Rating: NNNN
english-born anna hunt turns public buildings into intimate environments you’d want to live in. A Place For Us, at the Monte Clark Gallery, is her wonderfully sensitive series of intricately embroidered images of iconic 20th-century buildings. Using nothing but thread, Hunt transforms the cool hardness of metal, glass and concrete into a shimmering vibrancy of colour, warmth and humanity. Rem Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’ Ava gives off a subtle three-dimensional glow a photograph could never achieve. The reflection of the sky in the zinc-clad exterior of Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum feels more real than it does when you’re standing in front of it in Berlin.
And the dramatic angles of Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station come alive with a moody luminosity reminiscent of Monet’s painting of Rouen Cathedral on a rainy day.
If Hunt makes the public private, Vancouver photographer Karin Bûbas does the opposite. She works in the tradition of artists visibly bearing witness to an intimate scene.
In 1434, for example, Jan van Eyck painted The Arnolfini Wedding, the portrait of a merchant and his wife exchanging marriage vows. In the background, a mirror reflects a tiny image of the artist. Inscribed above it are the words “Jan van Eyck was here.”
For her Florence And George series, Bûbas photographed details of the interior of her grandparents’ house: a worn green bath mat, a cocker spaniel piggy bank, that 70s orange-and-brown floral wallpaper.
In a witty nod to van Eyck, there’s even an image of Bûbas herself reflected in the screens of two vintage TVs.
Florence and George are nowhere to be seen, but the banal details of their home construct a kind of portrait of them in absentia.
While that portrait has a distant, almost museum-like feel, “Karin Bûbas was here” is written all over it.
ANNA HUNT and KARIN BUBAS at Monte Clark Gallery (752 Queen West) to March 31. 416-703-1700. Rating: NNNN
