Since I haven’t been away – yet – this summer, my favorite summer show is in Toronto, at one of my favorite galleries.

Flavio Trevisan, The Three Dales, 2010. Image: flaviotrevisan.com

With the mayoral debate gearing up and the fact that Torontonians seem obsessed with urban issues and how to evolve our ward-centric patchwork quilt of a city, this show is particularly relevant.

Flavio Trevisan: Studies of a New Past
Diaz Contemporary
Through August 14, 2010

Hurry – don’t miss it, it’s definitely worth seeing in person.

Watershed, 2008. Image: VoCA

I love when you see art that says a lot with a little, or more precisely, apparently very little. This show of wall-mounted map works are made of carefully, painstakingly inlaid “millboard, a solid cardboard that I cut into thin strips,” says Trevisan. “Then I fill in the spaces with drywall compound or in the newest work with a fluid acrylic paint.” The fact that they seem sculptural is, maybe what gives them a precious quality – they weren’t made quickly. The largest work, Grey Area, below, took about 4 months to make.

Grey Area, 2009. Image: VoCA

Grey Area, detail. Image: VoCA

The gallery’s press release tells us that Trevisan “sees the process of translating maps into sculpture as a way to appreciate the internal logic and progressive accumulation of our urban and suburban environment”, and you can see this in works like the puzzling black triptych which depicts first a series of streets running North-South, then those running East-West, and finally all the cul-de-cacs and dead ends.

(Up down, side to side, round and round), 2010. Image: flaviotrevisan.com

(Up down, side to side, round and round), 2010 (detail) Image: VoCA

The map of Toronto, Grey Area, is both familiar and unfamiliar, and a constant reminder of this wonderful city and how it’s changing so drastically right now. I’d love to have that piece in my dining room, mostly so that I could keep it for ten or twenty years and then look back at it.

Another work from the show, which shows Toronto’s water network PATH system gouged out of the board.  Image: VoCA

A detail. Image: VoCA

Browse more work on Trevisan’s website HERE and at Diaz Gallery, HERE.