I think Toronto artist/curator Sarah Lazarovic has done something interesting (again) for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
In her latest installation, on view at the BCE Place/Brookfield Place, Lazarovic has ensconced fourteen memorable tweets in the hand of Wayne Reuben, whose hand-painted signs has become a hallmark of Honest Ed’s.
It’s a mashup of mediums, and like all successful mashups, the elements being blended here are paradoxical: The tweet, perhaps the most transient form of expression ever, doles out life in 140-character increments at a relentless pace to an audience that’s global the hand-painted sign is an anachronism, a thing intended for a time when something written was written once and read for a long, long time.
Lazarovic combines the two, ensconcing in permanence statements like “It’s a Breakfast Burrito kind of Thursday” or “You are still sleeping its ok I will eat your muffin for you.” The results are jarring, and wholly disorienting. Here, ineffectual statements that would never have been read, much less recorded, are, and the red, yellow, and blue words “Off to Dentist…” written in Reuben’s hand seem suddenly profound.
True to its mash-up form, the combination is more than the sum of its parts. Tweets + Wayne Reuben = a juxtaposition of feelings wholly confusing yet pleasant.
A Tweet by @zdarsky
