Erica Eyres and Kendall Messick at G+ Galleries (50 Gladstone), to September 24. 416-840-5549. Rating: NNNN Rating: NNNN
Kendall Messick’s intimate and candy-coloured photographs and Erica Eyres’s obsessively crafted drawings demonstrate G+ Galleries co-director Holly Lee’s ability to bring divergent work together.
The ballpoint pen portraits in Eyres’s Forever And Ever And Ever And Ever And Ever And Ever show are based on low-quality photographs submitted to an undisclosed men’s magazine by women seeking their “ideal man.” The second-rate photos bleed through Eyres’s drawings to create images that are both awkward and immensely revealing.
Eyres’s great sense of line makes the asymmetrical wonkiness of her series even more appealing. The show reveals her ability to find beauty in ugliness, and ugliness in beauty.
The women’s slightly twisted faces and too wide-set eyes make their smiles, sneers and flirtatiousness both sexy and menacing.
In Catherine, the woman’s bee-stung lips and beckoning dark eyes flash through feathered strands of hair in an image that evokes melancholy and desire.
Adjacent to Eyres’s work is Kendall Messick’s The Projectionist. The large-format photographs of elderly film buff Gordon Brinckle are crisp and saturated with exploding colour. Messick’s layered and highly formal tableaux illustrate the romance and sentimentality of cinema, from its birth to its emergence as one of the world’s most influential art forms.
**
