Manatee Drive 1, by Isabelle Hayeur (2011)
Stay in Toronto long enough (especially in its art scene), and a certain amount of déjà vu sets in. Everything begins to look like a rerun: the same shows by the same people in the same places. Anything that smacks of novelty is therefore immediately exciting. Which is how I found myself at Ernest Avenue, a small stretch of road that runs for what amounts to a block and a half between Springhurst Avenue and the Dundas Rail bike path. I came in search of one of the Contact Festival’s featured shows at the new Arsenal Toronto, and I was there to see the gallery just as much as the show.
Ernest is lined on either side by abandoned industrial buildings. There, next to a low, flat, square box of a structure lined with aluminum siding, was a small placard: “Arsenal Toronto: Photographie.” A young gentleman in standard gallerina drag (nicely pressed shirt, crisp jeans, shiny pointy shoes) smiled, nodded, and went inside. I followed.
I had heard murmurings of the Arsenal Gallery: this new space, a branch of a Montreal gallery, that seemed to have descended from out of nowhere and opened to little, if any, fanfare (I didn’t receive any press invite, nor did I notice any advanced publicity on any of the art listservs that currently clutter my inbox). Its page on the Contact Festival’s website and catalogue mentions nothing about the gallery itself, only a curatorial statement and its contact info. In fact, Arsenal Montreal is a similar kind of converted-warehouse affair. It houses two prominent commercial galleries: René Blouin and Galerie Division. The Toronto iteration is slightly different in its intentions — it’s meant less as a satellite of those galleries, but more for independently curated projects and institutional collaborations. Currently, it’s only open Fridays and Saturdays.
Arsenal Toronto is nothing short of astounding, a cavernous white cube of a space with huge, wide walls, diffuse lighting and polished concrete floors. The front room hosts paintings by Martin Bourdeau, and in the main entryway and the back room is the Arsenal’s entry for Contact, simply titled Photographie. The show collects the work of Montreal-based artists from Galerie Division’s and René Blouin’s stables, all of whom came of age artistically in the ‘90s, during the emergence and widespread availability of digital photo technologies, which bred in these artists a particular kind of photo-based conceptualism.
Nicolas Baier opens the show with huge images of caves and grottos, each assembled from the juxtaposition and superimposition of multiple photographs. No effort is made to correct divergent angles or colours, and so the photocollages have a variegated glimmer to them. Pascal Grandmaison’s Void View images evoke a heartbreaking wistfulness — glimpses of a shimmering, glassy cosmos peek out from fields of desolate ash (in fact, Grandmaison burnt photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope on his barbeque). Alain Paiement’s photocollage of drifting ice floes has a stark simplicity and a stuttering formal rhythm.
Isabelle Hayeur’s industrial landscapes and Michel De Broin’s digital image of conjoined military tanks seem the odd ones out in terms of tone. While the curatorial statement focuses more on the specificities of media approach, there is a palpable aura of geological mysticism here: natural phenomena aspiring to a transcendental otherness.
Perhaps my language seems hyperbolic. Photographie is, in and of itself, a very good show, and what’s more, the space supports it, and thus supports this kind of inflationary talk. We are simply not used to seeing shows presented like this in Toronto. It’s amazing what one does get used to. By and large, we look at art in small storefront galleries: low ceilings, tight narrow floor plans. The only spatial equivalent to Arsenal, a non-institutional contemporary art gallery, is Ydessa Hendeles’ gallery on King and Niagara, and she doesn’t program the same kinds of shows that will be at Arsenal. There are some private galleries that have a similar enormity; Olga Korper, for instance. One reason why the Daniel Faria Gallery, a few blocks south of the Arsenal at St Helen’s Avenue, is such an exciting venue is that, despite its slightly smaller surface area, it has an equally expansive capacity.
We’ve seen these artists before — De Broin, Grandmaison and Baier are all represented in Toronto by Jessica Bradley — but we’ve never seen them like this. At Arsenal, their work is afforded a particularly generous installation. These photographs have room, not just to breathe, but to take up as much air as they need; the works can thus not only speak for themselves, but their dialogues with each other become so much clearer.
Arsenal Toronto officially opens in September. Until then (once the Contact show comes down), it will offer what the gallery attendant referred to as “placeholder shows,” and will continue with their sparse business hours. If it can make good on its ambition — in terms of both means of presentation and curatorial intent — it could very well change how we look at art in this city.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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