Festival (left) and Born Again (right), by BGL
The summer season, for galleries, always means a downward shift. There are typically two breaks in a gallery’s year: the post-Christmas/New Year slump, and the summer. The rest of the year, the engines are going full blast (at least, they should be), driving the gallery through its relentless cycle of shows and art fairs. And then summer hits, and the engines idle. Typically, the season is marked by group shows, a kind of casual summary of the gallery’s artists and who they might have their eye on; and if not group shows, then distinctly lighter, breezier fare from artists in the stable.
BGL’s current show at Diaz Contemporary is an ideal summer show, not simply because it’s light and breezy, but because it’s a forceful reminder that lightness and breeziness are not mutually exclusive from wit.
BGL are a trio from Quebec, and I know them mostly as grand-scale installation artists. From the first work of theirs that I saw at Mercer Union in 2005 (Besoin de Croire/Need to Believe), I have known them to specialize in scenarios. All of the works that I’ve seen of theirs have been elaborate sets, huge installations that unfold cinematically. Entire rooms are picked apart and reconstituted, carefully constructed to lead viewers through a series of visual puzzles until they turn a corner and voila: a big reveal.
I have also known BGL to be pranksters of a sort. Their work has always been shot through with a kind of puckish sense of humor: a delight in the visual pun, a gleeful disregard for austere solemnity. This is not to say that they’re not Serious Artists; they have a clear and cohesive vision, and their work is ambitious and visually arresting. It’s just that their preferred form of delivery is comedy.
And so their new show at Diaz Contemporary, Better Mistakes, is perhaps less vast and immersive than what I’m used to seeing — for one thing, the gallery is replete with discrete pieces — but everything else is intact: the charm, the wit, the infectious sense of play.
The first thing to greet you as you enter the main gallery is Vieux Ciel: a vast field of sky-blue, shattered, fissures of black radiating out from a central point of impact. It has a companion piece on the opposite wall, Vieux Soleil — the same idea, but this time, a broken field of glaring yellow. This is, at its core, a formal game. Both pieces are created using the same pictorial mechanism, but how you read and interpret the shatter is coloured by the surface’s…well…colour. Vieux Ciel reads as violent, a splintering, as if the titular sky were a vast windshield that had just been smashed by a hammer. Vieux Soleil, on the other hand, reads as a dessication, as if the surface of the image was peeling from an excessive sunburn.
This kind of visual trickery, this riffing on material malleability, is throughout the show. There is another such pairing, this time of traffic signs: a pedestrian crossing sign (Passage piétonnier) and a wet paint sign (Peinture fraiche) both covered in bugs. In the case of the former, it’s as if the pedestrian in question was walking with such velocity that they started accumulating dead insects, like a car windshield on a highway. And in the case of the latter, simply the announcement of wet paint is enough to act as a glue-trap.
The most elaborate installation of the show is Festival. A steel and aluminum mobile is made up to look like multicoloured pennants hanging from a string; a pair of shoes hangs off of it by their laces; the whole thing makes a perpetual slow rotation courtesy of a giant speaker in the corner whose subwoofers have been swapped for fans. The whole thing has a distinct après moi, le deluge feel to it. We are watching the last decadent moment of the party, preserved in amber (or in this particular case, steel and aluminum). Some hapless boy’s sneakers have been thrown skyward, and the pennant streamer is finally tumbling to the ground, perpetually turning, turning, turning, never signaling the end by making contact.
These are more than simple visual puns, or one-off jokes. Or perhaps they are just puns or jokes, but BGL are reminding us that puns and jokes were never all that simple to begin with. In their use of visual puns, in their appropriations of quotidian signage, in their elaborate recreations of the most mundane objects, BGL are playing fast and loose with semiological meaning, stretching it, inflating it, as if linguistic referents and references were a material in and of themselves. The twirling pennant streamer remade in steel, the shattered skyscape and peeling sunscape, the speeding pedestrian sign and the sticky wet-paint sign might seem like gags (and they are), but they are also object lessons in semiotics. By exaggerating the references of these objects, BGL is exposing the semiological chasm underlying them, which we take for granted in all their quotidian banality. It’s as if those pennants and traffic signs were sleeping monsters, and by literalizing their idiomatic meanings, BGL has tickled them awake.
Maybe I should apologize — nothing is worse than someone trying to explain a joke.
Better Mistakes will be open at Diaz Contemporary until August 18.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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