MARA KORKOLA at Lonsdale Gallery (410 Spadina Road) to November 30. 416-487-8733. Rating: NNNN
though not much bigger than snapshots, the tiny oil-on-panel paintings of Mara Korkola’s No Place make a big impact. It’s all about being caught unawares by the familiar.
At first glance, these tiny works (they range in size from 4-by-4 inches to 8-by-5.5 inches, formats you’d normally associate with an envelope of Black’s prints) read like blurry images shot through the window of a moving car.
But a second look reveals urban landscapes that play with light and shape in ways that someone like Brian Burnett explores on a much larger scale.
Korkola’s subject matter verges on the banal — her titles are all variations on No Place, or Winter Was Hard — but her takes on the world as seen from the road near Hamilton and other completely unglamorous industrialized suburban settings raise some big questions about life inside a car-driven commuter culture.
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