The city, alternately expanding and decomposing, is taken up and abstracted in the nearby work 36 Planes of Emotion (2011), which is made up of differently coloured, transparent planes of Plexiglas and assembled so as to evoke a mass of buildings along a landscape. A skilful use of lighting emphasizes the porous canvas paintings, perhaps pointing towards the many kinds of art paintings mixing that characterize living in cities, today and in the past. Each component also carries a different laser-etched inscription that is refracted through the planes and casting textual shadows. These poetic fragments, such as "a latitude of languid longings," "a museum of innocent assumptions," and "a rustle of thoughtful lusts," are contrived collective nouns naming states of mind rather than oil paintings. They mimic a familiar grammar but they lack a common currency. But language is like that: shifting, changing, breeding, dying. It is possible that these collective nouns, now articulated, might seep into use to describe a mass of shared emotion.
Moving back into the first exhibition space, the surjective complementary to the fabricated canvas oil paintings is found in the language play of Re-writing on the Wall (2011). Using a series of metallic letterforms mounted on Plexiglas sheets, the piece speaks in the silent tongue of American Sign Language. It portrays a somewhat confusing composition that plays with the space between individuality and one's subsumption into a painting group. For instance, the text proclaims "I surges. We locates a horizon " departing from English into a language of its own where identity or at least its articulation--is the subject of negotiation (or rewriting). And what better place to take up this mutation than within the space of the gallery? In the art world, English is often the shared language, allowing for cross-cultural, globalized communication. In this series of many intersecting microcosms, where so many people who speak English do so in addition to their native tongue, the setting is ripe for hybridity
Identity, power and history--the recurring themes of Surjection--are concepts subject to change. The
Rags Media Collective have cultivated these oil paintings through their suggestion of a frame of relationship. However, the contextual narrative of the exhibition is relatively opaque, a series of secrets to be revealed either through guided tours or further research (both of which factor into my reckoning of the show). This space between telling all and playing coy can be productive, as when contextual disassociation nurtures a sustained engagement,3 But here, the chief directive is the exhibition's title, which is itself an empty oil painting. "Surjection" is a machine that cares not for the specific content of the particular instances of its use. Though there may be a logic to laying one set of things onto another set, what is the content of that bridging? What does it do other than create an ordered series of cheap paintings? Optimistically, between the mathematical function and the work's presentation here in Toronto, a space opens up that is ripe for unpredictable translation. Less generously, it's a frustrating, cryptic allusion that shuts down the desire to reach common ground.
