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Art Art & Books

Sculptors score

OCAD sculpture program students at Installation Project Space (401 Richmond West) to May 10. 416-890-7489. Rating: NNNN

Rating: NNNN


the school’s sculpture students have filled a gargantuan space at the west end of the first floor of 401 Richmond West, creating a madhouse.Highlights include Michelle Menzies’s odd little wooden people, who interact in human ways and sometimes succumb to the weight of gravity. Lucas Winters has appropriately addressed climate control with very clean forms that mimic heating radiators and cooling air conditioners.

A pair of tech-based pieces make a strong impression. In a small room, Mark Mantzel has placed two mechanical sharks and a manta ray that spring into lifelike motion at the push of a button. You could be watching the Discovery Channel, it’s so real. Robin Forbes’s strange pump moves water from a fish tank through a latex rubber tube that feels really weird, and back again.

Sarah Stinthcombe has cleverly crafted fine jewellery out of birth control pills as well as filling an hourglass with a year’s worth of the stuff ground up.

Matthew Drake tears holes in walls with some deft camera trickery, while David Gallagher handily recreates the Canadian experience with half a canoe, a scenic video playing on a screen and a tree blowing in the wind.

James Mitchison has made some acoustically and visually loud mechanized sculptures. Deborah Wiles has cast 52 real vaginas in bronze, and like a crazed scientist, Jeffrey Alten has devised a very complex contraption that projects an image of a submerged light bulb onto a wall.

It’s an exhausting romp of a show.

Go West, in just its second outing, is the fresh-faced juried exhibition where fresh-faced students from the Ontario College of Art and Design invade commercial galleries for the weekend. There’s a lot of great stuff to see, and the students are so damned nice. Here are some stand-outs.

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