Review: Anthropocene at CANADA

depict hominids as the clunky, feeble apes we really are in Traveling (1998).  Standing roughly 1-foot-tall, a furry couple trod through a patch of flowers, the man puts his arm around his bob-haired female companion as both gaze blankly ahead-an image of a modern migrating pair in their natural habitat.

The colors of sinking Venice haunt the show (reminiscent of Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing #564). Chris Hood’s Interloper Day Glow (2014) shows a wonky grid of pastel-hued hexagons and quadrilaterals which look like a soft-sculpture version of a tiled floor. Interspersed amongst this field are squiggles and cartoonal creatures (a mushroom, a snail),  to suggest some sort of patio in decay. From Hood’s paintings the off-kilter geometry continues in Nicole Cherubini’s four wall-hung clay works. Accented with cracked slabs of terracotta, spray paint and acrylic, Cherubini’s provisional works are like ruined sconces. Where Cherubini gives us self-conscious clunkiness, Elisabeth Kley deftly uses earthenware to its full expressive potential while adhering to its utilitarian history. Her three, roughly 36” tall, free-standing “vases” present exaggerated elongated necks and happy, bulbous bodies. Kley adorns these with floral patterns, scrolls and arabesques which are harried enough to not feel fussy with quickly brushed in swathes of viridian, peach and pea-green glaze. View for example, Large Red and Green Three Part Bottle (2012), with its peach body, large rosettes, leaf forms and simple Grecian geometry.

a muddy image of a hummingbird sticks its limp beak into the center of a red puddle. Gibson gives us two solipsistic “feminist” text paintings which, despite an absurd amount of visual information, manage to remain mute.

Joyce Robins’ ceramic discs were surprisingly provocative and unsettling if you, like me, were the victim of that insidious lotus seed pod/skin Photoshop nightmare image (the link read "you will never use Head and Shoulders again"), then these convex disks and clusters were enough to leave your skin squirming. A work such as Pale Oval (2004), a seemingly benign and perfectly lovely sea glass colored objet, might trigger an episode of trichophobia (the fear of holes) for some, while others might delight in its delicate, coral like form. Robbin’s deft transformations of clay straddle the line between domestic finery and alien life form. But then, a little bodily unease was welcome in this land of creaturely delight and magical thinking.

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