the bathroom at Luft Gallery (1192 Queen West) to December 23. 416-535-6958. Rating: NNN
luft gallery brings porcelain beauty to Queen and Gladstone with a show of cutting-edge local photography called The Bathroom. Co-curated by Luft director Selena Cristo and photographer Jennifer Long, it started with a call for entries that addressed the bathroom as a social environment. The nine artists whose works are on view were selected from more than 30 entrants, and the results are mixed but, in all, solid.
Ruth Kaplan’s black-and-white glimpses of the ladies’ room scene at high-society balls are always brilliant, as are Sarah Thorpe’s portraits of models wearing lingerie inside a tub, each image framed with the garment’s original size-and-price tag from Value Village.
Other highlights include Jeff Turner’s dramatic Portal David Kemp’s detail of blue floral Bathroom Wallpaper Amee King’s soft-focus abstracted colour images and Hugh Martin’s Hotel Bathroom, San Francisco, in which a vinyl shower curtain is draped with such elegance that it’s easy to miss the seediness of the scene.
Also on view are untitled Polaroids by Jaime Maddalena, a pair of images by Tracy Carbert — including her self-explanatory Moths In Sink — and Robert Anderson’s Men’s Washroom, which focuses on graffiti found at OCAD.
Mackenzie House (82 Bond, 416-392-6827) is exhibiting Sitting Pretty: The History Of The Toilet through January 6, an unplanned parallel that’s flush with synchronicity.
