ALLYSON VIEIRA AND PAUL KAJANDER at Daniel Faria Gallery (188 St. Helens), to September 6. 416-538-1880. Rating: NNNN
American sculptor Allyson Vieira and Seoul-based Canadian Paul Kajander use contemporary strategies to riff on the art of ancient Greece in curator Rui Mateus Amaral’s smart show All Beneath The Moon Decays.
Carving columnar piles of drywall with a Sawzall, Vieira transforms the dreary construction material into pairs of caryatids supporting metal I-beams. Despite their angular roughness and protruding screws, they read as noble female figures standing in classical contrapposto.
Their dimensions are based on a complex formula involving the artist’s body measurements and the 16-inch standard of modern building. Two stele-like rectangles of plaster embedded with studio garbage are twisted into in a more abstract echo of the figures’ posture.
Vieira, a regular visitor to Greece, pulls in a wealth of references: the human scale of Greek column-and-pediment architecture, the recently restored Erechtheion caryatids in Athens, the evolution of art and architectural materials from stone to synthetic, art as labour, traditional art instruction’s use of plaster casts of Greek sculpture, the aesthetic of ruins.
Kajander, whose practice includes video, performance and installation, reworks black-and-white photos from an art history text in All That Was Solid (For Greece). Two or more of his little “décollages” – he blacks out parts of images of Greek sculptures so they take on strange new forms – are displayed in a series of framed double pages. Some resemble modernist semi-abstract figures à la Henry Moore, others recall bones or anatomical organs, still others combine mechanical and figurative elements. He adds poetic titles like Terrible Puppets or Ashamed That It Has Come To This.
Their tiny scale and impossible structures rob the sculptures of their identity as solid stone representations of human forms, as if Kajander has excavated a surreal modernism from within these fragments of Western civilization’s early realist art. Like Geoffrey Farmer, Kajander makes old art book photos into an exciting new medium.
Vieira and Kajander couldn’t approach their subject more differently, yet thanks to Amaral’s inspired pairing, they speak eloquently together about art and time.
art@nowtoronto.com
