THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE at De Luca Fine Art (217 Avenue Road), to August 31. 416-537-4699. Rating: NNNN
Eccentric takes on such end-times topics as floods, fires, Aquarian thinking and clandestine messages bounce off each other in this show by four Canadian women – Janet Bellotto, Barb Hunt, Faith La Rocque and Camilla Singh – at De Luca, a small gallery on the edge of Yorkville with a strong roster of mid-career artists.
Bellotto likes to look at the world through water, bringing a melancholy lyricism to images of flooding. In the video The Slow Decline, a woman in a black pantsuit serenely sinks into the sea as fish swim by. There’s a calm inevitability to two photos of domestic interiors overcome by water or fire.
Stacks of rectangular sandbags might seem ready for a flood, but La Rocque fills these Magic Bags with lavender and other healing substances. Appropriating materials from alternative healing practices, she captures both the beauty and silliness of New Age beliefs.
For another sculpture, she hangs testicular harmony balls from the bottom of a stool seat topped by a perfect cone of Epsom salts.
Hunt plays with concepts of nature, gender, the body and mortality in her 7-foot dress. Cut from a flat sheet of black steel, with a lacy design of bones, it leans against the wall like mourning attire for a giant paper doll. A large drawing for another dress in this series is covered with vein-like vines and leaves.
Singh’s drawing series Secrets harks back to a pre-electronic, pre-surveillance age of handwritten communication, using overlapping words that are mostly unreadable. Their transgressive messages obscured, they’re transformed into linear gestures and patterns reflecting the writer’s spiky emotional state. The former MOCCA curator’s enigmatic plaster-and-cloth sculptural studies of Uniforms For Curators resemble monastic, or possibly Klan, pointed hoods.
Though the apocalyptic connection may be more tenuous in some artworks than others, the four artists share a quirky, poetic approach to serious subjects that makes them excellent companions.
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