Rating: NNNNN
WHAT: Disturbance, Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay West, 416-?973-?4000), to June 22.
WHY: Staats’s mesmerizing small show combines photos and videos of trees on the Six Nations Reserve with diaries and other artifacts left to the artist by his grandfather. The video camera circles a dead tree or captures the movement of branches in the wind, while Mohawk singing and mechanical and natural sounds play over headphones. It’s an elegiac meditation on memory, change and the healing power of nature.
BUZZ: Staats has exhibited throughout Canada and locally at Gallery TWP, Mercer Union and MOCCA. He received the federal government’s Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography in 1999.