JASON TRUCCO at Angell Gallery (12 Ossington) to August 16. 416-530-0444. Rating: NNNN
Jason Trucco, a Los Angeles multimedia artist who works at the intersection of art, film and theatre, brings his unusual sensibility to Toronto in his Exhibit A1 show.
An artist immersed in the classic Hollywood tradition, he’s good at disturbing the surface tension of an image. Wake Up Screaming appears to be a still of a terrified ingenue from a 1940s movie. Without the larger context of a story or title, however, it takes on the ominous universality of a trope or meme.
Trucco is fascinated by the way images from film, television and other media get distorted into archetypes. The vacuum in which his images appear calls attention to their larger contexts and to the way these skew our notions of reality and narrative more than we realize.
This is evident in the massive installation in the gallery’s main space. All three walls are filled floor to ceiling with a printed facsimile of a gallery exhibit. As a whole it gives the impression of a lo-fi Holodeck, an impressive undertaking that purposely falls short of its goal.
Trucco is teasing us with the elusive dream of an immersive virtual environment, a dream held out by our culture of 3D Imax surround-sound blockbusters. He’s highlighting the naïveté of our belief that sharper digital imagery will bring us closer to understanding our day-to-day lives.
What we’re left with is the faded print of a photograph of a virtual rendering. As we go farther down the rabbit hole of our mediated environments, Trucco suggests we may be getting no closer to lived experience, but farther and farther away.
art@nowtoronto.com
