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10/3/2011

Three Exhibitions

The Power Plant, Toronto

Thomas Hirschhorn: Das Auge (The Eye)
The North American premiere of one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s largest and most immersive works.

Das Auge (The Eye) is one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s largest and most visceral sculptural installations yet to be presented. Selected to represent his native Switzerland at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Hirschhorn is renowned for his sprawling, immersive artworks that use everyday materials, found images from the news and mass media, and impassioned graffiti-like texts to engage audiences in actively thinking about politics and philosophy. Hirschhorn is interested in the aesthetics of political protest – slogans, placards, provocative photos – and in moving people to think and act critically in the world.

Sprawling over the gallery’s largest space as well as a specially constructed mezzanine, the ambitious Das Auge (The Eye) was first presented at the Vienna Secession in 2008. Crafted out of paper, packing tape, colour photocopies, stuffed animals, mannequins, and other provisional materials, the exhibition is based around the image of an eye that sees only the colour red. Cobbled together from hundreds of different sculptural elements, images and texts, the entire mise-en-scène is dominated by the juxtaposition of red and white: the flags of Canada, Switzerland and other nations; the veins in an eye; blood on snow. The artist has written: “Das Auge [The Eye] does not see everything – but it sees everything that is red. Das Auge only sees the colour red. Thus it can only show red, it can only name red, and it can only ‘be’ red.” Potent and overwhelming, Das Auge (The Eye) links perception and voyeurism with the politics of the body, all-seeing eye to all-too-fragile flesh.

Thomas Hirschhorn (born in 1957, Bern, Switzerland) lives and works in Paris. Since the 1980s, the former graphic designer has evolved a radical sculptural installation practice.

Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2005), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Spain (2006), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2007), and Museo Tamayo, Mexico (2008). He was included in documenta 11, Kassel (2002), 27th São Paolo Biennale (2006), and the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008). Hirschhorn has received the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2001) and the Joseph Beuys Prize (2004).

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview between Thomas Hirschhorn and Gregory Burke (Director of The Power Plant and organizer of the exhibition), a statement by the artist and full-colour images of Das Auge (The Eye).

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Inigo Manglano-Ovalle: Phantom Truck
Curated by Gregory Burke

The North American premiere of Phantom Truck, featured at documenta 12, presented alongside Always After (The Glass House), a key 2006 video projection from Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's much-discussed body of work based around the buildings of Mies van der Rohe.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s sculpture and video works have explored such phenomena as war, migration, the environment, and the legacies of modernist architecture with impeccable formal elegance and metaphoric power. For much of the 2000s, Manglano-Ovalle has been producing work exploring the “climate” of our times – both in terms of meteorology and the state of global geo-political affairs. Originally produced as a project for documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, Manglano-Ovalle’s enigmatic sculptural installation Phantom Truck (2007) will be exhibited in North America for the first time. It will be presented alongside Always After (The Glass House), a key 2006 video projection from his much-discussed body of work based around the buildings of Mies van der Rohe.

Phantom Truck is a full-scale reproduction of a mobile truck trailer ostensibly containing a biological weapons lab. Such a truck was described by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when addressing the United Nations Security Council prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After the invasion, no trailer was ever found that was capable of biological weapons production, so Manglano-Ovalle has built one: a Platonic idealization of Powell’s lab. Parked in existential limbo in a darkened space, the barely perceptible yet massive truck austerely reflects on its own status as a fiction while towering above those who view it.

Employing long, graceful takes, Always After (The Glass House) focuses on the broken glass accumulated after the windows of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall were smashed as part of a ceremony in advance of the building’s renovation. For Manglano-Ovalle, this dreamlike scene of destruction – where modernist progress meets crisis – is a potent metaphor for our twenty-first century way of seeing the world “as a condition of a post-event.” For Manglano-Ovalle, we are doomed to always clean up our messes – as the custodians here sweep up the shards – rather than thinking through the consequences of creating them in the first place.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (born in Madrid, 1961) has had solo exhibitions at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (2004), the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2009), among many others. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2000), Liverpool Biennial (2004), documenta 12, Kassel (2007), and Universal Code: Art and Cosmology in the Information Age at The Power Plant (2009).

Curated by Gregory Burke (Director of The Power Plant), the exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an essay on Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's recent work by Programs/Publications Coordinator Ed Kanerva and full-colour images of Phantom Truck and Always After (The Glass House).

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To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?
Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Erin Shirreff

To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? refracts the natural world through five younger artists’ meditations on and mediations of the landscape.
The artists in this exhibition craft topographies of the imagination detached from geographic reality and the experience of actually “being there.” Instead they filter their images of the earth through conceptual practices, archival research, cultural references, and technologies of simulation. After years of critically debating the landscape genre – particularly in Canada – these artists achieve complex, fantastical visions of land, sky and sea apropos to the twenty-first century.

Annie MacDonell’s sculptural “iceberg” and her black-and-white photographic collages draw from the 1967 patriotic photographic tome To Everything There is a Season by Roloff Beny, developing the book’s overtly mystical view of the Canadian landscape. Jennifer Rose Sciarrino produces delicate sculptures that simulate elements of the natural environment, evoking the uncanny with mountains carved from paper and artificial geological crystals cast from resin. Erin Shirreff began making her 2009 video Roden Crater by printing out a photograph found online of James Turrell’s unfinished monument of land art. She then rephotographed the image under various kinds of lighting, artificially mimicking the changing sky above the crater. Andrea Carlson’s mixed-media pieces feature vibrant seascapes and iconic images from a variety of sources (such as museum artifacts) enclosed in ornate irises; these works on paper position waterways as fluid cultural conduits of trade, interaction and conflict. Finally, Kevin Schmidt’s 2009 video Disappearing Act stages an odd optical illusion in the wilderness. Schmidt located a majestic vista and reproduced it with paint onto a nearby tree, thereby transforming its trunk into a kind of hollowed-out viewfinder – at least on first glance.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an introduction by curator Jon Davies (Assistant Curator at The Power Plant), artist biographies and a checklist. In addition, Christian Bök's poem "Midwinter Glaciaria" will be available as a printed takeaway.

The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West - Toronto
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 12–6 PM
Wednesday 12–8 PM
Open holiday Mondays
Admission
FREE Members
$6 Adults
$3 Students/Seniors

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