Friendly Greeting: Is this the real (if not quite) Toronto show?

Opening: Saturday, August 4th, 1 - 5 pm at MKG127 Gallery, Toronto. The exhibition continues until September 1.

An Te Liu, Detail from Pattern Language II: Tantric (gold), 2002.
Image: renabranstengallery.com

This group exhibtion includes pieces by reliably strong Toronto artists, including Anitra Hamilton, whose most recent ‘performance’ at Toronto’s MoCCA involved letting blindfolded, axe-swinging participants loose - one at a time - on a car suspended in mid-air, a kind-of demolition-derby-meets-pinata party.

Anitra Hamilton. Who’s Gonna Tell Jesus There’s No Santa Claus, 1994-1999. Image: msvuart.ca

Other local-ish artists are Sara Graham, An Te Liu, Joy Walker, Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou, the partly Toronto-based collective Instant Coffee, the Meaford, Ontario and Berlin-based artist Laura Kikauka and Vancouver artists Germaine Koh & Jayce Salloum.

Laura Kikauka, Babyblue, 2006. Image: dna-galerie.de

There’s also work by Denver artist Lawrence Argent and an intriguing piece - the collaborative window project between New York-based artist Micah Lexier and Calgary-based poet Christian Bök.

Micah Lexier, installation view of SELBSTPORTRAT ALS….at Gitte Weise Gallery.
Image: gitteweisegallery.com

Peter Goddard in the Toronto Star says this of the work:

“This text and the one beside it are equal,” begins the easily readable vinyl lettering by Lexier on the left side of the two windows looking over Ossington Ave. “I wrote this one first, and then I gave it to my friend Christian Bök and asked him to generate a new text using every letter and every punctuation mark that I used in mine. The other text is his.”

Bök might be right, of course. Who’s to know whose text came first? It may well have been Bök’s. Even if Lexier did conceive of his text first, he had to be reworking (perhaps unknowingly) yet another pre-existing text. Perhaps many.

Read Goddard’s full article HERE