NATALIE KOVACS
on view at Angell Gallery (890 Queen
West) until June 2. 416-530-0444. Rating:
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dizzyingly raw and visually mes-
merizing, Natalie Kovacs’s Conversations includes some of the freshest works to be seen this spring.
Many of the photo-based pieces are shown in front of light sources, and Angell Gallery is leaving them on overnight so they can be seen from outside 24/7. This is work that invites that kind of voyeuristic viewing.
Ranging from a video loop of a couple breaking up in the Pompidou Centre to a four-sided, backlit, photo-based sculpture just a little bit smaller than the phone booth Kovacs claims she practically lived in on a recent trip to Paris, Conversations feels rock solid, even while its subject is emotional fragility.
There’s an immediacy at play here, in part because when Kovacs shoots video, all her editing is done in camera — a reflection of her overall aesthetic.
A couple of waterscapes showing the surface of Georgian Bay use the same kitschy process that makes Niagara Falls look like it’s flowing in cheesy tourist displays. They’re Kovacs’s answer to her failed attempts to get companies like Sony to loan her plasma-screen TVs so that she could present her work on DVD.
