composition to split into two pipes, one each going to the semi-oval shape of each lung. Covering the lungs are small black blotches that combine with a tree-like maze of slender stems, ostensibly to carry the oxygen to the rest of the body. The graphic immediacy of the image astonishes; the sharpness of detail feels microscopic. In another image, called Heart (YEAR?), the reddish-brown semi-oval shape of a human heart anchors the thin stalks bearing black blossoms that rise from the upper surface of the organ. Here anatomy meets the lyrical bent of nature, and both appear enhanced by the affiliation.

Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, Heart, 2023, print 8″ × 10″ on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist
Costas Picadas, Biomes and Homologies, Heart, 2023, print 8″ × 10″ on archival paper. Limited edition. Image courtesy of the artist

Picadas’s art reverses our expectations by merging the intuitions of the process, its justifications as an interpretation of what we see, with the much more stringent detailing of natural (or scientific) imaging. In his case, the merger makes sense in that he comes from a family whose vocation was scientific in nature. By softening his effects a bit, Picadas mkes it clear that the scientific methods contribute well to a view most effectively disposed toward painting, rather than to the rigors of the lab. Picadas uses his background well, but medicine never overtakes his pictorial intelligence. We can conclude that the painter’s merger, between cellular depiction and free-wheeling abstraction, consistently results in compelling art.

MOCA Toronto’s Spring Exhibitions

by Steve Rockwell

Susan For Susan, Trade Show, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay
Susan For Susan, Trade Show, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay

The cluster of Spring 2023 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto (MOCA), might best be viewed as a bouquet of sorts, its vase the Auto Building, a 10-storey architectural industrial heritage building on Sterling Road. Built in 1919 by the Northern Aluminum Company, the building is characterized by its exposed concrete framing and used as an aluminum foundry and manufacturing plant that was operational as recently as 2006. Its adaptive reuse for the creative and digital sector, as well as its museum venue, seems still to be in the process of completion, and the “landmark structure” as a whole might fully be appreciated when its grounds and architectural nesting are complete. 

Susan For Susan, Trade Show, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay
Susan For Susan, Trade Show, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay

Exhibitor Susan For Susan, the collaborative design team of brothers John and Kevin Watts, in their Trade Show exhibit, delivers the bridge between the cultural practices of art, architecture, and design. Central to the exhibit is an elaborate gantry – a system for moving heavy loads across warehouse floors. 

Trade Show is essentially one big sculpture broken into separate parts: a concrete table suspended by chains with a set of box pan chairs, an accordion movable metal mirror, a lamp column structure, and a tilting metal bookcase held in place by the out-stretched arms of an aluminum puppet. An ironically creepy component of Trade Show is a lizarov frame holding a handcrafted black rose made of steel. The lizarov method is used in surgery for limb reconstruction and reshaping bones, but its use here inevitably brings to mind the iron maiden, a medieval torture device with spikes that enclose a human being.

Kapwani Kiwanga, Keyhole, 2023. Steel structure, plants, water, soil, pea gravel, LED grow lights, air pump. Installation View, Remediation, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. © ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Photo: Laura Findlay
Kapwani Kiwanga, Keyhole, 2023. Steel structure, plants, water, soil, pea gravel, LED grow lights, air pump. Installation View, Remediation, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. © ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Photo: Laura Findlay

Canadian-French artist Kapwani Kiwanga is presented at MOCA with her first major survey exhibition in Canada. Her Remediation exhibit is the product of researches into the tensions between toxicity and regeneration of our environment. She studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University, but her focus had been medical anthropology. In view of the violent convulsions that the earth has undergone over time, Kiwanga has been interested is in how nature and humankind have variously responded to these phenomena. MOCA’s industrial past inspired the artist to produce many new site-specific works such as flooring and window interventions and inflatable vivariums. In natural settings, plant life has found a way to fight back from contaminated environments. On the other hand, Kiwanga has succeeded here in seeding MOCA’s brutalist interior.

Kapwani Kiwanga, Vivarium: Apomixis, 2023 (foreground), Vivarium: Adventitious, 2023 (background). PVC transparent, steel, colour, MDF. Installation View, Remediation, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. © ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Photo: Laura Findlay
Kapwani Kiwanga, Vivarium: Apomixis, 2023 (foreground), Vivarium: Adventitious, 2023 (background). PVC transparent, steel, colour, MDF. Installation View, Remediation, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. © ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Photo: Laura Findlay

Commissioned by MOCA Toronto, Greek/Canadian artist Athena Papadopoulos produced her large-scale sculptural works The New Alphabet in response to the isolation of the past two years of the pandemic. The first of two bodies of work, Bones for Time makes use of hospital and wool blankets that mime the artist’s body shape into letters. With Trees with No Sound, Papadopoulos finds new use for unwanted furniture, clothing and stuffed objects. It seems that almost anything may grace a Papadopolous tableau, from hair dye, lipstick, red wine, bleach, shoe polish, and iodine tincture to nuts and bolts. The artist’s working process is an exultation in the breadth of cultural effuse and its subsequent regurgitation creatively. She has stated that “The works are not meant to be moving upwards towards a point of precision, they are of a world that is downward and sprawling.”

Athena Papadopoulos, 2023. Installation View, The New Alphabet, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay
Athena Papadopoulos, 2023. Installation View, The New Alphabet, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay
Athena Papadopoulos, Trees with no sound: Manzanilla de la Muerte, (Little Apple of Death), 2023. Installation View, The New Alphabet, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay
Athena Papadopoulos, Trees with no sound: Manzanilla de la Muerte, (Little Apple of Death), 2023. Installation View, The New Alphabet, at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay

The ground floor of MOCA’s North End Gallery features Turkish conceptual artist Serkan Özkaya‘s installation ni4ni, or as it would be read when sounded out, “An Eye for an Eye.” The artist combines digital technology with a massive, mirrored sphere for a truly immersive experience, a sense of having been shrunk to the size of a blood vessel, an experience not unlike the 1966 sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage. Here it’s a journey toward an all-seeing eye that casts a 360 degree image. The technology has roots that date to 100 A.D., with scientist and astronomer Ptolemy, who had developed an equi-rectangular projection method able to translate a spherical surface onto a plane.

Serkan Özkaya, ni4ni v.3, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay.
Serkan Özkaya, ni4ni v.3, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Laura Findlay

Approaching the MOCA Auto Building from the rear and seeing a billboard for an apparent real estate advertisement seemed peculiar for an art museum, but less so having exited the museum. Crown land is, in fact, a portrait of Philippine-born artist Patrick Cruz at age fifteen, appearing in the sign as a realtor. If the Cruz lightbox signals an implied entanglement of art world with real estate, and there might be some truth to it, in terms of the present cluster of exhibitions, the connective threads between building, museum, installation, and individual artist, coalesce nicely here into a cohesive whole.

Patrick Cruz, Crownland, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: MOCA Toronto
Patrick Cruz, Crownland, 2023. Installation view at MOCA Toronto. Courtesy the artist. Photo: MOCA Toronto